US Politics: Red Whine Hangover

[Ran]

Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico would immediately and substantially reduce the R advantage in the Senate, as I think I noted earlier.

[DMC]

Statehood, or something at least resembling actual representation, has been a cause celebre within DC for too long to count.  The latest suggestion was to trade an added congressional district in Utah for a voting one in DC.  It didn't work, and the GOP has no reason to budge.  Puerto Rico is even more hopeless.  The only tangible solution to all of this is the National Popular Vote, and work it out from there.  What sucks is that seems just as hopeless as all the rest.

[Rippounet]

8 hours ago, Ran said:

Madison largely referred to "pure democracy" when speaking of democracy. 

The Framers largely understood the republic to be a representative democracy. Eugene Volokh lays out a good line of reasoning. End result: the U.S. is a democracy and a republic.

As to the mess, it's because of a congressional act from 1929. It's not a constitutional issue. No such act, Gore wins in 2000. No such act, Clinton wins in 2016 with a Democratic majority in the House. No such act, I suspect the arc of increasing partisanship would be very different as the GOP would have no hope at the presidency if it stuck to its approach.

None of this even begins to address the very simple point I'm making, that people have very little actual power in a representative "democracy."

As to "the mess we're in" I wasn't merely talking about Trump. I was thinking in broader terms, about the fact that populist demagogues like him can exploit the feelings of frustration and resentment born out of the powerlessness felt by the average citizen. Also, about the fact that some issues, despite being very high on the list of the public's most important concerns, are not seriously addressed by our "representatives" (these days we take climate change as an example, but that's only the most glaring example).

As regards Trump specifically, his election is somewhat ironic. While liberals like to point out how undemocratic the Electoral College is, and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote, they also conveniently forget that the undemocratic failsafes that were supposed to be used against just such a presidential candidate (i.e. faithless electors) were not used. So it's ironic, and Trump is really the man that was never supposed to be president.

As to Volokh's article, it's mostly quibbling about semantics. His bullshit starts right from the start:

Quote

A common definition of “democracy” is, “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives”

Nope. Democracy means "power to/of the people," full stop. The "common" definition is just propaganda. The fact that such propaganda is so widespread doesn't change the fact that it's horseshit.

Which is why I like the infamous Federalist n°10 so much. For reasons beyond his control (I'm tempted to say, actual democracy, ha ha), Madison had to engage in a rare display of intellectual honesty as to what a representative democracy really is. Not only was he honest enough to admit that it wasn't really democracy, he even admitted what the ultimate goals were:

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A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Something which he had alluded to earlier:

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But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Madison makes it very clear what kind of "minorities" are to be protected through his "republican" scheme. Not that I would go as far as Charles Beard did and say that this was class war. I think the point was merely stability. I don't think it ever occurred to Madison that socio-economic stability would, over centuries, progressively rob the common man of any actual power. But the point was nevertheless to neutralize the will of the people, to ensure that democracy could not threaten the established order.

Not of course, that these "revolutions" we had did not change things for the better and move in a more democratic direction. But to call what we have today "democracies" is a farce so ridiculous that by now a crushing majority of people is keenly aware of it and angry. Why do you think so many peoples turn to strongmen these days? Why are people so slow to reject would-be autocrats like Trump or Bolsonaro? I dont think people have suddenly developed a distaste for democracy. I think, on the contrary, that given the choice between the illusion of democracy and a would-be autocrat that pretends to care about their plight, many are willing to do away with the illusion and give the would-be autocrat a shot, especially since only a stong government has any chance of facing the global economic forces at work. Needless to say, Bolsonaro, like Trump, will turn out to be a puppet of the 1%, thus plunging everyone into an ever greater abyss of despair. Which is why, if you want to fight these guys, it might be best to start by doing away with the horseshit about us living in "democracies," ffs.

[OldGimletEye]

More on conservative criminal procedure concern trolling.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/9/17955340/trump-chicago-shootings-stop-and-frisk

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President Donald Trump simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about on Chicago and stop and frisk.

Speaking at an international gathering of police on Monday, Trump said that he’s asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s office to “go to the great city of Chicago to help straighten out the terrible shooting wave.” He went on, “I’ve told them to work with local authorities to try to change the horrible deal the city of Chicago’s entered into with ACLU, which ties law enforcement’s hands, and to strongly consider ‘stop and frisk.’ It works. And it was meant for problems like Chicago. It was meant for it. Stop and frisk!”

