First as tragedy . . .
Not to put too fine a point on it, the recent chaos in the GOP-controlled House isn’t a bug, it’s a feature for the modern GOP. There isn’t any daylight between Gym Jordan and Mike Johnson, politically, but policy no longer matters to the GOP. It’s just optics, and Johnson has (so far) mastered the avuncular optics necessary to win the speakership. But since the point is chaos, Johnson will preside over chaos, with the hope that voters will decide to elect an autocrat (Trump) who promises to make the trains run on time.
Look, nobody elected the Bolsheviks when the Czar abdicated. The Kerensky government was weak and Lenin et al. exploited this to replace some semblance of democracy with dictatorship. Trump and his supporters (Steve Bannon et al.) are the modern American Bolsheviks. Yes, Russia in 2017 was a peasant agrarian society and America in the 21st century is an industrialized society, but there’s nothing Democratic about the presidential elections, what with the gerrymandering and the unrepresentative electoral college, so a tiny difference in a few states is all it takes to tip the White House back in the hands of a party that believes in a strong executive.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
~Karl Marx
Mike Johnson is kind of the epitome of the modern GOP.
He is going to do what ever the MAGA crew want to maintain majority status for us white folks, without being too politically incorrect about it – maybe.
Those 30 states with GOP legislative majorities are going to ‘keep hope alive’.
Jesse Jackson
Democratic National Convention, Atlanta, Georgia – July 19, 1988
Might not be all bad. He’s expressed support for a continuing resolution to allow time for appropriations bills to be considered. If he allows individual issues bills, that’s OK as long as issues Democrats favor are allowed on the floor. He’ll probably deny omnibus bills.
@Jack,
That’s fine as long as the “Freedom Caucus” allows it. But passing bills that Democrats support is anathema to Gaetz et al., so once the Johnson honeymoon is over (after the next CR vote), they’ll use the threat of a motion to vacate to bollux up the House and shut the government down. Matt Gaetz has become de facto speaker.
Y’know, Speaker Mike is/was not actually a member of the Freedom Caucus, just a mentee of Jim Jordan. That could make a big difference! Now he’s the Boss.
@Fred,
LOL! Now *there’s* some magical thinking!
Fred, Speaker Mike is just one motion away from being evicted. The real boss is Matt Gaetz.
Well, he can pretend anyway.
Don’t they both have to do as the Orange One commands?
Meet the New Boss
The New Republic – Oct 23
Democrats should fake some terrible split in their caucus so as to always have 8 or 10 votes ready to go if they secretly need something to pass but most members want to be “ No” on the record.
Maybe, if Johnson won’t allow Democratic favored bills to the floor, the Democrats will motion to vacate him themselves. At some point one hopes that some Republicans will agree to a bipartisan session. I did say “hopes” and not “expects”.
Usually the Electoral College effect is a yawn. In 2016 for example, if you discard the “Senate” 102 votes (D.C. gets 2), the Trump win looks almost exactly the same proportionally. Trump won in states with ~54% of the population and got ~54% of the EC. The only circumstances it might matter is if the Electoral College is really close, or the so far non-existent result of a candidate winning with exactly all the small states needed. Recently nobody has pulled together VT, RI, DE and also NE, MT and WY, etc. in anything other than a landslide. Basically if CA, NY go Democrat and TX and FL go Republican, the odds are high that the winning candidate with the “Senate” EC votes would win without them. In any case there ought to be a slight premium given for winning more states since our Republic is a formal union of states with a high degree of sovereign authority.
@Eric,
Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes. Trump was appointed president by the electoral college against the decision of the majority of voters. The fact that you find that a “yawn” tells me everything I need to know about your views on American democracy.
Feh.
Do you know how many times I have written on this? Do you even know what happened in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with the popular vote? Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, the household dog, etc. the Greens and the Libertarians, had a field day in 2016. What was 1% to 1.29% in 2012 went to 4.35% – 6.3% in 2016. It went back down in 2020.
Small states wanted equal representation in the voting process, hence the Electoral College which is frozen today at a number determined by the House at 435 since 1911. It might have made sense back then to freeze it. Communications were poor as well as traveling great distances. The opposite exists today. There is not many reasons for them to be in Washington DC other than tradition. Regional groupings could work better. Or build a larger meeting room to handle 250,000 people per rep. My chart on this number by state is out there also.
