We could make the system less tilted if the Democrats win back the House and retain the Senate and the WH, but of course only if 50 Democratic Senators are willing to reform the filibuster. They could institute election reforms, and grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, giving us 4 more Senators not representing rural whites. A more daring reform, expanding the House, would also make it and the electoral college more representative. Going farther still, creating multi-member congressional districts with rank choice voting could make gerrymandering irrelevant on the federal level.
Things aren't undemocratic because the preferred political coalition of the left today is disadvantaged by chance and the historical decisions of how states were divided in the past when the political calculus of the time no longer has any relevance. We choose votes in such a way that the pre-established method doesn't optimize is--like--a bad argument that democracy is breaking down.
if anything they dynamic that the right can maintain putting up weak candidates undermines our democracy because it opens up the incentive for the left to put up weaker--and further left--candidates because the chances of them winning are significantly higher than they'd otherwise be. In a world in which Rubio is a popular candidate, the incentive to run a far-left person is diminished relative to the world where a weak candidate like Trump or some less popular trump apostle runs. The weakness is like blood in the water and raises the stakes of outcomes, potentially increasing partisanship.
I don't think undermining the legitimacy of our republic is an effective way to advocate for change. Winning by 10% margins in NY and CA will get to your scenario of 52/48 Dem/Rep and Republican control of government. Instead of trying to win by 10% in those places, Dems should try to win by taking positions that put them in control of government.
Matt, with all of these nerdy jokes about Dune I've seen on your twitter, can I ask if you have read or plan to read any books by Brandon Sanderson? I don't think they would disappoint!
"But its various non-majoritarian aspects have also not traditionally served to entrench some specific form of minority rule."
This is not true. For most of the US history the lack of a right to vote has served to entrench the dominance of the enfranchised (namely white landowning men). But what you said is more true of modern America, which I assume is what you meant.
I still have yet to find a good argument against the strongest of the GOP's claims: the GOP is probably the only right party that still wants limited government (on the margin, relative to Democrats, etc) and thus benefits from the gridlock. Given this difference, and given that the gridlock is highly constitutional, and part of the spirit of the constitution (without wide consensus, no change), why are the Republicans anti-Democracy by simply playing system to their advantage? Much more anti-Democratic seem the Democrats, by only now, want to actually change the rules that it doesn't benefit them: abolish electoral-college, add seats on Supreme Court, add states, etc....within the already established rules, the GOP is playing politics. Seems reasonable argument to me.
I don’t know how much you follow Matt and Ezra, but the use of the filibuster has skyrocketed. That would count as “hardball,” in that it’s damaging to our democracy, but not illegal. Refusing to confirm even a very moderate SC justice in his sixties in the last year of a president’s term is hardball, as is eliminating the filibuster for SC confirmations. Yes, I know Democrats eliminated the filibuster for lower court appointments, and Republicans stopped respecting “blue slips.” As with most things, both sides do it, and Republicans are worse.
But pressuring nonpartisan election officials to overturn legitimate election results isn’t “hardball,” it’s a direct attack on our democracy, as is storming the Capitol.
Sure, the filibuster recently. But even then, look at Obamas comments when it benefited the party to keep, and his flip flop when it didn't. That's my point. Also, I remember the first time the filibuster was used for an appellate court judge - Miguel Estrada, a Latino btw - it was by Democrats. I didn't see anyone crying about the abuse of power then? What seems to be unique about this period is not the abuse of power, but the fact that Republicans have decided to go tit-for-tat.
With that said, I'm not saying CURRENTLY that Republicans are not worse than Democrats, they clearly are and the pressure to overturn the election is a clear example of a new escalation never before seen. A scary one at that. But I see this like Scott Alexander does: its a bipartisan issue, it just happens to currently benefit Republicans now. But who would deny that if the Senate remained divided, and Biden administration had the power, he would change the rules to benefit HIS side (abolish electoral college, add Supreme Court seats, etc)? Or had the Democrats not sabotaged Sanders campaign, what would Sanders populist party have brought to the table?
I get it, Trump is bad. But why not just slow policy change down and work within the rules? That's a hard pill for Democrats to swallow....but its exactly what the constitution would want.
Lol, well McConnell said the decision to eliminate the filibuster on federal judges would end the world, and I saw that, so I seem to remember some crying. And of course, that was in response to Republicans blocking Obama’s picks, so that was also hardball.
The filibuster is extra-constitutional, so by definition it has nothing to say about whether it should or should not exist. Nor is it good for *anyone* that major legislation is passed through budget reconciliation. That’s not some brilliant stroke of Founder insight, it’s exploitation of a loophole that has become a bizarre workaround for passing laws as the filibuster has metastasized.
I forget who popularized the ideas of “forbearance” and “restraint”, but the authors correctly pointed out that hardball is dangerous because it escalates, and it reflects a growing attitude on yes, the Republican side, that Democratic victories are illegitimate. Yglesias mentioned for example that it was always assumed that a president would would grant emergency aid to any state, regardless of whether it voted for him. But Trump changed that, because he is amoral and atavistic. This is real democratic breakdown, not just partisanship.
Im making two arguments. We seem to be agreeing on the first one. My first point is that the parties are the same, when it comes to using the rules of the game for their own political advantage. The filibuster is a good test for that. Go back in time and start with the first 'abuse' and follow the ping pong affect and you will see that no party is really different. Democrats have been just as abusive as Republicans overall (I would argue Democrats a hair worst, but arguendo). My argument is precisely that this is the overall pattern, not just with the filibuster. The only difference now is that we are at a point where Republicans played the last hand. Luckily, Democrats won the senate as well, so we will get a cooling down of emotions. But had the Repulbicans kept the Senate, again by following the general rules of the game, Democrats would have been seriously considering serious constitutional changes (EC, redesign of Supreme Court, additional states, etc). Id be surprised if you would disagree with this assesment.