 

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Second, stop and frisk doesn’t work, at least to the degree Trump seems to think it does. The research has long found that the effects of stop and frisk on crime were weak at best. Some studies suggested stop and frisk didn’t have any effect whatsoever.

 

[OldGimletEye]

Your daily reminder why you should roll your eyes at conservative civility concern trolling.

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/8/17951260/north-dakota-kevin-cramer-calls-metoo-movement-toward-victimization

Quote

Only a day after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in a deeply divided vote, Rep. Kevin Cramer, the Republican nominee looking to unseat North Dakota’s vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate, said #MeToo is a “movement toward victimization.”

 

[OldGimletEye]

29 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

snip

Man oh man, it seems Madison went kind of full blown Marxist, with his talk about different class interest, didn't he?

[OldGimletEye]

13 hours ago, DMC said:

snip

So the difference between the party medians - which is the standard way to measure congressional polarization - rose .271 overall from Reagan's first two years to Trump's.  The GOP accounted for (.196/.271) 72 percent of the increased polarization.  So not quite 90/10, but in the ballpark.  How bout the Senate:

• 97th Senate Dem: -.314, 115th Senate Dem: -.328; Change: -.014
• 97th Senate GOP: .294, 115th Senate GOP .463; Change: .169

Here the difference in party medians only rose .183 (another demonstration the House drives polarization), but the GOP accounted for .169 of it.  That's 92 percent of the increased polarization.  Damn, so that 90/10 ain't looking so bad.  Seems pretty clear that at least in terms of institutional, or elite level, polarization, there's one side that is doing almost all the heavy lifting. 

And this is ignoring the substance of the argument - the fact that just since 2000 the GOP has unilaterally changed the goal posts repeatedly on tax cuts, the debt ceiling, health care, immigration, climate change, gun control, SC nominations, what constitutes news, and now with Trump we can include trade, Russia, North Korea, and basic human thought.

That's some good stuff right there. Definitely worth filing away for future reference.

[Morpheus]

9 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

On the Supreme Court Grassley claims he'd maintain the Garland charade in the other direction and not allow a 2020 SCOTUS vote.  I''ll believe it when I see it.   But the irony is that what Grassley would even be doing their would be wrong.  It would just be less hypocritical than what the Turtle would be doing if they did allow one. 

McConnell has already made it clear that Trump will get the full process should he get an opening in 2020.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Man oh man, it seems Madison went kind of full blown Marxist, with his talk about different class interest, didn't he?

As I said, a rare display of intellectual honesty.

[The Anti-Targ]

8 hours ago, S John said:

They’re pretty important.  Sometimes it seems like the most immediate thing is always the most important thing ever but in this case it really is pretty important.  Republicans have been inexorably sucked into Trump’s orbit since 2016 but we’ve only had hot air from either side and no concrete verdict on the actual mood of the country.  These midterms are where the chickens will finally come home to roost - at least among voters.  

If the Dems do well we might see some Republican dingleberries detach from Trump’s giant old ass.  These people are all spineless.  If the electoral wind looks to be anti-Trump so too shall they be.  

 

He will suddenly become not conservative enough, just like every Republican president apart from Reagan.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

Some random thoughts on the Senate:

There's been increasing talk on the left about how undemocratic the Senate is as an institution, and it sure is.  There's that stat circulating right now that if you add up all of the Senator's states populations and divide by half the 48 dems represent something like 38 million more people than the 50 GOP'ers.

Does this not have a chance to get much worse?  If people were to continue moving to the coasts and away from the more rural states (even if there are also some states like Texas that people move to).  The smaller the rural state populations get relative to the overall US population the more outsized their voter's votes become in the Senate.

Even if the Dems can win some elections in the future to stave off complete collapse it's getting clearer with things like this plus the horror of the Supreme Court that they'll need to find more structural changes like adding states or something.

On the Supreme Court Grassley claims he'd maintain the Garland charade in the other direction and not allow a 2020 SCOTUS vote.  I''ll believe it when I see it.   But the irony is that what Grassley would even be doing their would be wrong.  It would just be less hypocritical than what the Turtle would be doing if they did allow one. 

 

 

The only provision of the US Constitution that requires unanimous consent to change is equal State representation in the U.S. Senate:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.  U.S. Constitution Art. V [emphasis added]

 

It is highly unlikely that the "undemocratic" nature of the Senate will change as long as the United States exists.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Man oh man, it seems Madison went kind of full blown Marxist, with his talk about different class interest, didn't he?

