One thing I worry about is a contingent presidential election. That situation arises when no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes (270 of 538). Should this situation arise, Congress gets to pick the next president and vice president.
You’re missing a key part of that process which makes it even more of a shit show. If there is a contingent election, then it is not resolved by a straight vote of 435 House members. Each state’s House delegation gets a vote. So all 52 members from California get the same voting power as Wyoming’s lone rep.
I thought, surely you must be wrong.
Nope… You’re right.
And they can even hold the vote in a closed session.
wtf
Of course I’m right…
… and don’t call me Shirley.
The one time our votes count for MORE instead of LESS
System is garbage
One time whose votes count more? Wyoming? They already count more in presidential and Senate elections that californians’
We have a lot of nightmare scenarios in the future: Trump wins, Trump loses and we get insurrection part II, Biden wins and we don’t take the house and keep the Senate, and we have at least 2 more years of gridlock while our lives continue to get shittier, etc etc.
The true tragedy is that there isn’t even a good outcome in the mix. Biden wins and Democrats take Congress. Fine, will they fix the courts? Fix student loans? Will they even try for universal healthcare? Universal Basic Income? Anything even close to meeting the moment?
So depressing.
Anyway, vote Biden so at least we don’t wind up in a fascist dictatorship.
Fine, will they fix the courts? Fix student loans? Will they even try for universal healthcare? Universal Basic Income?
Of the four things you listed, Biden and Congressional Democrats are actively working towards three. State level Democrats are working towards the 4th.
Last time Democrats had a supermajority (just for a few months!) they gave us the ACA which has saved countless lives.
Vote Democrat if you want your goals to become reality. They aren’t dictators who can declare things by fiat, and they aren’t genies who you can demand wishes from. They need political power to do the things that you want and that they already support.
“Congress doesn’t get things done” is a myth.
“Republicans block things” is the reality.
I fully agree with your assessment of the basic partisan realities, but the ACA is the perfect example of the problem.
Democrats aim low, and compromise even lower.
The ACA was sold to us as a stepping stone. Democrats told us not to worry that it didn’t go far enough, because we would build on it.
What ACTUALLY happened was that passing it was like releasing a pressure valve, which took away all momentum for fixing the healthcare crisis.
Not only did they fail to expand it, they spent the next decade watching it get chipped away and chipped away.
15 YEARS LATER and we are STILL in a full-blown healthcare CRISIS.
So sure, the Republicans are evil fascists that will destroy the country, and must be defeated at all costs. But Democrats are embarrassingly incompetent, and I am so fucking tired of watching them tout their insufficient, mediocre accomplishments as if it’s something to be proud of.
Not only did they fail to expand it, they spent the next decade watching it get chipped away and chipped away.
And why is that? Think about it for a minute. Guess what we haven’t had at all since then: enough democrats in congress to override Republicans.
Democrats can’t do shit until there’s at least 60 senators and preferably 62 or so in case of Manchins. All they can do until then is make small gains here and there while staving off republican bullshit.
You keep saying dems are incompetent but they don’t have the numbers in Congress. That’s politics 101.
Insurrection Part II comes to theaters, I’m taking to the streets.
Contrary to popular belief, a great many of us liberals are armed and practiced. POC, LGBT and women are the largest gun buying demographic since 01/06, and they’re asking how to safely learn and defend themselves.
Easy for this old white guy to say, I’ve lived a great life, but I’m not getting on any fucking trains.
That’s great, but a civil war won’t be decided by citizens with guns. It’s going to be military and police forces. How confident are you that they are all on the right side?
Georgia military ballots went to Biden 2:1. Police forces swing Republicans. Military is overall younger which means they vote Democratic. The military and the civilians that sides with them calls the shot in a hypothetical civil war.
Oh they’re definitely almost all on the ‘right’ side. I think there’s an acronym people sometimes like to throw out that illustrates the reality of the situation.
Gods save us from the enlightened centrists who somehow perceive both parties as the same.
Even if this pustulant third party managed to win the White House they’d have zero support from either chamber. They’d be completely ineffective at governing.
It’s not about the third party winning, they won’t. It’s about how no majority in the electoral college means that the decision is wrested from the people and throws open the door wide for political shenanigans that are far from democratic.
Think of it like something similar to the spoiler effect if that makes it clearer.