My second argument, a bit more subtle, is that instead of seeing what the Republicans are doing as "anti-Democratic" why not see it as just another extension of the filibuster game? They are playing within the rules of the game for political advantage. Democrats are doing the same and have done the same. Sure, we can talk about how much better things would be if the constitution were different. I love those discussions. But like any child will tell you, trying to change the actual rules of the game (constitution) when one is losing rubs everyone as poor sportsmanship and would be a different escalation of polarization. Its similar to what Trump did by pressuring elected officials to overturn the results of a legitimate election.
A better approach, and one absent in Ezra Kleins book, but written extensively about in David French book on the same topic (how many lefties read it?): why not slow policy change down and wait til stronger majorities are reached? This has the benefit of also fitting within the spirit of the constituion. Another option would be having the parties change the rules when it actually hurts them: say the Republicans wanted to stack SC justices, or Democrats required ID's when voting (you know, like every other industrialized country), now that would actually show good faith change by politicians. But of course thats not what we see. So slowing down policy seems to be the only real workable solution.
Btw, you’re incorrect about the filibuster. Like everything else, Republicans began abusing it, Democrats copied, and then Republicans went batsh*t with Obama.
There is simply no way to say that Democrats are worse, and I say that as someone who sees plenty of Democratic hypocrisy.
As for that majorities needed, all you have to do is look at the electoral map and see that it’s unlikely either party will get 60 seats in the next ten years. Unresponsive government isn’t benign. It’s a recipe for civil unrest, including war. Even dictatorships have to try to help their subjects.
I would be perfectly happy to trade photo id for anti-gerrymandering, particularly if fees were waived for those ids. Voting is extremely easy in other OECD countries, so I’m not sure this helps your case.
I dont think the trade-off is unresponsive government. Republicans are basically Democrats 'lite'. Look at the Trump administration. Basically the same on principle as the Biden administration, just maybe less...with some tax cuts thrown in. Even police reform, the bones of it would have passed under Trump admin too. Im okay with lite.
I would say also with the EC, there were some rumbles from Democratic activists about abolishing it in 2000, but Gore’s *campaign manager* wrote an oped defending it. Gore conceded in an election that it appears he did in fact win, for the good of the country. That is forbearance. Nixon could have raised a stink in his first election, but he chose not to. Here we see a crystal clear departure, not just from an understanding that when you lose, you go, but from the sense that the EC was an irrelevant formality. Certainly the founders never intended it to regularly undo the popular will. That’s something that emerged.
I’ll leave you with one other example, Baker v Carr, where local election rules meant that black urban voters had their votes diluted to ***3%*** of white rural ones. That’s quite a hill to climb for “those are just the rules you have to follow.”
I totally agree with this column, except your regrettable decision to cite Scott Alexander, and in that spirit, I’m going to ask an annoying question. If Republicans have, as you say gone to the left and represent 49% of public opinion, why is it so terrible that they could entrench politics you consider to be relatively moderate and popular? It’s one thing for 70% to be ruled by 30%, but 51% by 49%? What’s the big deal?
I ask this as one of the people you occasionally snigger at on The Weeds, a squashy center-left suburban woman. I care about democratic institutions a lot more than I care about the top marginal tax rate. Trump viscerally horrified me.
Biden’s economic policies are more leftist than I expected, and I don’t think it’s smart to completely withdraw from Afghanistan, but more than anything, I want Biden to be popular, and I’m pretty flexible about what it will take to do that. But you make fun of people like me, even though I agree with you. So, why should I continue to care? Why not submit to benign despotic rule?
You've made a decent argument here, but I think it has a fundamental flaw that weakens it considerably. The flaw is the assumption that the present asymmetries in partisan outcomes, which currently disadvantage Democrats, are the result of our governing structures and institutions, such as the EC and Senate.
The problem with that assumptions is that our governing structures and institutions, in their present form, have existed for well over a century yet we've only seen these asymmetries over the past couple of decades. The relevant question, therefore, is why we are seeing this asymmetry now and why we didn't we see it in the past? My view is that since our governing structures and institutions have remained largely the same, then other factors must account for this change.
It's not as if there is an iron law that mandated that the GoP would get their current structural advantage and, likewise, there also is no iron law that mandates they will keep it. We didn't wake up one morning to discover that the GoP had a rural advantage with all the consequential effects - rather the current dynamic between the two parties was the result of an emergent process that had little to do with the structure of our governing institutions. The Democrats didn't intentionally plan and decide to be a party with a constituency that would make them less competitive in the Senate and EC, and the GoP did not have any master plan to have "minority" control either. Yet it happened and it's something that hasn't happened before. The relevant questions, again, are why and why now?
So my view is that the current asymmetry is not caused by any inherent unfairness in the system that specifically benefits one side or another. The problem is our parties and how they are structured. What's changed is that our parties have become decentralized and more democratic, but that has also made them weak. We have the weakest political parties of any comparable democracy with no effective central control or leadership. The parties have become more like brands.
This is why Trump was able to capture the GoP nomination. Despite near-universal opposition from the GoP party establishment, he won and took the party over. This never would have happened through most of US history when parties were stronger and had more central control and leadership. That control and leadership have, over the last half-century, become weaker and weaker with "democracy" as the justification.
We now have a very small d democratic primary system which has had the effect of handing control of the party and reigns of power to whatever faction of primary voters happens to be ascendant. This is the reason that a large number of politicians today fear primaries more than anything. The parties can no longer even protect incumbents. Again, this ability for any challenger to adopt a party brand and unseat an incumbent in a primary doesn't exist elsewhere.
