Constitutional Changes - Voting

Dear Friends,

If we are to achieve true equality of opportunity in the United States, each person must have the same influence on who represents them.  The Constitution of the United States establishes a very undemocratic way to determine federal elected officials.  First let's look at a few interesting facts.
The population data is from the 2010 census.  The official site is here.  I found the Wikipedia site (here) easier to use.  When people refer to the population of the United States, they are generally referring to the people in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.  The people who live in American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands don't even count and of course get no representation.  I note that Puerto Rico has a population that is about the same size as that of Oklahoma or Connecticut.

The population of the United States including the 50 states and the District of Columbia is 308,745,538.  Since the District of Columbia does not get any voting members of Congress, I would reduce the population by the 601,723 people who live in DC.  So the number of people living in the 50 states who actually have representatives in Congress is 308,143,815.  There are 100 voting members of the Senate.  If they were divided equally, each Senator would represent 3,081,438 people but of course that is not the case.  Wyoming is the smallest state by population (563,626), and each of the two Senators from Wyoming represent 281,813 people.  California is the largest state by population (37,253,956) and each of its two Senators represent 18,626,978 people.

The same issue exists with members of the House of Representatives.  There are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives.  They represent a total of 308,143,815 people, so if all were equal each Representative would represent 708,377 people.  However, every state gets one Representative.  The sole representative from Wyoming represents only 563,626 people, while each of the 53 Representatives from California (on average) represents 702,905 people.  If you combine both the House and the Senate, each of the 3 representatives to Congress from Wyoming represents just 187,875 people, while each of the 55 representatives to Congress from California represents 12,417,985 people.  This is clearly not equal representation.  I should also note that the 601,723 people in Washington DC have no voting representation in the House or the Senate while the 563,626 in Wyoming have 3 voting representative, two Senators and one member of Congress.

Of course the same is true for the election of the President since it is done by the electoral college which is based on virtually the same system.  There are 538 electors in the college, three for each state plus the District of Columbia.  For reasons that escape all understanding each state can determine how its electors will vote with many choosing a winner take all approach.  As the general electorate becomes more divided politically and those lines are also geographic we can expect more times when the President will be elected after losing the popular vote.

The failure of our voting system in recent years is made clear by the fact that in the last 4 Congressional elections (2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016) the Democrats have won a greater percentage of the votes than the percentage of seats in the House of Representatives they have won.  This difference often referred to as a "seats bonus" is the topic of an article by Molly Reynolds (here) that is very interesting talking about the 2016 election.  She writes:

First, while Republicans, as of this writing, received a plurality of votes cast for Congress nationwide this year—49.9 percent, again according data from the Cook Political Report—they received a greater share, 55.2 percent, of the seats. Democrats, as a result, won a smaller share of seats than they did votes: 44.8 percent of seats as compared to 47.3 percent of the votes. (These numbers may change as final vote tallies are updated.)

This differential is a result of the Constitution's undemocratic approach to voting as well as gerrymandering.

It seems clear that there are several amendments that must be made to the Constitution.  

1. The electoral college must be eliminated so that the President and Vice President are elected by a direct popular vote.
2.  The Senate seats must be done by population not state.  Smaller states could join together with adjacent states to gain enough people to get one of the 100 Senate seats.
3.  Congressional districts must be drawn in a non-partisan manner, i.e. no gerrymandering.  Also a state that does not have enough population to get one of the 435 seats must join with other states to reach the threshold.
4.  All American citizens must have a Senator and a Representative.  That means that Washington DC, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands must be included in our system of representative democracy.
5.  The qualifications to vote must be set in the Constitution and not left to partisan state legislatures, so that all voter suppression is eliminated.
6.  The Constitution must say that money is not speech and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.  All political contributions must include the name, etc. of the person making the contribution and only real live citizens of the United States can make contributions.  Contribution limits should be established on a per person per year in the aggregate to all candidates, parties, PACs, etc.  The campaigns must be funded by the government and all campaigns must receive equal media coverage.
7.  Election Day must be a holiday and multiple ways of voting must be available to all.
8.  Lying, including reckless disregard for the truth, in a political campaign must be a felony.

I am sure there are other amendments, and there are many details that need to be put in place, but these would be a good start.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Capitalism in America, Part 2

Dear Friends,

In my last post, I said that capitalism as practiced in the United States has failed us both economically and politically, but deferred the discussion of its failure politically to this post.  The United States is supposed to be a democratic republic, i.e. a country where the majority rules except as limited by its constitution.  In the United States, our constitution has always contained a number of very un-democratic features.  Some of these features have been removed, e.g. slavery and only white male landowners can vote.  Others continue to exist, e.g. the Electoral College and each state gets two Senators.  In recent decades, gerrymandering by both major parties and voter suppression, primarily by Republicans have been added to these structural impediments to make the United States even less of a democratic republic.  Capitalism has failed us politically because as it is practiced in the United States, capitalism protects and enhances the money and power of the already rich and powerful at the expense of all the others and has, therefore, encouraged this movement away from a true democratic republic.

Electoral campaigns in the United States are bribery contests.  They are not at all democratic.  According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of American adults who contribute to a political party, campaign or organization has grown from 11% in 1992 to 15% in 2016 and 32% of households with income over $150,000 make such a contribution compared to just 7% of those with family income of less than $30,000 (here).  Making political contributions is for the wealthy.  According to Open Secrets, only 0.68% of US adults made political contributions in excess of $200 in 2016.  Of the $4,533,700,000 in political contributions in 2016, $2,606,200,000 or 57.5% were given by just 45,129 people or 0.018% of US adults.  The Open Secrets website has lots of very interesting and disturbing data (here).  If you have time, take a look.

