The presidential election of 2016 - and likely the 2018 midterm elections as well - has helped to underscore a systemic flaw in the current constitutional system in America. Due to demographic changes that have seen surging growth in population in large, generally liberal urban areas and declining populations in rural areas, a minority of the population now controls the federal government. As the population growth disparity continue, the problem will only intensify. Something similar exists in many of the states. Here in Virginia it will be hopefully be proven again in November that Republicans can no longer win in statewide races where the population of the so-called urban crescent can out vote the reactionary and backward rural areas of the state. Yet, despite this, thanks to gerrymandering and arcanely drawn districts, Republicans control the House of Delegates and thwart progressive and science based legislation. The result is that the will of the majority is thwarted by a minority of voters that are increasingly out of touch with objective reality or who seek to take the nation back to the 1950's. A column in the New York Times looks at the growing problem. Here are highlights:
Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts.
I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.
I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.
A combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms — which polls show is probable — they may not take back the House of Representatives.
And because of the quirks of the 2018 Senate map, Democrats are extremely unlikely to reclaim that chamber, even if most voters would prefer Democratic control. Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. . . . “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.” The distortion carries over to the Electoral College, where each state’s number of electors is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. This would matter less if the United States weren’t so geographically polarized. But America is now two countries, eyeing each other across a chasm of distrust and contempt. One is urban, diverse and outward-looking. This is the America that’s growing. The other is white, provincial and culturally revanchist. This is the America that’s in charge. I recently had the chance to ask Gov. Jerry Brown of California what might happen if we have more elections like 2016, where a majority of voters and a supermajority of Californians are thwarted. Polls already show a third of Californians favor secession. Could that fringe movement become mainstream? Brown said it was “not beyond the realm of possibility” that the country could eventually break apart, even if he doesn’t think it’s likely.
Conservatives are often unmoved by complaints that our system is undemocratic, arguing that America was intended not as a democracy but a republic. But if this was true at the founding, it’s probably not how most Americans understand their country today, when “undemocratic” is considered a political epithet.
Certainly, we need checks on the tyranny of the majority. But what we have now is the tyranny of the minority.
There are ways out. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — a plan in which states agree to award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner — could circumvent the Electoral College if enough states enacted it.
Don Beyer, a Democratic representative from Virginia, has introduced the Fair Representation Act, which would change the way the House is elected, replacing single-member districts with larger districts represented by several people. They’d be chosen by a system of ranked voting that would allow third parties to compete without becoming spoilers, while giving political minorities a say in the process.
[A]bsent reform, our system could eventually face a legitimacy crisis. Levinson, perhaps the most prominent among progressive critics of the Constitution, argues that the crisis is already here: “At some point we need to discuss the extent to which the entire constitutional system is full of these anti-majoritarian aspects.”
Trump’s election has revealed many dark truths about this country. One of them is: We’re a lot less democratic than we might think.
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