And so my view is that this is why the current asymmetry exists. A party with leadership that has actual authority would be able to manage all the competing intra-party factions toward achieving power along with specific ends. A party with that kind of leadership would take concrete steps to make the party more competitive in the Senate and EC by appealing more to relevant constituencies and forcing party factions to play well together. Today there is no leadership or party authority that can do this. So parties cannot effectively act collectively because any faction has a veto.
The result is that the only solution presented to correct the current Democratic disadvantage in the Senate and EC is to do anything except change the Democratic party. The "one neat trick" solutions of structural reforms, or packing the court, or creating new states sidestep the obvious political actions - actions that the Democratic and Republican parties of 30 years ago would have taken.
I agree with you about needing stronger parties (bring back the smoke-filled rooms), but I don’t think that’s what’s driven polarization. It has a lot of causes, but for instance, nobody foresaw that Democrats would become increasingly urbanized, or that education would globally become more associated with left politics (it used to be the other way around, because education correlates with greater income, which correlates with right wing economics). Nor was it foreseen that the population gaps between states would be so enormous.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that party weakness is causing polarization. Rather, it limits the ability of parties to effectively deal with it and be more competitive.
When African-Americans were able to vote during the Reconstruction, governments in the South looked quite different. So suppressing their votes clearly shifted the median voter to someone who would have been in the minority without voter suppression.
True (though I think some of it was also the prior disenfranchisement of former Confederate officers). And I believe that South Carolina and Mississippi may both have been majority Black for some portion of that history.
Since this post starts with Liz Cheney: have Greenwald et al—the people who ridicule the Democrats for cheering Liz Cheney, making her out to be some kind of saint, etc.—have any examples of Democrats cheering Liz Cheney and making her out to be some kind of saint? As far as I've seen, Dems haven't gone any farther than saying "Cheney is right on this issue and we wish more Republicans would say so." And of course the irony is that Greenwald in particular will bite your head off if you say that his various examples of praise for Trump or Bannon, or his anti-anti-Trumpism, amount to making him a Trump supporter.
I mean I paid a lot of attention to Donald Trump too! Unfortunately sometimes bad actors have a lot of influence and it's worthwhile to keep abreast of what they're saying. And in my case there's a personal element too, which is that I read him religiously in the Bush years and so it's hard to shake the habit of caring what he has to say.
I can tell you why *I* think he's dishonest and hypocritical but sometimes read him anyways. Obviously it requires reading with a critical eye, but the conclusions he's motivated to come to are ones that are sometimes correct (generally along the lines of criticism of the US National Security apparatus), and I haven't yet found someone who will consistently put forward only the genuinely good ones. Getting all the half-compelling ones spewed at me and sorting out for myself which ones are correct is the best I've managed to find so far.
Do you support him going on Glenn Beck, pandering to Beck’s conspiracy theories, and then saying the Democrats are evil because they want to abolish the electoral college?
From a California perspective it's really frustrating that our votes matter so much less. Sometimes I think that we should just take advantage of the fact that Wyoming is hurting economically because of overreliance on the fossil fuel industry and we should try to buy their senators -- like California would give $1 billion a year to Wyoming (which would result in checks of $1700 per person) and then their Senators would have to vote like our Senators. Somehow it seems more realistic than other options. But if Trump is elected in 2024 with weird electoral college stuff and a huge gap in the popular vote there will be a lot of civil unrest -- and the desire for secession for states like mine that are larger than most other countries in the world will get very intense.
The only area where California has a disadvantage is in Senate representation and only in terms of proportional representation - plus a tiny bit of the same in the EC. The latter could be almost eliminated by expanding the House, which leaves the Senate. In every other dimension, California trounces the influence of Wyoming. In several areas, California is a de facto second federal regulator thanks to its size and influence.
Many non-Californians, me included, are not disposed to the idea of eliminating California's "disadvantage" in the Senate while preserving all of California's many other advantages in size and scale.
What "advantages"? California is more influential than Wyoming because it's much larger. That's just fairness. What would be unfair is if California got ten extra representatives because it's the largest state, or something of that nature.
Yes, California is much larger which gives it a ton of influence outside of California that no other state has. California is the only state granted an exception to federal EPA regulation, for example. California, by virtue of its size and market power, is a de facto second federal regulator in many areas. See for example the effects that SB822 is having on the wireless industry.
Our system is built and designed as a federal compact of semi-sovereign states. Equality between the states in terms of status and representation in the Senate is intentional. This was put into the Constitution for the specific purpose of ensuring that big states cannot completely dominate the other states in the federal government. I can see how Californians would like to retain all their state's advantages and get rid of their one disadvantage, and you may think doing that is "fair" but many people do not. And not just those who live in Wyoming.
This kind of regulatory accomodation seems pretty far afield from permanently and intentionally overrepresenting Wyoming residents. You may think that the two are equally offensive, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. You place far too little weight on the principle of democratic equality.
I'd just note that democratic equality was never intended at the federal level. As previously noted, the Constitution is a compact among equal states and therefore the state is the core political unit in our federal system. The Constitution was designed to make it impossible to change the equality of states with respect to each other without dismantling the whole thing. The point in bringing that up is just to note that it's not possible to achieve what you want without blowing up the Constitution. At the very least, one much convince the small states to give up political power to benefit you and California - they are unlikely to ever agree to that absent some kind of quid pro quo. So my objection has little to do with democratic principles as opposed to the very real practical aspects of getting from here to there.
Secondly, democratic equality also applies in the other direction. I have no representation in California since I am a resident of Colorado, but as a de facto federal regulator, California policy in a number of areas affects me and many people outside of the state of California. You complain that you have unequal representation compared to Wyoming, but I can complain that I have no representation at all in California.