Dems in Michigan did not turn out. Or voted for others. The numbers were less than 2012. They climbed back up in 2020. Yuge love affair with a big-mouth bigot, womanizer, racist, and a fraud. Same impact in Wisconsin. Slight decrease in Pennsylvania. Others vote in 2016 increased. In 2020, Dems in all three states turned out bigly after recognizing the damage caused in 2016.
The House should represent by population. The Senate as it stands. Even so voting for others and a dislike for Clinton for whatever reasons caused 2016. In general people learned a valuable lesson.
@Eric,
“In any case there ought to be a slight premium given for winning more states since our Republic is a formal union of states with a high degree of sovereign authority.”
In any case, a heavy premium should be placed on winning the popular vote, since the power of government should be derived from the consent of the governed, not the arbitrarily described landmasses on which they happen to reside.
Not at all. The office is the executive of the union of states and each state should determine how their interest gets expressed. Popular vote beyond the state jurisdiction is irrelevant. In any case this would require enormously complicated changes to our elections since whoever certified results in any state would have a truly monumental task. A state without early voting (there are some) could not accept early votes from states permitting the practice. Counting absentee votes has widely different standards. Felon eligibility is another area of significant difference. Right now the popular vote total is not important so Florida doesn’t care too much hoe New Jersey does it but that indifference shifts radically if this changes.
@Eric,
Not at all. The office is the executive of the people of the United States, and each citizen should determine how their interest gets expressed.
You have nothing to teach me about how things actually work. And you have nothing to teach me about the impossibility of changing our anachronistic and undemocratic system. That doesn’t change the fact that our system of electing presidents is anachronistic and undemocratic. There is no rational basis for having each state separately determine the process of electing the chief executive of the US in the third decade of the 21st century.
If the voice of the voting American citizens had been followed, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton would have been president.
Basketball has had an analogous situation with 3 point shots and 2 point shots. There is a line and beyond it you get an extra point for a basket. This is at high school, college and pro and was introduced like 40 seasons ago. It took a generation of players to really understand the implications, but once they did, game strategy changed tremendously. You could go back to game film from 1968 and decide that this or that game would have flipped based on the number of 2 point shots the teams made that would have been 3 points. But what you can’t pretend is that game would have played out the same way had the teams played it knowing the 3 point rule. So you can say that in 2000 and 2016 there would have been different winners, but you really can’t say anything about the results had the candidates run knowing a popular vote rule. As far as Our system being anachronistic, I disagree. The United States is kind of an outlier in that the central national authority does not dominate public policy to the extent common in many countries thought of as sort of “peers”. I would say that only the Federal Reserve holds an overwhelming centralized level of authority in a policy sphere and the Fed in no way is an executive or legislative branch subordinate. States exercise tremendous levels of authority. I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all that the election mechanism serves to remind the federal executive that other significant authorities operate in our system.
@Eric,
States already hold tremendous power through their individual elections for the House and Senate. This election mechanism serves to remind the federal executive that other significant authorities operate in our system. And yet, those processes are also one person one vote democratic (pace gerrymandering). There is no rational basis for having the chief executive position be undemocratic.
States are not represented by population in presidential voting.
The way to make the built-in unfairness of the Electoral College go away the two votes that each states gets because the each have two Senators. Since House seats for each state are apportioned by their population, the portion of electors associated with House seats is inherently (small-d) democratic. That all states get two more seats regardless of population is what makes the current arrangement un-democratic.
Virtually impossible to make this go away, except if the National Popular Voted Interstate Compact gets to do its thing, one of these days.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Err… The way to make the built-in unfairness of the Electoral College go away is to take away the two votes that each state gets because they have two Senators (regardless of how small their populations are.)
@Fred,
“Since House seats for each state are apportioned by their population . . .”
Actually no. Wyoming has one House member for ca. 577,000 people. The average congressional district has 760,000 people. Because there is a cap on the total number of House members, the least populated states are over-represented in the House. So neither the House nor the Senate are democratic bodies and rural states are over-represented in both bodies and thus in the EC.
Hmmm. Wyoming should have 76% of a Representative then.
Very solomonic!
It should be easy to let them only have that percentage of a vote in Congress, and their single Rep should take a pay cut accordingly.
Likewise for Vermont, at 85%.
For some reason, the minimum each state can have is one Representative.
Perhaps so they feel like they are participating in legislation, if not having much influence. Would you have denied influence to (post Jan 6) Saint Liz Cheney?
