With
almost two (potentially gruesome) years to go before the next
Presidential election let’s take a look at who we are, and where we are,
today.
Who are we as a nation? How did we get here? How can we change?
Answer
to the first question: We’re a nation of TV watchers and phone-zombies
who sheepishly conform to an outrageously unjust status quo. The
super-rich own almost all the wealth, yet the other 99.9 percent of us
appear content to scrap over the remaining slivers of the pie.
Oh, and a particularly foul representative of the super-rich is current holding the highest office in the land.
How
did we get here? I’ll rephrase this number two question to a more
specifically political question: How well is our Constitutional system
of government working for us in the year 2019?
Not very well, I submit, by any reasonable measure.
Some
people contend — I have read their reasoning in online comments — that the
separation of powers provided by our Constitutional system has a better
record for stability than parliamentary governments do. Defenders of the
status quo point out that our system of government has never broken
down into a Nazi-style totalitarian dictatorship that murders millions
of people (including many of its own citizens) through legally
authorized governmental procedures.
I would submit that’s setting the bar pretty low.
A
more pertinent performance measure is that the United States of America
is leading the pack (in tandem with China) toward the destruction of
human life on earth through the rapid environmental degradation known as
global warming, and closing its eyes to the coming climate apocalypse
the rest of the world (even China) acknowledges is fast approaching.
Meanwhile our government rushes to open up new public lands to fossil
fuel exploitation in the mindless pursuit of more billions for those who
already have more billions than they can count. When the sun is
shining, Americans shrug off the threat of rapid climate change as if
the superstorms weren’t coming quickly enough to turn Florida and
Houston — as well as New York City and Boston — into mainland versions
of storm-obliterated Puerto Rico.
Some
will object that our impotence in the face of global warming is the
fault of the current fake-President we’re stuck with. While that claim
is hardly the whole truth, it leads us directly to two or three other
pressing questions.
Why are we stuck with this Pretender? How did that happen? How do we know it will not happen again?
Which
is to say, in other words, after two years of misgovernance, why do we
permit a dangerously unstable, fact-phobic, hate-mongering, lying sadist
to go on ‘governing’ by media manipulation, while appointing ignorant,
selfish, ass-hats like himself to major government jobs for the purposes
of self-enrichment and furthering the corporate interests of mega-pigs
already laughing themselves to the apocalypse?
So, the answer, once again: The Constitutional system we’re so proud of isn’t working very well any more.
The
fake-President is not only unpopular with a solid majority of
Americans, he distinctly lost the popular vote in the Presidential
election that paradoxically put him on the throne. How do we prevent
this “loser wins” scenario from happening again?
The
solution, in theory, is simple: choosing a President by national
popular vote alone. Conventional wisdom tells us, however, that the only
way to get to a national popular vote is to amend the Constitution.
But that may not be the case. There is a quicker ‘work-around’ solution.
An initiative known by the unwieldy name of The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
seeks to convince enough states to agree to commit all their electoral
votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote, regardless of who
the winner in their state is. If states totaling a combined 270
electoral votes join the compact by passing a state law to this effect,
then a presidential election would be determined by popular vote
regardless of what the other states do.
The
compact’s backers contend that this agreement complies with the
Constitution. That document’s Article II provides that “Each State shall
appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number
of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives
to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” The key words here
are: “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”
This
approach seems to me to be a useful, though short-term solution. If its
backers are successful, the multi-state agreement would make the
popular vote winner the next US President.
Now wouldn’t that be something?
Imagine
what the network TV screens would have to come up with if they could no
longer meaningfully divide the national map into red and blue puzzle
pieces, and eagerly count which way these arbitrarily constructed
dominoes have fallen.
It
would no longer matter whether a few more voters in the state of Ohio
favored candidate X or candidate Y. The only number that would matter
was which way the national vote total was trending. Oh, the commentators
would say in tones of hushed expectancy, here comes the vote from
Texas! Let’s see if the Texas numbers puts Y over X, or keep X in the
lead.
Choosing
Presidents by national popular vote brings other advantages as well. It
would prevent candidates of the two major parties from concentrating
almost all their efforts on a dozen or so “toss-up” states. Oh, boy, the
operatives now way, rubbing their hand over our wasteful two-year
run-up of endless complications to the Electoral Vote nonsense: New
Hampshire is in play this year. And so is North Carolina. But in a
victory by popular vote system, even if you’re certain to lose Alaska
and the Dakotas you need to maintain a strong campaign presence there
because every vote you win even in the states you lose counts to toward your popular vote total.
Imagine that! Every vote would count!
We have never had a presidential election in this country in which that statement could be made.
Popular
Vote elections would inevitably decrease inter-sectional divisiveness
and hostility. White people from Mississippi and Vermont would no longer
be forced to regard each other with suspicion. The dreaded
“polarization” that begins and ends all current political discussion
would immediately decrease as the experts discovered that many people in
Louisiana have a lot in common with people from rural New York. And all
their votes would count, even if the state plurality doesn’t swing
their way.