If it helps, remember we have some tiny blue states too. And I also get some comfort from knowing how miserable California Republicans are. I drove through House District 1 a few months ago and the Trump regalia blew my mind. People had Trump flags flying that were bigger than my entire apartment!
If Californians want more equal representation in the Senate and Electoral College they can subdivide California into a smaller states. All that takes is approval by the California legislature and Congress - and if that's what Californians want, even Joe Manchin might not stand in the way, local rule and all.
But if Californians' attachment to the idea of California as California makes that option too unpalatable .... well that kind of proves the point of those who say we are in fact a federal union and that states are not merely anachronistic relics shouldn't have representation in the federal government.
Actually I don't know if the California legislature could approve subdividing the state or it would take a state constitutional convention. But at the federal level all it takes is congressional approval.
I think that creating two equal Californias which would almost certainly both yield Democratic senators would in fact be a bridge too far in a Senate with a filibuster. And it seems bizarre that we would have to give up existing economies of scale and still get nothing approaching proportional representation -- the two Californias would still be much more populous that most other states. Probably the third and fourth most populous states. Becoming our own nation seems like a better investment of time and energy when the benefits are so small. I get that California is the boogeyman for the right and absolutely the housing situation here is a crisis but we are actually in fits and starts making headway and I see our state moving forward in all kinds of ways that the right wing resists. I am a thousand percent for Democrats working to win under the rules as they are and I did everything I could in 2020 during the primary to rally folks in my orbit to Biden over Sanders to give us the best shot of beating Trump and I take comfort in the fact the Dems got our act together and made this happen. But if Republicans keep changing the rules to win with minorities and then turn around and govern from anger and resentment -- like cutting taxes for the rich heirs but raising them for blue states -- it seems like we are better off keeping our tax revenues at home.
Once you start on this process, can you really be sure you’ll get the political advantage you expect? It depends on how you split the state. Why just two? Why not four, to give the Republicans a shot? Everything will be in play. For example, splitting New York to give downstate New York its own Senators (most representative and logical), would leave behind a Red upstate New York, thus nullifying the existing +1 Blue State advantage in the Senate. Which is why there is a lot of talk and no action on this.
There's a difference between not being a "pure" democracy (as in ancient Greece) and not really being a democracy in the popular sense of the word. It's true there aren't any pure democracies around in terms of nation states. But I think Matt's making the point that the United States isn't *really* (and hasn't ever really been) an actual representative democracy as such in the commonly understood meaning of the term, given its objectively minoritarian constitutional arrangements. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with his take, mind you, (I'd probably argue it's a highly imperfect democracy rather than a non-democracy), but I believe that's what he's indicating here
On the last point, I would say there was more civil disobedience in Minneapolis in May/June, where I live, than violence, but that former doesn't get much media attention. But there were a lot more people blocking interstates, roads, camping outside the capitol after curfew than there were looters. And in general the police reacted violently to those people who weren't behaving violently.
Trumpers, can maybe live with them, can't live without them. Whatcha gonna do? About the only thing you can do, as a Democrat, is sit back and let them compete at the primary level for Looniest Loon is the district. Trump himself will assist in this endeavor since he doesn't give a rodent's rectum about anything resembling policy. I confess to looking at these things from an engineering point of view in terms of positive and negative feedback loops. I think your analysis is fundamentally sound. The American governing system is tipped towards instability. But ultimately, divorced from political realities and the need to achieve voting majorities to be electable the Republicans will certainly, as any similarly situated party must, drift ever father into internal hyper-competitive stupid.
This would be the only redeeming quality to America's truly execrable primary system. It almost never puts House seats in play in ideologically committed districts but it does have an effect in more marginal seats. And now we get to test this hypothesis.
Gerrymandering is noxious and should be outlawed. Any Republican who argues otherwise is blinded by fear of what it would be like to be without political power, distrust of "the other side," and an unwillingness to compromise.
Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor. It is less obviously the result of modern players attempting to "rig the game" and more of a reflection of the founders' idea of federalism. I think Ezra Klein covers this in WWP... When the nation was founded, a citizen's state-based identity far outweighed their national one. The Senate was meant to represent an equal collaboration between the states on issues that affected all states. If it was just meant to proportionally represent the national population, you wouldn't bother with a separate chamber of the legislature from the House at all. What purpose would it serve? Even the EU parliament mirrors our own, with a Council that has one member per state: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedstates/en/eu-us-relations/legislative-branches Also, the Constitution is pretty stubbornly firm on the "equal number of Senators per state" rule. Efforts to grant statehood to DC and PR are worthy steps toward representation for those citizens, but not as an end-run to game control of the Senate. It's worth discussing whether the Senate has too much power, or whether the fillibuster should go (it should). But I think it's not inherently un-democratic to have a chamber with equal representation per state.
The Electoral College falls somewhere in the middle, but it's harder to steelman. I'd be happy to see it go.
>>>Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor.<<<
I don't have a problem with the way Senate seats are apportioned (it's arguably an elegantly simple method) so much as I have a problem with the fact that the Senate is fully the equal of the House in crafting legislation. Indeed, it's probably the stronger of the two chambers given its confirming role for judicial and executive branch appointments.
In a good number of bicameral polities, the upper chamber exercises considerable powers, but these are nonetheless inferior to the lower (people's) chamber's powers, and so the former mostly plays an amending or delaying role with respect to legislation (which is a non-trivial role!). If America could ever modify its constitution in this manner, I'd have zero problem with Wyoming and California both sending two Senators to Washington.
We could make the system less tilted if the Democrats win back the House and retain the Senate and the WH, but of course only if 50 Democratic Senators are willing to reform the filibuster. They could institute election reforms, and grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, giving us 4 more Senators not representing rural whites. A more daring reform, expanding the House, would also make it and the electoral college more representative. Going farther still, creating multi-member congressional districts with rank choice voting could make gerrymandering irrelevant on the federal level.
