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Mitch McConnell shares GOP's ‘worst nightmare’ scenario of a Harris-Walz White House
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Flatly wrong about packing SCOTUS. It's probably a bad idea--as is ending the filibuster--but it's not unconstitutional.
As to why it's a bad idea - Republicans haven't increased the size of the court when they've held the legislature and presidency; packing the court would encourage them to do the same the next time they have power--and they will eventually, because that's the way politics have gone in this country--and we'd quickly end up with a court that's even more unwieldy than it is now.
The same principle applies to ending the filibuster; if it's ended now, then Dems can't use it when they are out of power in the Senate. Because, again, Republicans will win again at some point--possibly even this fall--and giving absolute power to a single party is a bad idea.
And that's how we keep scooting to the right.
People think there's a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn't the case. Look at what happened for appointments to the supreme Court under Obama vs trump as an example. I understand why you might feel this way considering that the nuclear option for ending cloture wasn't used by Republicans until Harry Reid did it, but 20 years later honor and decorum are no longer foundational to government.
Anymore, I think the best thing to do is use tools available to terrible effect, then with any luck all the "honor system" stuff can be written into law.
Bring back the talking filibuster, and pack the court to fix it's rules, ethics, and enforcement (the court doesn't even respect stare decisis anymore), add states, expand the cap on the house, blow the electoral college. No more gentlemen's agreements.
At least that's how I see it.
I'm absolutely fine with the talking filibuster; I love it, and think we should do it. Killing it entirely? No.
Packing the court? Also no. If anything, I think that the size should be reduced. I'd be fine with term limits on judges (say, 16 years), along with a code of ethics and mandatory financial disclosures and recusals for conflicts of interest. But packing the court is not a good idea.
I think that if we're ever going to get back to a point where we aren't hyperpartisan, we need to operate in good faith, even if the other side isn't. Constantly escalating ends up hurting us in the long run. And, again - as soon as you create the tools to get your way, those tools will be used against you; a hammer doesn't care which ideologue is swinging it.
Bad idea. Getting 400+ people to stop arguing long enough to vote on a thing is already hard enough. You'd just be adding more layers of bullshit.
Eh. Last I knew, PR didn't really want to be a state; I recall that under 50% of the island population wanted statehood. D.C. might, but I'm not sure that making a city a whole-ass state--particularly since most of the city is actually in Virginia and Maryland--is a good idea. That would have the effect of ensuring that voters in D.C. would be far more powerful than any other voters, since you would have a fairly small number of voters selecting two senators. (I can't find exact populatino data for D.C. alone; all population figures I can find are for metro D.C., which counts large parts of Virginia and Maryland; those voters already have representatives and senators.)
I oppose this for the same reason that I oppose getting rid of the Senate and going to a direct democracy; an electoral college balances the interests of the states as a whole against the population, because they're not always the same. An electoral system forces candidates to try and balance a message, rather than focusing solely on the most populous areas. Rather than eliminating the electoral college, I'd rather see some form of ranked-choice voting, which would tend to eliminate candidates that had the most extremely unpopular platforms. (E.g., Trump consistently won about 30% of the votes in the 2015 primaries, but a strong majority of voters would have selected him as their last choice. Some form of ranked choice in the Republican primaries likely would have resulted in a candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio instead of Trump.)
All of this is a balancing game of competing interests and priorities. Steamrolling people and hammering them isn't going to make anything better. Yes, I hear what you're saying about the Overton window, but frankly, that's a messaging problem that the left has created. If the right is able to move the Overton window, it's because the left is doing a really shitty job at meeting voters where they are, while the right is doing a damn good job at outreach.
There's some common ground here and some... not so common ground.
If you go back to the talking filibuster, you've essentially eliminated the filibuster as it exists today, but with the added benefit of potentially bringing attention to issues. It's not possible to just kill progress with an email. So on that we're agreed.
For packing the court, I could go one of two ways: Either just do it so that we codify how many justices and the rules for appointments (which I think is good) and potentially term limits OR pivot and leave justices as serving for life, appoint them into the federal court circuit. Every new case--or new term-- select 7, 9, or 13 justices and let's go for that term. The more justices sit the bench, but more likely they are to reach non-extreme outcomes.
With respect to fair play and hyperpartisan politics I think you missed the point. We are currently in a two party system with a penchant for minority rule. We don't get back to a good place by trying to be nice guys and all play together again. What we do instead is overhaul the voting system in such a way that ranked choice or proportional representation or some other more modern approach is used instead of FPTP. We got here by groups coalescing into two polarized super-parties, and that need not be the case. But we have to break it to fix it.
RE adding states and capping the house, your opinions are at odds. Apportionment is totally busted right now with a lower cap. Either we have to write off states with low population, or you have to up the cap so that voters in LA and Boseman are approximately equally represented. It sounds weird to say "hey DC doesn't get 2 senators, but CA gets 750k people per congressional rep and Montana gets 500k people per rep." I'm seeing quick facts here of DC with about 60% the population of Montana. It's small, but it's not beyond compare.
RE electoral college: The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is already well on the way. The EC doesn't make sense to me. Using the senate makes sense with states being equal, but land doesn't vote, people do. The idea originally is just to let the more "sophisticated" delegates overrule the populace if necessary, and also make it easier to count votes in the days before the telegraph. The EC should have prevented Trump, it shouldn't have enabled him. It's busted. Since the EC votes are managed by the states as well, we have arrived at a position where only swing states really matter and that means I don't get to see candidates in Indiana because they're going to MI and PA instead and the message is not balanced: it's only for those competitive areas. IMO it's doing more harm than good. I see the intent of balancing out the desires of all the parts of the country, but instead of doing that, it allows gaming the system. See also gerrymandering for this, because that's also busted AF.