I consider The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
a ‘short-term solution’ because the artifice of the ‘electoral vote’
would still be on the books. It would be an end run around the current
electoral vote system, instead of its complete abolition — the goal
greatly to be desired if you are a believer in democracy.
Remember,
the ‘will of the people’ is the basis of ‘democracy.’ ‘One person, one
vote.’ ‘The majority has spoken.’ And every citizen has the right to
vote.
Secondly,
as a mathematical device, a work-around to nullify the destructive
flaws in the current anachronistic Presidential selection method, the
cure is vulnerable to attack. What if one or more states pulls out of
the compact, putting its committed electoral vote total below 270? Then
we’re back to the same undemocratic system we have today.
A
work-around, rather than abolition, still implies the legitimacy of the
Great Compromise monkey business in the Constitution that gave the
right to choose the President to “electors” rather than to the people to protect the supposed ‘rights’ and interests of small states.
Sorry,
when it comes to the sacred democratic right of the ballot box, states
have no legitimate rights. Only citizens, human beings, have the right
to vote. Let us clearly recognize and protect that right. Vermont has
the second smallest population, and has voted strongly blue. Yet many of
its voters routinely choose Republican candidates.
So in that state, and all 49 others, the results exhibit two (at least) different views of where the state’s best interests lie.
To speak of Vermont’s, or Kentucky’s, or New York State’s “interests” is to invent an abstraction that does not exist.
In
what ways are New Yorkers’ interests different from those living any
other states? There is no “New York vote.” Whatever candidate a
plurality of the state’s voters may choose, New Yorkers do not think
alike. In their personal and material interests, they are all over the
map. They are socialists and libertarians, to some greater or lesser
degree; as they are liberals and conservatives.
They are professionals,
artisans, blue collar workers, white collar workers, service workers, as
well as bankers, brokers, and attorneys. If for example voters in New
York vote their interests as poorly paid service workers, they are
voting just as millions of citizens in Louisiana and Florida (and the
rest of the country) are.
This is true of people in every state in every region in the country.
Citizens in every state in the country do not all think or vote alike. But however they vote, our election system should let that vote be recognized and honored.
If
only two people in some Mississippi hamlet wish to vote Blue, let them
do it and let those votes count. If only two crusty old-timers in a
Vermont village near a wacko-liberal college wish to vote Red, let their
votes count as well.
The
Constitution’s state-based ‘only-Electors-truly-vote’ system not only
violates the right of the majority to choose, it violates the right of the minority to speak through their vote.
That
right is implicit in any democratic government. But that right is
meaningless if those votes have no weight in the final nationwide
decision.
Understand,
please, that the Constitutional Framers did not ‘fail’ to create a
democratic system for choosing a President. They did not wish to. They intentionally created a system in which a privileged minority had the sole right to choose a President.
Constitutional
amendments long ago gave to increasing numbers of citizens the right to
choose their state’s electors. But Presidential elections are still far
from democratic, so long as the system is still dogged by the unequal
and unfair distribution of electoral votes, favoring the less populous
states over the states in which the majority of Americans live and vote.
This is the subject discussed in my ‘story’ posted here back in November: https://medium.com/@rcknox2/another-election-another-split-decision-how-constitutional-roadblocks-to-democracy-continue-to-331d8a6b3d40
I’m tempted to make that whole argument over again here, but will forbear.
(Short
take: since the Constitution gives each state regardless of population 2
electoral votes representing its 2 US Senators, the impact of less
populous states is increased; the impact of more populous is decreased.
It’s just math. But it helps explain why candidates can win the
electoral vote while losing the popular vote. Also, the reliance on
state-by-state pluralities, instead of a national plurality, and the
rule that entitles state winners to all
their state’s electoral votes allow the winner in a handful of closely
contested states to gather more electoral votes than the candidate who
wins other states by large majorities. Put all these undemocratic twists
and tweaks into one election system, and what do you get? Answer:
Trump.)
On to our next major question: How hard can it be to change the voting system and simply count every vote?
In
fact it is very difficult because we can change the Constitution only
by absurdly difficult, drawn-out, undemocratic and complicated methods
that simply don’t work any more. Which is why the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — as
discussed above — has drawn wide interest, and actual support from 11
states, plus the District of Columbia, totaling 172 votes.
The Constitutional Amendment process is yet another anachronistic feature of our system of government.
In
an effort to create a high bar to structural change, lest people make
too many sensible, modernizing changes, the Framers required that any
proposal to amend the Constitution receive the approval of
three-quarters of the states. Once again, giving an important power to
the ‘semi-sovereign’ fictions we call ‘states’ allows a small minority
to thwart the will of the majority.
The
rejection of a proposed amendment — let us say, for example, the Equal
Rights Amendment — by a mere 13 states dooms the whole idea. Since (once
again, do the math) the populations of our states are wildly unequal,
13 states with a total of less than 10 percent of the country’s
population can block a change sought by 90 percent of the country.
No
amendment has been ratified since 1967, when the 25th amendment
addressing the issue of Presidential succession — following the Kennedy
assassination (in 1963) — was ratified.