Things aren't undemocratic because the preferred political coalition of the left today is disadvantaged by chance and the historical decisions of how states were divided in the past when the political calculus of the time no longer has any relevance. We choose votes in such a way that the pre-established method doesn't optimize is--like--a bad argument that democracy is breaking down.
if anything they dynamic that the right can maintain putting up weak candidates undermines our democracy because it opens up the incentive for the left to put up weaker--and further left--candidates because the chances of them winning are significantly higher than they'd otherwise be. In a world in which Rubio is a popular candidate, the incentive to run a far-left person is diminished relative to the world where a weak candidate like Trump or some less popular trump apostle runs. The weakness is like blood in the water and raises the stakes of outcomes, potentially increasing partisanship.
I don't think undermining the legitimacy of our republic is an effective way to advocate for change. Winning by 10% margins in NY and CA will get to your scenario of 52/48 Dem/Rep and Republican control of government. Instead of trying to win by 10% in those places, Dems should try to win by taking positions that put them in control of government.
Matt, with all of these nerdy jokes about Dune I've seen on your twitter, can I ask if you have read or plan to read any books by Brandon Sanderson? I don't think they would disappoint!
Thank you for omitting Massachusetts from your "sensible Republicans" list. Charlie Baker has got to go!
"But its various non-majoritarian aspects have also not traditionally served to entrench some specific form of minority rule."
This is not true. For most of the US history the lack of a right to vote has served to entrench the dominance of the enfranchised (namely white landowning men). But what you said is more true of modern America, which I assume is what you meant.
I still have yet to find a good argument against the strongest of the GOP's claims: the GOP is probably the only right party that still wants limited government (on the margin, relative to Democrats, etc) and thus benefits from the gridlock. Given this difference, and given that the gridlock is highly constitutional, and part of the spirit of the constitution (without wide consensus, no change), why are the Republicans anti-Democracy by simply playing system to their advantage? Much more anti-Democratic seem the Democrats, by only now, want to actually change the rules that it doesn't benefit them: abolish electoral-college, add seats on Supreme Court, add states, etc....within the already established rules, the GOP is playing politics. Seems reasonable argument to me.
If only gridlock meant the government stopped doing stuff. It doesn’t. It just means status quo forever.
I don’t know how much you follow Matt and Ezra, but the use of the filibuster has skyrocketed. That would count as “hardball,” in that it’s damaging to our democracy, but not illegal. Refusing to confirm even a very moderate SC justice in his sixties in the last year of a president’s term is hardball, as is eliminating the filibuster for SC confirmations. Yes, I know Democrats eliminated the filibuster for lower court appointments, and Republicans stopped respecting “blue slips.” As with most things, both sides do it, and Republicans are worse.
But pressuring nonpartisan election officials to overturn legitimate election results isn’t “hardball,” it’s a direct attack on our democracy, as is storming the Capitol.
Sure, the filibuster recently. But even then, look at Obamas comments when it benefited the party to keep, and his flip flop when it didn't. That's my point. Also, I remember the first time the filibuster was used for an appellate court judge - Miguel Estrada, a Latino btw - it was by Democrats. I didn't see anyone crying about the abuse of power then? What seems to be unique about this period is not the abuse of power, but the fact that Republicans have decided to go tit-for-tat.
With that said, I'm not saying CURRENTLY that Republicans are not worse than Democrats, they clearly are and the pressure to overturn the election is a clear example of a new escalation never before seen. A scary one at that. But I see this like Scott Alexander does: its a bipartisan issue, it just happens to currently benefit Republicans now. But who would deny that if the Senate remained divided, and Biden administration had the power, he would change the rules to benefit HIS side (abolish electoral college, add Supreme Court seats, etc)? Or had the Democrats not sabotaged Sanders campaign, what would Sanders populist party have brought to the table?
I get it, Trump is bad. But why not just slow policy change down and work within the rules? That's a hard pill for Democrats to swallow....but its exactly what the constitution would want.
Lol, well McConnell said the decision to eliminate the filibuster on federal judges would end the world, and I saw that, so I seem to remember some crying. And of course, that was in response to Republicans blocking Obama’s picks, so that was also hardball.
The filibuster is extra-constitutional, so by definition it has nothing to say about whether it should or should not exist. Nor is it good for *anyone* that major legislation is passed through budget reconciliation. That’s not some brilliant stroke of Founder insight, it’s exploitation of a loophole that has become a bizarre workaround for passing laws as the filibuster has metastasized.
I forget who popularized the ideas of “forbearance” and “restraint”, but the authors correctly pointed out that hardball is dangerous because it escalates, and it reflects a growing attitude on yes, the Republican side, that Democratic victories are illegitimate. Yglesias mentioned for example that it was always assumed that a president would would grant emergency aid to any state, regardless of whether it voted for him. But Trump changed that, because he is amoral and atavistic. This is real democratic breakdown, not just partisanship.
Im making two arguments. We seem to be agreeing on the first one. My first point is that the parties are the same, when it comes to using the rules of the game for their own political advantage. The filibuster is a good test for that. Go back in time and start with the first 'abuse' and follow the ping pong affect and you will see that no party is really different. Democrats have been just as abusive as Republicans overall (I would argue Democrats a hair worst, but arguendo). My argument is precisely that this is the overall pattern, not just with the filibuster. The only difference now is that we are at a point where Republicans played the last hand. Luckily, Democrats won the senate as well, so we will get a cooling down of emotions. But had the Repulbicans kept the Senate, again by following the general rules of the game, Democrats would have been seriously considering serious constitutional changes (EC, redesign of Supreme Court, additional states, etc). Id be surprised if you would disagree with this assesment.
My second argument, a bit more subtle, is that instead of seeing what the Republicans are doing as "anti-Democratic" why not see it as just another extension of the filibuster game? They are playing within the rules of the game for political advantage. Democrats are doing the same and have done the same. Sure, we can talk about how much better things would be if the constitution were different. I love those discussions. But like any child will tell you, trying to change the actual rules of the game (constitution) when one is losing rubs everyone as poor sportsmanship and would be a different escalation of polarization. Its similar to what Trump did by pressuring elected officials to overturn the results of a legitimate election.
A better approach, and one absent in Ezra Kleins book, but written extensively about in David French book on the same topic (how many lefties read it?): why not slow policy change down and wait til stronger majorities are reached? This has the benefit of also fitting within the spirit of the constituion. Another option would be having the parties change the rules when it actually hurts them: say the Republicans wanted to stack SC justices, or Democrats required ID's when voting (you know, like every other industrialized country), now that would actually show good faith change by politicians. But of course thats not what we see. So slowing down policy seems to be the only real workable solution.
Btw, you’re incorrect about the filibuster. Like everything else, Republicans began abusing it, Democrats copied, and then Republicans went batsh*t with Obama.
There is simply no way to say that Democrats are worse, and I say that as someone who sees plenty of Democratic hypocrisy.
As for that majorities needed, all you have to do is look at the electoral map and see that it’s unlikely either party will get 60 seats in the next ten years. Unresponsive government isn’t benign. It’s a recipe for civil unrest, including war. Even dictatorships have to try to help their subjects.
I would be perfectly happy to trade photo id for anti-gerrymandering, particularly if fees were waived for those ids. Voting is extremely easy in other OECD countries, so I’m not sure this helps your case.
I dont think the trade-off is unresponsive government. Republicans are basically Democrats 'lite'. Look at the Trump administration. Basically the same on principle as the Biden administration, just maybe less...with some tax cuts thrown in. Even police reform, the bones of it would have passed under Trump admin too. Im okay with lite.
Patience is what Democrats need.
I would say also with the EC, there were some rumbles from Democratic activists about abolishing it in 2000, but Gore’s *campaign manager* wrote an oped defending it. Gore conceded in an election that it appears he did in fact win, for the good of the country. That is forbearance. Nixon could have raised a stink in his first election, but he chose not to. Here we see a crystal clear departure, not just from an understanding that when you lose, you go, but from the sense that the EC was an irrelevant formality. Certainly the founders never intended it to regularly undo the popular will. That’s something that emerged.
I’ll leave you with one other example, Baker v Carr, where local election rules meant that black urban voters had their votes diluted to ***3%*** of white rural ones. That’s quite a hill to climb for “those are just the rules you have to follow.”
I totally agree with this column, except your regrettable decision to cite Scott Alexander, and in that spirit, I’m going to ask an annoying question. If Republicans have, as you say gone to the left and represent 49% of public opinion, why is it so terrible that they could entrench politics you consider to be relatively moderate and popular? It’s one thing for 70% to be ruled by 30%, but 51% by 49%? What’s the big deal?
I ask this as one of the people you occasionally snigger at on The Weeds, a squashy center-left suburban woman. I care about democratic institutions a lot more than I care about the top marginal tax rate. Trump viscerally horrified me.
Biden’s economic policies are more leftist than I expected, and I don’t think it’s smart to completely withdraw from Afghanistan, but more than anything, I want Biden to be popular, and I’m pretty flexible about what it will take to do that. But you make fun of people like me, even though I agree with you. So, why should I continue to care? Why not submit to benign despotic rule?
You've made a decent argument here, but I think it has a fundamental flaw that weakens it considerably. The flaw is the assumption that the present asymmetries in partisan outcomes, which currently disadvantage Democrats, are the result of our governing structures and institutions, such as the EC and Senate.
The problem with that assumptions is that our governing structures and institutions, in their present form, have existed for well over a century yet we've only seen these asymmetries over the past couple of decades. The relevant question, therefore, is why we are seeing this asymmetry now and why we didn't we see it in the past? My view is that since our governing structures and institutions have remained largely the same, then other factors must account for this change.
It's not as if there is an iron law that mandated that the GoP would get their current structural advantage and, likewise, there also is no iron law that mandates they will keep it. We didn't wake up one morning to discover that the GoP had a rural advantage with all the consequential effects - rather the current dynamic between the two parties was the result of an emergent process that had little to do with the structure of our governing institutions. The Democrats didn't intentionally plan and decide to be a party with a constituency that would make them less competitive in the Senate and EC, and the GoP did not have any master plan to have "minority" control either. Yet it happened and it's something that hasn't happened before. The relevant questions, again, are why and why now?
So my view is that the current asymmetry is not caused by any inherent unfairness in the system that specifically benefits one side or another. The problem is our parties and how they are structured. What's changed is that our parties have become decentralized and more democratic, but that has also made them weak. We have the weakest political parties of any comparable democracy with no effective central control or leadership. The parties have become more like brands.
This is why Trump was able to capture the GoP nomination. Despite near-universal opposition from the GoP party establishment, he won and took the party over. This never would have happened through most of US history when parties were stronger and had more central control and leadership. That control and leadership have, over the last half-century, become weaker and weaker with "democracy" as the justification.
We now have a very small d democratic primary system which has had the effect of handing control of the party and reigns of power to whatever faction of primary voters happens to be ascendant. This is the reason that a large number of politicians today fear primaries more than anything. The parties can no longer even protect incumbents. Again, this ability for any challenger to adopt a party brand and unseat an incumbent in a primary doesn't exist elsewhere.
And so my view is that this is why the current asymmetry exists. A party with leadership that has actual authority would be able to manage all the competing intra-party factions toward achieving power along with specific ends. A party with that kind of leadership would take concrete steps to make the party more competitive in the Senate and EC by appealing more to relevant constituencies and forcing party factions to play well together. Today there is no leadership or party authority that can do this. So parties cannot effectively act collectively because any faction has a veto.