Your last paragraph almost deserves its own reply. Rather than write it in full, I'm going to leave this video which does a great job. If you haven't seen it, please watch it in full. The left isn't that good at messaging I agree, but their job is much MUCH harder than the right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A
The perspective that I'm approaching this from is that some people and politicians will use any crack as leverage to break a system. Any changes that are made need to be done in such a robust way that abusing it in an unanticipated way would be extremely challenging. Anything that can be used for positive change can also be misused for regressive, negative change, unless it's managed very, very carefully.
Not necessarily correct. As it stands, we have 5 extremely far-right judges (Thomas, Alito, Goresuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), one that's moderately right-wing (Roberts), and three that are moderates-pretending-to-be-liberal (Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Even if we managed to nuke two conservative justices and capped it at 7, that would still be a 4-3 conservative court, and probably still a far-right court. Term limits would certainly help, but I strongly suspect that SCOTUS would shoot down term limits unless it was a constitutional amendment. Moreover, you could still get cases where a justice vacated their seat early and a president ended up being able to pack the court with justices that matched their ideology, much like Trump did with Kavanaugh, Goresuch, and Barrett.
I don't think that's wise. Breaking it in order to fix it assumes that the majority of the people will want to fix it. As we've seen with the number of people that support outright fascism, I simply don't believe that. I do think that we need some form of ranked-choice so that there's not a duopoly, but I also think that, given where we are now, that needs to start at a local level and work up to a state level before we even consider taking it national.
Not exactly. The house is supposed to represent the people of the state, and that's based on population, with an absolute floor of 1 (technically, each state gets 1 representative, and then the remaining representatives are apportioned by population; practically, each state has at least two representatives). Senators represent the state, and each state gets two, in total. Given that states have a population, that means that senators in low-population states can be representing a much smaller number of people. The idea was to balance states that were far more rural against states that were much more urban, and force compromises.
Rather than intentionally undermining the bicameral system, I think it would be more productive to break the duopoly by creating some form of ranked choice voting at a local and state level (...and I believe that a few states have preemptively banned it because it worries the parties in power so much). The primary reason that the system seems so broken is that you have two parties that, while not truly monolithic, tend to vote that way. E.g., my state--Georgia--is quite pro-gun, but the two Senators--Warnock and Ossoff--will vote against 2A rights because they're Democrats, even though that's not the will of the people in the state as a whole. (My rep, Andrew Clyde, is good on that single issue, and fucking awful on everything else. Which makes sense, since he owns a gun store.) (That also gets into other questions about whether elected representatives are supposed to follow the will of the people, or whether they should do what they feel is best for the people, and these are not the same thing. I tend to lean towards elected officials doing what is best regardless of the will of the people, but that assumes you're electing smart people with integrity.)
Yes, but. The general idea is that you need to balance the states in some way. Ignoring for the moment the two-thirds compromise (because jesus fucking christ...!), the less populous southern states never would have joined with the union in the first place had there not been some way to balance their needs and desires against the needs and desires of the more populated northern states. When the other 37 states joined, that was the basis upon which they joined, including the way that the constitution could be amended. I understand the interstate compact, and it's a clever way to get around amending the constitution, but note that the states that have approved it so far tend to be more left-leaning. It will likely be an uphill battle to get right-leaning states to agree to that, since they would likely see it as a dilution of their votes. (E.g. Texas is unlikely to sign on, because it's the second most populous state and gerrymandered to shit so that Republicans dominate it despite not having a huge statistical advantage over Dems. Texas would want to keep all of their delegates red.)
In my opinion, I'd rather see the constitution amended to change these things, rather than creating work-arounds that can themselves be undone. The compact only works as long as the states don't change their laws to unwind it, and you could very well see a state like California do that if their electoral votes went to someone like Trump or DeSantis.
Oh, absolutely. I don't disagree. I don't have great solutions there aside from one-on-one discussions, and that's much harder to do than mass media.
I think the perspective you're coming from makes a lot of sense, which is why I think that generally speaking it's better to have rules written explicitly and try to minimize interpretation.
RE Justices on the court: Yeah anything and everything has to be a constitutional amendment. It would be smart, for example, to make a ruling saying the SC may not take up cases about the SC, and outline cases in which justices must recuse. My argument about size is only true for random selection from a pool, not to appoint 25 justices; of course that can be an unbalanced court as easily as 9 justices.
RE break it to fix it: I agree the source problem is voting method (and by extension money in politics), but I don't think you can do it from the ground up. Consider even recent laws in FL (HB433) where the state disallows counties and municipalities from requiring water breaks etc to workers in high temperatures. If the rot is already in the state house, they legislate down and prevent it from happening. I think you have to pass clever master-stroke legislation to fix this problem, and there will probably not be many chances to do it. I say do it.
RE representing people: People do not and are not obliged to vote in their own best interests unfortunately. But poll testing can be weaponized. A good start to addressing the problem (besides changing voting method) is to make it easier for people to vote. But making election day a holiday is one of those things Mitch says is a blatant power grab by dems lol. While I'm all for a meritocracy, that is absolutely not what a democratic republic is. Especially not in the US (See MTG since you're a georgian).
RE EC: I don't see you arguing FOR the EC, only justifying why it originally existed. The big picture of the EC is resolved by the senate: all states are represented equally. I don't think you need to equally represent states in every branch of government. Why SHOULDN'T the people choose the executive if the EC isn't going to be independent of the state or party? At present, the EC disenfranchises everyone not in a swing state.
Did you by chance watch the video? It's a goody. Only 18 minutes or so.
DC has more people than Montana...they deserve senators, representatives and votes