That would have been hard to do when Karl Marx hadn't been born yet. 

[Ran]

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

None of this even begins to address the very simple point I'm making, that people have very little actual power in a representative "democracy."

In a country of hundreds of millions of people, of course, a single person has little power. Direct democracy is simply not a practical alternative unless one imagines breaking up nations entirely into far smaller localities, a thing that simply won't be happening because of the downsides. 

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As to "the mess we're in" I wasn't merely talking about Trump.

I also cited Gore. If it weren't for the Reappropriation Act of 1929, the winner of the popular vote would be the winner of the electoral vote, end of story, once we acknowledge that the faithless electors has proved meaningless.

Quote

I was thinking in broader terms, about the fact that populist demagogues like him can exploit the feelings of frustration and resentment born out of the powerlessness felt by the average citizen.

Prior to the act of 1929, the system Madison and the framers of the Constitution put in place would have prevented the demagogue, however. 

Quote

 

As regards Trump specifically, his election is somewhat ironic. While liberals like to point out how undemocratic the Electoral College is, and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote, they also conveniently forget that the undemocratic failsafes that were supposed to be used against just such a presidential candidate (i.e. faithless electors) were not used.

That's a fault in the increasing partisanship that made faithless electors insufficient to align the results with the vote, but it's not a fault in the original vision of a system where there would be far more electors and far more congresspeople. You can't complain about the fact that the representatives are far removed from the people and not acknowledge that that was not the intention of the Framers. 

Quote

 

Nope. Democracy means "power to/of the people," full stop. The "common" definition is just propaganda. The fact that such propaganda is so widespread doesn't change the fact that it's horseshit.

Which is why I like the infamous Federalist n°10 so much. For reasons beyond his control (I'm tempted to say, actual democracy, ha ha), Madison had to engage in a rare display of intellectual honesty as to what a representative democracy really is. Not only was he honest enough to admit that it wasn't really democracy, he even admitted what the ultimate goals were:

Focusing on Madison is weird in part because his the Federalist #10 was not that influential or important contemporaneously, at least within the canon of the other papers. It's only in the last hundred years or so that it has been re-evaluated as revealing something deeply meaningful regarding the constitutional project, and I find that kind of suspect; if it were meaningful, it should have had a lot more meaning in the 19th century than it had. Madison's views were his views, and not necessarily the views of everyone else, is my take on it. Just because he said it didn't mean everyone else agreed with it.

But in any case, sure, his view of which minorities needed protection were not what minorities we think need protection. And yet, the tyranny of the majority is a real concept and a thing that has actually happened in history. So, too, has the tyranny of an entrenched minority that uses all of its power to maintain control. The solutions to these things are hard. And I notice that solutions are very few on the ground.

As Churchill said: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. 

 

[Rippounet]

Let's start by what we agree on:

1 hour ago, Ran said:

But in any case, sure, his view of which minorities needed protection were not what minorities we think need protection. And yet, the tyranny of the majority is a real concept and a thing that has actually happened in history. So, too, has the tyranny of an entrenched minority that uses all of its power to maintain control. The solutions to these things are hard. And I notice that solutions are very few on the ground.

As I said, such systems of government represented progress compared to what existed before. Huge progress, in fact.

I see little point in idealizing them however. Yes, the solutions are hard. But even if one were to conclude that our current system of government is the lesser of all evils, one should still be aware of its flaws and weaknesses. Now, more than ever, because there is a real possibility of history repeating itself -in some ways.

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I also cited Gore. If it weren't for the Reappropriation Act of 1929, the winner of the popular vote would be the winner of the electoral vote, end of story, once we acknowledge that the faithless electors has proved meaningless.

Prior to the act of 1929, the system Madison and the framers of the Constitution put in place would have prevented the demagogue, however. 

That's a fault in the increasing partisanship that made faithless electors insufficient to align the results with the vote, but it's not a fault in the original vision of a system where there would be far more electors and far more congresspeople. You can't complain about the fact that the representatives are far removed from the people and not acknowledge that that was not the intention of the Framers.

I won't dispute these points. However, let's also bear in mind that just as the US institutional framework was made less democratic in some respects, it was also made far more democratic in others. Take the XVIIth amendment for instance. Not to mention the Reconstruction amendments. Or the XIXth. Or the XXIVth. Or the XXVIth. Etc... Surely you're not arguing that the original design was that much more democratic than what it has become?