The result is that the only solution presented to correct the current Democratic disadvantage in the Senate and EC is to do anything except change the Democratic party. The "one neat trick" solutions of structural reforms, or packing the court, or creating new states sidestep the obvious political actions - actions that the Democratic and Republican parties of 30 years ago would have taken.
I agree with you about needing stronger parties (bring back the smoke-filled rooms), but I don’t think that’s what’s driven polarization. It has a lot of causes, but for instance, nobody foresaw that Democrats would become increasingly urbanized, or that education would globally become more associated with left politics (it used to be the other way around, because education correlates with greater income, which correlates with right wing economics). Nor was it foreseen that the population gaps between states would be so enormous.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that party weakness is causing polarization. Rather, it limits the ability of parties to effectively deal with it and be more competitive.
> But its various non-majoritarian aspects have also not traditionally served to entrench some specific form of minority rule.
Um... slavery and Jim Crow?
Those didn't entrench *minority* rule.
When African-Americans were able to vote during the Reconstruction, governments in the South looked quite different. So suppressing their votes clearly shifted the median voter to someone who would have been in the minority without voter suppression.
True (though I think some of it was also the prior disenfranchisement of former Confederate officers). And I believe that South Carolina and Mississippi may both have been majority Black for some portion of that history.
Since this post starts with Liz Cheney: have Greenwald et al—the people who ridicule the Democrats for cheering Liz Cheney, making her out to be some kind of saint, etc.—have any examples of Democrats cheering Liz Cheney and making her out to be some kind of saint? As far as I've seen, Dems haven't gone any farther than saying "Cheney is right on this issue and we wish more Republicans would say so." And of course the irony is that Greenwald in particular will bite your head off if you say that his various examples of praise for Trump or Bannon, or his anti-anti-Trumpism, amount to making him a Trump supporter.
I mean I paid a lot of attention to Donald Trump too! Unfortunately sometimes bad actors have a lot of influence and it's worthwhile to keep abreast of what they're saying. And in my case there's a personal element too, which is that I read him religiously in the Bush years and so it's hard to shake the habit of caring what he has to say.
I can tell you why *I* think he's dishonest and hypocritical but sometimes read him anyways. Obviously it requires reading with a critical eye, but the conclusions he's motivated to come to are ones that are sometimes correct (generally along the lines of criticism of the US National Security apparatus), and I haven't yet found someone who will consistently put forward only the genuinely good ones. Getting all the half-compelling ones spewed at me and sorting out for myself which ones are correct is the best I've managed to find so far.
Do you support him going on Glenn Beck, pandering to Beck’s conspiracy theories, and then saying the Democrats are evil because they want to abolish the electoral college?
I don't, and it's even because of stuff like that I'm not a paid subscriber
From a California perspective it's really frustrating that our votes matter so much less. Sometimes I think that we should just take advantage of the fact that Wyoming is hurting economically because of overreliance on the fossil fuel industry and we should try to buy their senators -- like California would give $1 billion a year to Wyoming (which would result in checks of $1700 per person) and then their Senators would have to vote like our Senators. Somehow it seems more realistic than other options. But if Trump is elected in 2024 with weird electoral college stuff and a huge gap in the popular vote there will be a lot of civil unrest -- and the desire for secession for states like mine that are larger than most other countries in the world will get very intense.
The only area where California has a disadvantage is in Senate representation and only in terms of proportional representation - plus a tiny bit of the same in the EC. The latter could be almost eliminated by expanding the House, which leaves the Senate. In every other dimension, California trounces the influence of Wyoming. In several areas, California is a de facto second federal regulator thanks to its size and influence.
Many non-Californians, me included, are not disposed to the idea of eliminating California's "disadvantage" in the Senate while preserving all of California's many other advantages in size and scale.
What "advantages"? California is more influential than Wyoming because it's much larger. That's just fairness. What would be unfair is if California got ten extra representatives because it's the largest state, or something of that nature.
Yes, California is much larger which gives it a ton of influence outside of California that no other state has. California is the only state granted an exception to federal EPA regulation, for example. California, by virtue of its size and market power, is a de facto second federal regulator in many areas. See for example the effects that SB822 is having on the wireless industry.
Our system is built and designed as a federal compact of semi-sovereign states. Equality between the states in terms of status and representation in the Senate is intentional. This was put into the Constitution for the specific purpose of ensuring that big states cannot completely dominate the other states in the federal government. I can see how Californians would like to retain all their state's advantages and get rid of their one disadvantage, and you may think doing that is "fair" but many people do not. And not just those who live in Wyoming.
This kind of regulatory accomodation seems pretty far afield from permanently and intentionally overrepresenting Wyoming residents. You may think that the two are equally offensive, and I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. You place far too little weight on the principle of democratic equality.
We will probably agree to disagree then.
I'd just note that democratic equality was never intended at the federal level. As previously noted, the Constitution is a compact among equal states and therefore the state is the core political unit in our federal system. The Constitution was designed to make it impossible to change the equality of states with respect to each other without dismantling the whole thing. The point in bringing that up is just to note that it's not possible to achieve what you want without blowing up the Constitution. At the very least, one much convince the small states to give up political power to benefit you and California - they are unlikely to ever agree to that absent some kind of quid pro quo. So my objection has little to do with democratic principles as opposed to the very real practical aspects of getting from here to there.
Secondly, democratic equality also applies in the other direction. I have no representation in California since I am a resident of Colorado, but as a de facto federal regulator, California policy in a number of areas affects me and many people outside of the state of California. You complain that you have unequal representation compared to Wyoming, but I can complain that I have no representation at all in California.