I get what the topic is about: the very undemocratic possibility that our leaders get chosen by fiat and the free-for-all it would prompt. But regardless of the author’s insistence that it isn’t just about third parties, the enlightened centrists are really aggravating the problem by threatening to split the vote.
On top of all that, no one would regard the President as legitimate. Look where we’re at now, 30% of the country literally believes a Presidential election can be faked enough for Trump to have lost.
For at least one of the two parties currently in control… that would be ideal.
I had no idea this was the procedure. I’d love to have more than two viable parties, but I pretty much never want the house to pick the president. What a mess.
Makes sense in a direct vote scenario: the first round is normal, the top 2 enter a duel, and if nobody gets the majority there – that is, too many people pick “abstain” (explicit option on the ballot), the legislative branch could interfere.
State congresses should start trying to push a state led consitutional amendment (under the federal convention method) to reform the college to a ranked choice system where parties put up second choice votes if their candidate fails, proportional electors and a ban on gerrymandering etc.
Should? Yes.
Would? Ha!
Reality? Greed and corruption.
I think 40 states would be on board for a gerrymandering ban for congressional districts, if that gets through it would be a matter of building on that.
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That’s because we have a corporatist with minor socialist tenancies party and a corporatist fascist party.
There’s no national level politician in the USA that’s not pre-approved by the corporate oligarchy.
We even keep score by how much bribe money they raise to predict which oligarchy supported puppet will be in office.
The legislature picking the executive happens after every single election in parliamentary democracies. You don’t see people wetting their pants over it, life goes on.
Our legislature is heavily biased in one direction because of the laws that structure it. Institutionally, it would be extremely bad for the rest of the world.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
My smart readers might now rub their chins and reply, “Well, how likely is that scenario?” Some of them might even point out that there has not been a contingent election since 1824, when John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay split the votes.
Landslide victories (think Ronald Reagan vs. Walter Mondale in 1984 or Richard Nixon vs McGovern in 1972) are growing rarer.
Or, to take another possibility, a determined minority might thwart the House from choosing a Speaker, which leaves it unable to even take up the business of selecting a president.
A reader might be mistaken for getting the impression that the authors of the Protect Democracy report would prefer No Labels to pull the plug on its presidential campaign planning.
My own preference is that Congress would take time to pass a statute to clarify the processes that each chamber should use to decide a contingent election.
Congress failed to act, and an intruder in a fur hat with a spear in hand sat in the chair of the Speaker of the House.
The original article contains 890 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
you say shit show, I say grab some popcorn. It would be one hell of a ride. And whoever schemes thier way in will get very little done because of a lack of support. But if a third party got enough votes it becomes official in some capacity. Then there would be lots of changes. And really change is what we need.
Watching your house burn down from the inside might make some hot popcorn.
the problem is Democrats aren’t willing to play the long game on democracy. If there is space for a third party its at the state level and its pushing reforms like proportional voting and constitutional amendments as part of a vision to make the US walk the walk on democracy - to end the shallow lip service talk on democracy.
Nobody has tried the convention method yet for constitutional amendments and it would probably be easy to push something like “states may not gerrymander, and the number of representatives assigned to state and federal legislatures must be proportional to the overall vote for each party.”
Nah. No meaningful change there can happen without removing fptp.
Not sure what fptp is. But a third official party would change a lot of things.
FPTP: “First Past The Post”, the system of election where the winner is simply the one candidate who receives the most votes even if it’s not a majority (for example if many candidates ran and many received a significant share of the votes). FPTP is simple to carry out, but it’s often criticized for the fact that the winning candidate can be someone whom a majority or even a large majority of the voters didn’t want. The two-party system in America usually obscures that issue in general elections because they turn into, effectively, elections with only two significant choices so the winner tends to have a majority as well as the greatest number of votes. But the problem does show up sometimes in primaries.
FPTP can be contrasted with other systems such as ranked-choice voting and proportional representation.
I listened to a podcadt on ranked choice voting. It seemed pretty good.
It wouldn’t be unlike the birth of the Republican Party in the 19th century and the death of the Whigs.
Yes, these are the same folks who nearly shut down the government, who refuse to fix the broken immigration system and who have run up more than $33 trillion in debt.
It’s really telling that, when it comes time for you cite the issues with Congress, these two things are the most prevalent you can come up with.
Immigration and the debt? That’s your go-to? Those are the two most prominent failures of this Congress in your mind?
I didn’t write the article?