@Fred,
“For some reason, the minimum each state can have is one Representative.”
I assume the reason is that fraction representatives would require surgery that would not be approved for ethical reasons.
Y’know, I think dismembering the lone Reps from low-pop states would not actually be necessary.
Alternatively, more complicated, is to change the Reps per person calculation so that the population of the state with the lowest sets the base figure. They would get one Rep. Every other state gets a number based only on their population (rounded up or down if you like, but that introduces ‘unfairness’). Currently that can only add up to 435.
But the number was set by Congress, and it can be changed by them.
That would mean (unless rounding is done) an extremely complicated matter of dealing with fractional votes for all states but one, probably.
Easier to do it in just one (or a very few?) states. Because to do it across the board might imply that each and every congressional district in every state could have no more or less than the base number of inhabitants. We would have to be ‘re-mandering’ constantly. How important is this to you?
One might also observe that such states also should not be entitled to two Senators, but by law they are. Probably a whole lot of states should not be, but they are.
What we ought to do, when we re-write the Constitution, is make the Senate also have population-proportional membership, and make their House & Senate vote entitlements based on up-to-the-minute accurate population data.
Or we could simplify further by going unicameral, with all members at large, not associated with states at all. How would that suit you?
A name change would be in order. Then we would (truly) be The United State of America.
Fred:
An approximate 545,000 increase in votes for “Others” did Dems in. ~240,000 decrease in Dem votes from 2012 to 2016 in Michigan. ~ 280,000 decrease in Dem votes from 2012 – 2016 in Wisconsin. Pennsylvania was much closer. Much larger turnout of Repubs in PA in 2016.
If people do not come out and vote or if they vote for the Greens, Libertarians, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, their dog, etc.; we got what we deserve. I do know the Michigan Dems warned the Dem Party there were issues weeks ahead of time. The MI Dems asked for more help and did not get it. These are swing states. MI clobbered Repubs in 2020 by ~2.5%. WI was less than a percent and PA was slightly over 1% in beating trump. “Others” dropped back to historical levels of less than 1.75% for each state.
Party issues and people being stupid caused the problem.
I have insisted often enough that third-party voting in presidential elections is always a bad idea. People insist on doing it though. Sometimes egged on by ‘outside influencers’. Sometimes because they just want to elect a rebel, or a bad guy who will ‘show ’em what’s what’. In swing-states that works as some interests want it to work.
To me, that’s quite a different issue from small-population states having too much influence in the electoral college. That has roots in the framers wanting to be sure that such states are not politically overwhelmed by those with large populations. In that sense, things are working as intended. But large-pop states (the Dem ones at least) don’t like it.
And the small-pop states, about 30 of them perhaps, won’t allow this to be changed. So, we are left with presidential elections being often decided by a few swing states.
Or the small-pop states could just accept being left out. (But no, they don’t need to do that, because the GOP is looking out for them!)
Kurt Vonnegut had presidential elections decided by a couple of average voters in the statistical center of the USA. Almost always in Kansas I think. Maybe we could try that.
“we got what we deserve”
In 2016, “we” certainly did not.
Some idiots in Great Lakes states gave us what they thought we deserved.
BTW, there’s a racial component to this, from how the original states were constituted in the late 18th century. It wasn’t just seeing to it that small-pop states were not politically over-powered by large ones. It was also about counting non-voting slaves as ‘fractional citizens’ for the purpose of determining the number of reps such states would get.
Y’know, this is really important BTW.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Without doing an Constitutional amendment(s), it may be possible to fix the unfairness of the current Electoral College system. There will be objections from a lot of red states, and SCOTUS challenges, but it has a good chance of working.
Wikipedia – NPVIC legislation has been introduced in all 50 states. As of August 2023, the NPVIC has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia; notably, no Republican governor has yet signed it into law. Together, they have 205 electoral votes, which is 38.1% of the Electoral College and 75.9% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
In Nevada, the legislation passed both chambers in 2019, but was vetoed by Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) on May 30, 2019. In Maine, the legislation also passed both chambers in 2019, but failed the additional enactment vote in the House. States where only one chamber has passed the legislation are Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Bills seeking to repeal the compact in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington have failed.
(It needs to be passed in Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina for sure. Also Missouri & Indiana & others. What are the chances?)
But passage in Texas & Florida would be sufficient. One can only hope.
Mike Johnson in the news…
Mike Johnson Just Confirmed How Unserious He Is
NY Times -= November 1