If it helps, remember we have some tiny blue states too. And I also get some comfort from knowing how miserable California Republicans are. I drove through House District 1 a few months ago and the Trump regalia blew my mind. People had Trump flags flying that were bigger than my entire apartment!
If Californians want more equal representation in the Senate and Electoral College they can subdivide California into a smaller states. All that takes is approval by the California legislature and Congress - and if that's what Californians want, even Joe Manchin might not stand in the way, local rule and all.
But if Californians' attachment to the idea of California as California makes that option too unpalatable .... well that kind of proves the point of those who say we are in fact a federal union and that states are not merely anachronistic relics shouldn't have representation in the federal government.
Actually I don't know if the California legislature could approve subdividing the state or it would take a state constitutional convention. But at the federal level all it takes is congressional approval.
I think that creating two equal Californias which would almost certainly both yield Democratic senators would in fact be a bridge too far in a Senate with a filibuster. And it seems bizarre that we would have to give up existing economies of scale and still get nothing approaching proportional representation -- the two Californias would still be much more populous that most other states. Probably the third and fourth most populous states. Becoming our own nation seems like a better investment of time and energy when the benefits are so small. I get that California is the boogeyman for the right and absolutely the housing situation here is a crisis but we are actually in fits and starts making headway and I see our state moving forward in all kinds of ways that the right wing resists. I am a thousand percent for Democrats working to win under the rules as they are and I did everything I could in 2020 during the primary to rally folks in my orbit to Biden over Sanders to give us the best shot of beating Trump and I take comfort in the fact the Dems got our act together and made this happen. But if Republicans keep changing the rules to win with minorities and then turn around and govern from anger and resentment -- like cutting taxes for the rich heirs but raising them for blue states -- it seems like we are better off keeping our tax revenues at home.
Once you start on this process, can you really be sure you’ll get the political advantage you expect? It depends on how you split the state. Why just two? Why not four, to give the Republicans a shot? Everything will be in play. For example, splitting New York to give downstate New York its own Senators (most representative and logical), would leave behind a Red upstate New York, thus nullifying the existing +1 Blue State advantage in the Senate. Which is why there is a lot of talk and no action on this.
America isn't a pure democracy, but it is a democracy. Are there any pure democracies? Switzerland?
There's a difference between not being a "pure" democracy (as in ancient Greece) and not really being a democracy in the popular sense of the word. It's true there aren't any pure democracies around in terms of nation states. But I think Matt's making the point that the United States isn't *really* (and hasn't ever really been) an actual representative democracy as such in the commonly understood meaning of the term, given its objectively minoritarian constitutional arrangements. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with his take, mind you, (I'd probably argue it's a highly imperfect democracy rather than a non-democracy), but I believe that's what he's indicating here
On the last point, I would say there was more civil disobedience in Minneapolis in May/June, where I live, than violence, but that former doesn't get much media attention. But there were a lot more people blocking interstates, roads, camping outside the capitol after curfew than there were looters. And in general the police reacted violently to those people who weren't behaving violently.
Trumpers, can maybe live with them, can't live without them. Whatcha gonna do? About the only thing you can do, as a Democrat, is sit back and let them compete at the primary level for Looniest Loon is the district. Trump himself will assist in this endeavor since he doesn't give a rodent's rectum about anything resembling policy. I confess to looking at these things from an engineering point of view in terms of positive and negative feedback loops. I think your analysis is fundamentally sound. The American governing system is tipped towards instability. But ultimately, divorced from political realities and the need to achieve voting majorities to be electable the Republicans will certainly, as any similarly situated party must, drift ever father into internal hyper-competitive stupid.
This would be the only redeeming quality to America's truly execrable primary system. It almost never puts House seats in play in ideologically committed districts but it does have an effect in more marginal seats. And now we get to test this hypothesis.
Gerrymandering is noxious and should be outlawed. Any Republican who argues otherwise is blinded by fear of what it would be like to be without political power, distrust of "the other side," and an unwillingness to compromise.
Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor. It is less obviously the result of modern players attempting to "rig the game" and more of a reflection of the founders' idea of federalism. I think Ezra Klein covers this in WWP... When the nation was founded, a citizen's state-based identity far outweighed their national one. The Senate was meant to represent an equal collaboration between the states on issues that affected all states. If it was just meant to proportionally represent the national population, you wouldn't bother with a separate chamber of the legislature from the House at all. What purpose would it serve? Even the EU parliament mirrors our own, with a Council that has one member per state: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedstates/en/eu-us-relations/legislative-branches Also, the Constitution is pretty stubbornly firm on the "equal number of Senators per state" rule. Efforts to grant statehood to DC and PR are worthy steps toward representation for those citizens, but not as an end-run to game control of the Senate. It's worth discussing whether the Senate has too much power, or whether the fillibuster should go (it should). But I think it's not inherently un-democratic to have a chamber with equal representation per state.
The Electoral College falls somewhere in the middle, but it's harder to steelman. I'd be happy to see it go.
>>>Much as I dislike the disproportionate effects of the Senate, I have a harder time condemning it with the same fervor.<<<
I don't have a problem with the way Senate seats are apportioned (it's arguably an elegantly simple method) so much as I have a problem with the fact that the Senate is fully the equal of the House in crafting legislation. Indeed, it's probably the stronger of the two chambers given its confirming role for judicial and executive branch appointments.
In a good number of bicameral polities, the upper chamber exercises considerable powers, but these are nonetheless inferior to the lower (people's) chamber's powers, and so the former mostly plays an amending or delaying role with respect to legislation (which is a non-trivial role!). If America could ever modify its constitution in this manner, I'd have zero problem with Wyoming and California both sending two Senators to Washington.
Turn the Senate into the House of Lords and I have no problem with it.