There can be no logical or intellectually honest argument that our elected officials are not impacted by the people who make big contributions more than they are by those who make little or no contributions.  Consider for example that in the days leading up to the passage of Trump's tax bill, somewhere around 55% of the American people we opposed to the law and about one-third were in favor of the law.  Nevertheless, Congress passed it because the big Republican donors demanded it.  Or consider that when the FCC repealed the net neutrality rules 80+% of Americans were in favor of keeping them, including over 70% of Republicans, but the big Republican donors demanded the repeal.   I could go on and on, but you can provide examples of your own.

While there is some debate around the edges of the amount of influence of money in our elections, there is a clear consensus that it is extremely influential, particularly in state and local races.  Capitalism in the United States has led to gross inequality in both income and wealth and hence power, including the ability to contribute to and hence influence the outcome of elections.  Capitalism has allowed rich donors the ability to unduly influence local elections which has enabled state legislatures to gerrymander both state and congressional districts.  This gerrymandering in recent elections has led to the Republicans winning far more seats in state legislatures and Congress than the number of people voting for them (in the aggregate) would justify.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from an Associated Press analysis (here):

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.

While gerrymandering often has racial overtones because people of color tend to vote for candidates from the Democratic Party, voter suppression efforts lead by state legislatures are more overtly racial and with the same effect to keep the rich (primarily white) in power.

We should try to remove the influence of money from politics, but money will always equate to power.  Our form of capitalism protects and enhances the wealth (and therefore power) of the already rich (white) and prevents all others from achieving a level of income or wealth to challenge the economic and political status quo.  We need to constrain our current capitalism so that it provides for true equality of opportunity which is the only way that we will be able to say that capitalism as practiced in the United States is an economic system that advances the economic interests and provides better living conditions for all in a sustainable manner.  How to accomplish that result is the topic of another post.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Why our country needs Bernie Sanders

Dear Friends,

Our political system is broken and corrupt.  The old saying that the world is run by those who show up is no longer true with respect to our political system.  Now the correct saying is that the United States is run by those who show up and those with money, and we are not sure for the moment which of those two groups will win.

Even I was shocked by the recent article in The New York Times reporting that 158 families have given half of all contributions to the 2016 Presidential elections so far (here).  Although I should not have been shocked since I already knew that the Koch brothers were planning on spending as much if not more than either of the two major political parties for 2016 election cycle.  Congress does not represent the interests of the people.  It represents the interests of the oligarchs who fund the process and pay the lobbyist.  Just one example is the power of the gun lobby, fronted by the NRA.  Consistently +90% support background checks and a majority support stronger gun control legislation, yet Congress will not even give new laws consideration.

How does Congress get away with not taking action on things that the vast majority of Americans want and support?  People do not vote and big business spends billions of dollars to buy the system.  In the 2014 midterm elections only 36.4% of eligible voters actually voted.  It was the worst turnout percentage since 1942.  The United States ranks 31st out of 34 top industrialized democratic countries even using our 2012 Presidential year election (53.6%).  Belgium was first with 87.2%.  If Americans had voted in the same percentage as the Belgians in 2012, there would have been 200 million votes cast instead of only 129 million.  That is 71 million more voters.  Just to put that in perspective, President Obama beat Mitt Romney in the popular vote by 5 million; President Obama got 65.4 million votes.  Just think what would have happened if those other 71 million people had voted.

There are a lot of what are referred to as safe districts.  According to Chris Cillizza's analysis after the 2012 elections in the Washington Post (here), 38% of all Congressional seats are "safe"; that is to say the current incumbent won by at least 67%.  Clearly gerrymandering has had a big impact on the creation of these safe districts and while both parties have gerrymandered districts, the Republicans have done a much better job.  The Republicans have also been able to enact voter suppression legislation at the state level.  But Republicans also do a much better job of getting out their supporters to vote.  Higher voter turnout has always helped Democrats.  Getting everybody to vote would certainly make those "safe" districts much less safe particularly when you consider that the incumbents have moved so far right to protect themselves against Tea Party primary challengers.

People do not vote because they see no reason to vote.  The Democratic Party during my lifetime has been on a steady move to the right, accelerated under the Clinton administration.  Remember in 1960, the last year that President Eisenhower was President the highest income tax bracket was 91% and the country was doing very well economically.  This move to the right has coincided with increased political contributions by big business and the very wealthy, accelerated by the Citizen's United decision.  The Democratic establishment disowned Obamacare rather than educating the people about the good that it would do.  The Democratic establishment has and continues to pursue a strategy of being Republican light because they are too uncomfortable with real change and bold ideas.

The October 19th "All in with Chris Hayes" had a segment about the electability of a democratic socialist (Bernie Sanders).  The two guests were John Nichols who was not endorsing Bernie Sanders but who has great confidence in the American people's ability to embrace new and bold ideas and ended with the idea that perhaps the person with the boldest ideas will be the winner.  The other guest was Matt Bennett a Clinton supporter and advisor who could not imagine changing the narrative that the Republicans have crafted that government is bad and cannot solve the problems.  If you accept the Republican narrative, you have lost the battle.  Here is link to that segment.  It is very thought provoking.

Hillary Clinton is at best an incrementalist.   She will not dramatically increase the number of people voting.  Bernie Sanders has clearly demonstrated that he can and is getting some of those 71 million people that did not vote to become involved in politics because there is a difference between a political revolution and more of the same establishment politics.  Money can only be defeated by huge voter turnout and engagement, and Bernie is the only candidate with a chance to do succeed.  He can get this country headed back to being a democracy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal