I came across this presentation from a July 4th book launch event and thought it was one of the more ambitious and structured democracy reform proposals I’ve seen lately. The speaker outlines six major institutional changes he believes are necessary to make U.S. democracy sustainable in the 21st century (and beyond).
Basically, he wants to:
Abolish the Senate and vest all legislative power in an expanded House (695 members), and redraw all congressional districts into multi-member districts and elect them using proportional ranked choice voting.
He’d also Abolish the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote (obvious yes, for me).
Allow the House to impeach the President with a 60% majority, eliminating the Senate trial. Not sure about this one…but parliamentary systems seem to do ok with no-confidence votes.
Expand the Supreme Court to 21 Justices, each serving a 21-year term, with 4 appointments per presidential term. Creative, and yeah I can see how it “turns down the temperature,” as he says.
The video is here if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/cFca2mYb1wc
Regardless of whether you agree with all of it, I thought it was a really concise and provocative vision of what a redesigned democratic system could look like. Curious what others here think.
Rebuilding American democracy: 20-minute talk proposes abolishing the Senate, reforming the House, and restructuring the Supreme Court
byu/Smart-Emu5884 inFuturology
21 Comments
I like most of these TBH. I’ve always thought the Senate was stupid and outdated.
Eh, this is a solution looking for a problem. Money (e.g. Citizens United), insider trading, a lack of term limits, and gerrymandering contribute significantly more damage than any of this “restructuring” is trying to solve.
I don’t hate the Senate being a thing as it moderates what could be considered mob rule. Having policies derived nearly solely from simple majorities can be dangerous.
How does he plan to get states, the house and senate to willingly give up power?
Legally, no branch can abolish another, and why would the senate abolish itself? Why would a state give up the power to gerrymander?
This is a pipe dream.
I see no peaceful means to enact such positive change.
There is one half of our two-party system with a vested interest in ideas such as fairness, equity, and equal opportunity representation. This kind of restructuring is presumably appealing to that half.
The other half currently has control via dubious means, and would rather die than relinquish those dubious means. A restructuring of this nature is absolute anathema to them… “hell freezes over”-type stuff.
Sure, I’m jaded, and I wish I was wrong. I also consider myself a realist, though.
Fine, but there’s the same problem as with abolishing the EU veto: You just cannot fix a flawed system when those in power profit from exploiting the flaws.
Obviously the electoral college has problems, but the problem we’re facing is an anti-intellectual base electing populists, so how does the popular vote solve that problem?
I’ve had similar thoughts. I’d make the senate an ethics body – with teeth, then I’d increase the House to 10-100x the number of reps. Maybe we’d get done actual representation in there rather than just old white guys. They wouldn’t get to work in DC anymore. They’d have to be near their constituents full time. Ethics enforcement would be full time over that many reps. I’d make there be several new branches of the judiciary.. cover technical issues better, accelerate all decisions where branches of government are in conflict… that sort of stuff. I think that being able to recall the government is a good thing too. As far as the executive branch, I’d move all the departments to be HQ’d in different states.. assigned by lottery. They’d all have to work with local colleges for scholarships and employment programs. Lots of fun when you think how to do stuff to minimize the existing corruption, but of course these ideas are impossible and they’d be gamed just as hard over time.
Having two bodies of congress has some advantages. I’d do something like change the rules for how house districts are designed to be drawn by a neutral body. I’d make the senate ranked choice by state, with more proportional representation (giving larger states more senators).
The key is ending reelection. People that run get in, and all they want to do is stay. No more reelections for the same position.
It seems to me that the central issue right now in American politics is the overly centralized executive.
I know this is anathema to the American understanding of separation of powers but most modern democracies around the world separate executive powers between two figures (say a prime minister and president as in France).
That’s no perfect inoculation against democratic backsliding, see Russia, but it is a strong guardrail.
Add public funded elections/no donations allowed, and make lying illegal and punishable. If you cannot lie to the senate, the senate should not lie to you.
I like the Supreme Court change. I also like the idea of ranked choice voting in larger districts. I’d say the districts should be able to expand beyond state lines because a lot of representation is arbitrarily cut off due to state borders.
Instead of abolishing the senate I think you’d have to keep it.
Same with the electoral college. The fix for the college is proportionate allocation of electors instead of winner takes all.
Perhaps he goes into Citizen’s United in his book, but ranked choice voting is huge and really a no-brainer. It complicates things for the rich people who currently control the entire narrative. How would we enact this considering both sides don’t want it though?
Electoral college, obviously hugely antiquated and much more harmful than helpful in current day America.
RE: impeachment – sort of splitting the difference between what we do now and the simple majority criteria a lot of European countries adopt seems reasonable. “a check that has never been exercised.. it’s not a check”.
I cannot pass too much judgment on PoliticalZane’s supreme court proposal. Clearly we have issues there and I feel like what he is outlining is better than what we have now.
Thanks for sharing!
That system would immediately end in disaster. It would effectively become a single chamber government with a toothless President. Take it from someone who lives in a country that has all those parties that this system is attempting to create: it kinda sucks. Nothing gets done. You end up with majorities that are very clear on what they don’t want, but can never agree on what they want.
The Supreme Court is already too political. This system would completely throw out even the modest amount of brakes to the politics in the court and turn it into an extension of the already overpowered single chamber.
And the electoral college, as much as I know it is not popular here, is vital to a country as big and diverse as the U.S. You are *begging* for trouble with your rural areas. And while city dwellers are always sure that they are the true masters of the country, history has shown over and over again that when cities fight the land, the land tends to win. It tips the power *just* enough to make sure that cities do not completely take over the entire political debate. And even so, the rise of Donald Trump shows that the issues in that part of the country were not adequately addressed. We are seeing the consequences of decades of ignoring “fly over country”. And this proposed system would effectively move all power to the cities. Uprisings are guaranteed.
Honestly, the American system seems pretty damn good to me.
And as many others have pointed out already, this new system does nothing to address the true issues corrupting the political system. In fact, I would argue it amplifies them. A Supreme Court that is just another legislative branch. A raucous single chamber without a more serious upper chamber to slow down its more nutty ideas. Almost certainly a fractious chamber at that swings between unable to get anything done in an orderly fashion because of zero agreement among parties and then suddenly a single party getting a majority and pushing everything through.
The U.S. Constitution was designed the way it was, *not* for efficiency, but for durability in a heterogeneous, continent-sized federation. The framers feared majority rule as much as tyranny. And so should anyone who is looking for a durable form of government.
Seems like a reasonable idea. People are all about streamlining government, but they’re always targeting the bureaucracy that is actually useful. The fish rots from the head, as doctor horrible has said, so let’s take care of that first right?
I’d absolutely be down for such reforms. Can’t imagine they’ll happen though.
[What If The House Of Representatives Had More Than 435 Seats?](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/)
Any reform of the current system in this manner is beneficial to Democrats so it will likely never happen peacefully. Democrat politicians would have to grow a spine and act beyond being controlled opposition for the rich. The rich also control Republicans and have lopsided power systemically in all branches of governance in perpetuity while their base is brainwashed to hate countless other scapegoats to the point of desiring civil war for much, much less.
If people want something like this to happen there are almost zero fully peaceful solutions. The closest would be something approaching a national strike. You would need to somehow convince rural areas to also put country before themselves. They would somehow need to listen to citizens in cities regarding the health of the nation more than they listen to whatever propaganda they currently prefer and willingly concede a federal system that is leveraged to their benefit at every level. It’s genuinely difficult to get rural areas to advocate for political ends that actually benefit themselves in the most selfish manner imaginable, let alone convince them to give up their lopsided federal power that they wield as unintelligently as possible.
I’ve seen this before, and I like a lot of it. I also work in politics/public policy, and I’ve done this exercise of how to restructure things many times both in my head and out loud to whoever would listen. Lot of the same stuff comes up. Abolish the electoral college, make impeachment/removal easier, expand SCOTUS, reduce the ungodly hold unpopulous rural areas have, all that good shit.
My issue with all ideas of this nature is that that’s all it ever is. Ideas. Such discussions, while important and far from useless, tend to be a bit self-aggrandizing because we all know it can never happen. There are dozens of phenomenal ideas for this kind of reform, but there is no concrete mechanism or strategy to achieve it. It’s straight up impossible without either A) A political movement of strength this country has never seen before OR B) A straight-up coup.
It’s also the case that this idea as presented is incomplete. It does little to answer some of our most pressing issues, for instance the power disinformation and misinformation have on the electorate, or how we address issues in government agencies (the bureaucracy), which play no small part in the problems we face now.
As said, I’ve heard many ideas like this, and I agree with many of them. What I’d like to see, however, is a concrete plan as to HOW such reform can be achieved. Not just the logistical mechanisms. I understand very well how it could be done. What I want to see is a strategy that’s feasible. This is what I and others who think about this regularly haven’t come up with. The second someone does, THAT will be revolutionary.
There was a big push and even a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate back at the turn of the 20th century. Need to bring that energy back
We don’t need ideas about what a better system of government looks like, we need ideas about how to get from here to there.
The right has robust plans and an ongoing agenda to remake the system. What’s the left doing? Is it calling for vague revolutions on the internet while being too lazy and pure to even vote?