As
it happens, the 25th Amendment contains a provision that many voices
consider relevant to our current crisis, because it provides a method
(known as Section 4) to remove a President who is too physically or
mentally impaired to continue his duties. Many people have called for
this section to be applied toward the removal from office of the current
fake-President on the grounds of psychiatric impairment given his
evident inability to distinguish empirical truth from his own wishes and
delusions, and his inability to restrain himself from compulsive lying
for perceived advantage and the persistent repetition of clearly,
publicly exposed falsehoods.
Whether
he knowingly lies, and thinks he can get away with it (since his ‘base’
is as easily deluded as he is) or is unable to accept that known facts
repudiate his prejudiced views, the resulting disconnect from reality in
someone wielding the powers of the Presidency appears to most of us to
present a serious peril to the people in this country and the entire
world. In fact, anyone who does not recognize this danger is playing
dice with the universe.
So why can’t this constitutional provision be brought to bear?
The answer is simple. Partisan politics.
Section
4 requires the vice-president and a majority of the principal officers
of the executive departments — i.e. the cabinet — to initiate the
process. The VP and cabinet heads appointed by our fake-dunderhead and
approved by a Republican Senate are all Republicans themselves, and most
of them have proved to be toadies and ignoramuses like the Pretender
himself.
It
is simply not possible to get rid of a bad POTUS on mental health
grounds unless all parties behave responsibly and put the interests of
the country ahead of the interests of their party and themselves. Fat
chance in 2019.
The
only other legal method to remove a President is impeachment. Since
most all of us know how that works and — like the members of the House
of Representatives — are waiting for the Mueller report to jump-start
the process, let’s put this matter aside, and move on to my final major
question.
How do we prevent this predicament — a dangerously bad President installed by a disastrously outmoded system — from recurring?
My
answer is evident: Abolish the electoral vote in favor of the national
popular vote as the sensible, democratic way to elect a President.
But, given the previously discussed problem of the unworkable Constitutional Amendment system, how do we make this change?
My
answer is a radical one: a national plebiscite. Which, of course, is a
kind of national popular vote in itself. Let’s have Congress pass a law
creating a nationwide up-or-down vote on changing how the winner of our
Presidential election is determined from the artificial and undemocratic
electoral vote count to a simple plurality in the nationwide vote
But,
of course, you will say and I will agree, it’s impossible to get the
current Congress to agree on anything both fundamental and
consequential, because our divided form of government means that a
Republican Senate will never go along with a proposal to change a system
that has given their party an advantage in recent elections.
So, I reply, still more radically, we the people
should hold this national plebiscite and do so in the name of the
American people. After all it was “we the people” who gave birth to the
American nation. It says so in our founding document. So, logically, we
the people have the right to change it.
Let’s
create an ad hoc non-partisan, widely representative Good Government
Commission to publicize, organize, arrange, hold, manage, count the
votes and otherwise authorize a national plebiscite on this necessary,
fundamental change in how we choose a President.
If
local government authorities don’t wish to cooperate with this
grass-roots initiative, we’ll do it all ourselves. We’ll collect votes
at supermarkets. Outside post offices. In schools and veterans clubs,
and gyms, in libraries and the YMCA.
It’s
not impossible to bypass our government. Our political parties do it
all the time. They already have the voting lists. Put everything
online — all the information on when and where to vote; even the voting
lists themselves. Make sure that every registered voter will be
told — by mail, email, personal phone call, howsoever — here’s how and
where you vote.
Yes,
there will be a thousand details to iron out. That’s why we need a
grass-roots, popular, national citizen-led movement to create our Good
Government Commission. What I’m talking about amounts to a popular,
non-violent, citizen-initiated ‘revolution.’
Once
this revolution succeeds, government — our existing institutions — will
join us. Congress, the courts, local town clerk offices will not wish
to be left out. They are nothing without us. They exist to serve the people. If they stop doing that, they’re not needed.
Political
parties, alongside governmental bodies, will freely accept the new
national popular vote election system. If they don’t, new political
organizations will quickly replace them.
And
with the precedent of the national plebiscite established, we will also
have a tool to address that other lingering, insoluble problem: how to
rid the country of a President who is no longer able to perform his
duties because of mental (or some other) impairment, endangering the
security of both the nation and the world.
You
guessed it: We hold a nationwide vote on whether to remove a sitting
President whose impairment, or erratic conduct, poses a threat to the
nation.
No
elections are perfect, and no electoral system can promise to deliver
the ‘right’ choice every time. Popular vote totals even in fairly recent
elections would have given us the same bad choices that the Electoral
College gave us: Nixon over Humphrey; Reagan over Carter.
Those
of us who believe in democracy — and argue for more democracy in our
system of government — know this is so. But in a nation of tens of
millions of registered voters, counting every vote is certain to offer a
clear winner.
If,
for example, ‘we the people’ are given the opportunity to choose by
popular vote whether or not to remove the current threat to the
existence of life on earth currently barfing all over ‘our democratic
system,’ I’ll be satisfied.
Maybe the American people will vote to keep him.
That’s all right too. Just shoot me.
No comments:
Post a Comment