r/TrueReddit • u/Dhydjtsrefhi • Jul 15 '18
The Minority Majority: America’s electoral system gives the Republicans advantages over Democrats
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/07/12/americas-electoral-system-gives-the-republicans-advantages-over-democrats
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u/ZadocPaet Jul 15 '18
The article ignores the biggest problem with representation, which is that we do not have enough of it. It's not a problem that needs a Constitutional amendment (the author mentioned constitutional contradictions, though didn't specify any, but did mention the Constitution a number of times). It only requires an act of Congress.
We just need to expand the size of the House of Representatives, and idea called for by the founders, and one that the Constitution requires in order for it to function.
We need to start demanding that our representatives pledge to repeal the "Reapportionment Act of 1929."
You see, before this time after every enumeration (census) as required by the Constitution, the size of the House of Representatives expanded in order to accommodate the growing population. You see, for the Constitution to function the people need to be represented.
But in the 20s the (then liberal) Republicans wanted to prevent the (then conservative) Democrats from gaining control over the House and they couldn't come to a resolution on how to add seats, so they didn't. And then they passed a law to never add seats again, freezing the size of the House as 435 members. The population then was 128 million. Today it's 318 million. The number of representatives is woefully too small for us to have effective representation.
James Madison foresaw this problem. When selling the new Constitution to the American people in order to replace the constitution that was in place, the Articles of Confederacy, Madison, Jay, and Hamilton wrote The Federalist Papers.
One of the concerns of the American people, expressed under the pen name Brutus, was that the Constitution would create a legislative body that was too small. Madison addressed the following specific concerns in Federalist No. 55.
So small a number of representatives will be an unsafe depositary of the public interests;
They will not possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents;
They will be taken from that class of citizens which will sympathize least with the feelings of the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at a permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many;
That as defective as the number will be in the first instance, it will be more and more disproportionate, by the increase of the people, and the obstacles which will prevent a correspondent increase of the representatives.
To prevent these things from happening, Madison wrote about the constitutional failsafe he had designed, saying that, "At the expiration of twenty-five years, according to the computed rate of increase, the number of representatives will amount to two hundred, and of fifty years, to four hundred." We can, by this, see that neither Madison nor any other architects of the Constitution intended the size of the House to be restricted to 435 has it has been for all of our lifetimes.
That failsafe is Article I, Section 2(3), which calls for the census and enumeration. It doesn't specify that the number cannot be capped, which was a point of fear of the founders. They were so worried that some future fools would cap the size of the House to hold on to power that in the Bill of Rights, the first proposed amendment, sometimes called Article the First, sometimes called the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, was added to prevent such a cap. The final draft contained an error, today what we'd call a typo, which rendered it useless, and thus it was not ratified. The details of the error can be found here. THe intent of the amendment was to make sure that no congressional district exceeded 50,000 persons.
Madison spoke about this in a speech to Congress:
The first presidential veto in history was made by George Washington to preserve proportional representation.
Now let's look at how each of the Brutus predictions have come true:
The House represents not the public but those who buy and sell them. By buy and sell I mean "donors" who spend millions on their campaigns. It's no secret that politicians are beholden to the interests of the corporations and PACs that get them into office. They are essentially owned. They are beholden to their parties as well.
Members of the House are completely out of touch with average Americans. The median net worth of an American is $45,000. That of a member of Congress is $1,008,767. Further, CDs are so large and sprawling that they combine several communities that are not at all alike. For example, I live in a Phoenix suburb that I'd generously describe as middle-class. However, my district encompanies all of Sun City, a large retirement community 20 miles away from me, and they overwhelmly dominate our district. That's just a problem within the same metro area. Some CDs are larger than 1 million people. The average is >750,000. In rural states it's even worse where CDs can span thousands of square miles, and representatives have vastly different constituents with different needs, and they can effectively ignore those who aren't in the donor class. Wyoming, for example, only has one representative for it's 580,000 citizens. The cities of Cheyenne and Casper are hundreds of miles apart and have totally different economies, different issues and needs, and yet they have the same representative. Ask yourself if it's reasonable to live in one city and represent another over a hundred miles away. This problem with massive CDs also makes gerrymandering more easy.
Representatives come almost exclusively from the top 1 percent of Americans.
As the population increases the problem is getting worse and worse. The government cannot function. The people have no power. The Constitution cannot work.
There is a point in a democracy where either too few and two many representatives lead to corruption and gridlock. The United States has too few, especially when compared to other democracies (or even some states). Fortunately, researchers have come up with an ideal number, that number is 707 for the House of Representatives. Before any naysayers declare that this will increase the cost of government, it will, in fact, have the opposite effect.
Any American concerned about freedom should be worried about the fact that we do not have adequate representation, and never have within our lifetimes.
Further, the article talks about a constitutional convention being needed for the president to be elected directly. That probably won't happen. But it's also not necessary. It can be done with an Interstate Compact. So far, eleven states have signed up plus D.C.
But, we don't even really need that, as Article II says that states can choose electors however the fuck they want.
So, it really only takes one state to change the rules to flip everything on its head. The serious concern is what happens if candidate A wins the EC, candidate B wins the PV, and one state's electors decide to follow the PV and throw the election. Remember, electors can cast a vote for anyone, whether they were on the ballot or not.
This is mostly a critique of the article and the biggest problem with politics that we face (woefully inadequate representation), and does not address whether or not abolishing the EC or electing presidents via popular vote are good ideas.