1 hour ago, Ran said:

In a country of hundreds of millions of people, of course, a single person has little power. Direct democracy is simply not a practical alternative unless one imagines breaking up nations entirely into far smaller localities, a thing that simply won't be happening because of the downsides.

I think direct democracy is too often brought up as the alternative to representative democracy, as it if were the only one - it is not.
Besides, I think you missed a point I was making about representative democracies themselves being on a spectrum. Some are far more efficient than others, or they evolve over time... There are many factors involved.  Even if you insist on keeping representative democracy, there are many many ways to improve it. In fact, some are so obvious that the fact that they have not been implemented yet is a sign that something is very very wrong.

Anyway I'm a bit confused as to your entire line of argumentation. My original point was very tongue-in-cheek: that it's pointless to wonder abour how "undemocratic" this or that aspect of US institutions and US federalism is, since the framers sought to limit democracy in the first place. It's a cheeky point to make, but it's actually quite uncontroversial.
Perhaps Federalist n°10's importance is overblown, but it would be hard to argue that Madison's thoughts were completely at odds with that of his peers. On the contrary I believe that Federalist n°10 has started to attract attention because it is a reminder of the constant rewriting of history that is going on. Madison's thoughts were rather uncontroversial at the time ; they conflict with today's dominant narratives and nationalist myths however.

My second point may be more controversial, but is still hard to debunk: that people have lost faith in their institutions and the political process because they have little influence over them and feel that even that is being lost. Anti-Europeanism in the EU is a good example of that (the EU is generally criticized as anti-democratic), but distrust of the federal government in the US works along very similar lines.
It's kind of ironic that you say it is not practical to break up nations entirely... When I think what we are seeing today is the failure of the "super-nation" - by that I mean either large nations or federations/confederations. The US will endure. The EU... Realistically speaking it probably won't.

 

[lokisnow]

Here's a radical idea. a law and or amendment that allows states to operate as super states in a coordinated governance fashion, so say Vermont New Hampshire and Maine want to band together for some regional governance issues, they can, but they maintain their independence as states and their senators.

But it would also allow California and New York and Florida and Texas to divide themselves into appropriately sized smaller states, now they get more senators but could maintain the previous structure and agreements of the "super state" of California (for example) in administering shared logistical basics like water, power, sewers etc. 

California should have at least four states anchored by Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. New York should have two or three states, New Jersey should probably have two states and so on and so forth. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 hours ago, DMC said:

ETA:  *To specify and not offend people (or at least to only offend those in the following states), so by "plains states" I only meant the huge swath of land that constitutes Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and TWO Dakotas.  They have 10 Senators.  They should have, like, 3 tops.  Make them one state.  The "state that's primarily owned by the feds and really, really rich people" state.  I don't know, you guys are creative, clean that up.

Wyhotantas.

Sounds like a den of sex.

I’ll take an honorary mention in your dissertation.  

[DMC]

32 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

Here's a radical idea. a law and or amendment that allows states to operate as super states in a coordinated governance fashion, so say Vermont New Hampshire and Maine want to band together for some regional governance issues, they can, but they maintain their independence as states and their senators.

But it would also allow California and New York and Florida and Texas to divide themselves into appropriately sized smaller states

Um, there's no amendment needed for either of those.  The first is just an interstate compact, which would just take the consent of the states involved, and the latter would just take the consent of the state(s) and Congress (meaning majority vote).

12 minutes ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

Wyhotantas.

Sounds like a den of sex.

I’ll take an honorary mention in your dissertation.  

That name would confuse all the white people.  And if my dissertation was about the apportionment of the Senate, I'd kill myself.

[Rippounet]

22 minutes ago, DMC said:

That name would confuse all the white people.  And if my dissertation was about the apportionment of the Senate, I'd kill myself.

You're saying you're writing a dissertation and DON'T want to kill yourself? Color me impressed.

[Serious Callers Only]

 

BTW, apparently Indiana purged one in seven election registrations. Talk to me some more how this is not dictatorship republicans. It's going to take the army to disband the GOP and issue another election to deal with this shit, which of course won't happen.

[aceluby]

1 minute ago, Serious Callers Only said:

BTW, apparently Indiana is purging one in seven election registrations. Talk to me some more how this is not dictatorship republicans.

And registration ended yesterday (I believe), so if you got purged, NO VOTE FOR YOU!