I don’t think this is correct. The Electoral College has a clear bias toward small states due to the 2 votes from the senators, but the House of Reps is much better balanced.
The difference between the percentage of reps and the percentage of population is pretty small across the board; an error less than 0.1% per state.
The 3 most populated states (CA,TX, and FL) have slightly more representation while the fourth, NY, has a tiny bit less.
On the other end of the spectrum only WY and VT do not have the minimum population and get a rep.
Here’s a link to the data. Columns ‘Pop. per elec. vote (2020)’ and ‘%US (2020)’.
The concept of states as semi-sovereign, their established boundaries, and the principle that they are entitled to at least part of their representation on an equal basis are historical accidents; but changing that would require a Constitutional Convention that completely replaced our current system. That would more or less be a third American revolution (the Civil War being the second), and who knows what the result would be. Are we really so homogenous a nation today that regional interests should no longer be a factor?
Similarly, in a winner-take-all voting system like we currently have do we really want major national issues decided by a 50.01% majority across the entire nation?
I mean if we’re ripping everything up, we can rip up the winner take all system too.
But a winner take all popular vote for the presidency (which is what I assume you’re talking about) would be much better than what we have now. Even setting aside how small states are over-represented, ultimately the winner of the presidency is whoever wins 50.1% of a small handful of states, which is just like having it be 50.1% of the whole country with even more arbitrary swings.
With all this “presidential immunity” going on, what is keeping Biden from picking up a gun and forcing these “judges” to resign there and then?
Just to really bring home what an idiotic ruling that was?
The fact that the Democrats are too dedicated to playing “by the rules” to do any such thing. The Republicans are willing to hand the government all sorts of easily abused power because they know that the Democrats won’t abuse it against them. While they have no such compunctions.
They just say it’s not an official act and he spends the rest of his life in prison.
They didn’t say that the POTUS has full immunity from prosecution. They said that the POTUS has immunity when engaged in an official act, and then left that part undefined so that they could decide what an official act was later. They wrote themselves a blank check, essentially.
The problem isn’t that the ruling gives the POTUS too much power. The problem is that it gives the SCOTUS too much power, and it’s particularly unforgivable that they gave it to themselves.
While I don’t disagree I have to ask what is your proposal for doing that? Passing laws that people get their news only from government-approved news sources instead of profit-driven ones?
I don’t have any solutions. I wish I did. My point was that we can tear up the system or rework it any way we want, but if we still have a divided population, we won’t solve the problem.
I think that if we are to make changes that actually fix something, we first have to identify the root causes so that we fix the right thing.
I think it will take a deep dive into the history and mechanisms of the political shift and radicalization of the American right wing to be able to see clearly what factors were at play and still are at play that make the last three SC picks acceptable to so many, and why the Right isn’t up in arms that the Justices are weilding precisely the power that keeps those RW people clinging to their guns, hunkering in their bunkers, and shouting off about “the blood of patriots being the price of liberty,” and government intrusion into personal ethics, and telling people how to think.
To say that these conservatives agree with the outcome and actions because they aren’t on the receiving end and the court is “fixing” legal problems to their liking doesn’t really explain their hypocrisy, and I’m not ready to concede that half the population is that crassly hypocritical.
I think that the majority of the right are blind to how their stated values are being stomped all over with impunity and that, therefore, they are deluded or misdirected to not perceive the threat to their values. It can’t be sheer stupidity nor craven selfishness, so there must be something about their mindset and worldview that it’s distorted by an outside force.
If we can figure out those factors, we have a hope of devising a strategy to illuminate the discord or break the worldview.
If we continue to fail to address the root cause, we will get no nearer to a conclusion that actually makes America great again.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
They are, in fact exactly that hypocritical; that hypocrisy is the core value conservatism is built on. That, and cruelty.
Privileging some people, oppressing more people, and hurting those latter people; that’s what conservatism is. And nothing more.
Well at that point people need to coin a new term to replace “conservative” to mean the set of values that “conservatism” was formerly meant to convey. IOW, I don’t see that any advancement in understanding has taken place.
Yes, they very much do. We are in a common law system. Courts make law in a common law system. Every decision by the Court (or even lesser courts) makes new law.
Start by pounding hard and incessantly on the fact that it’s a sin to vote for a Republican. People who want to avoid sinning will be safe from that if they don’t vote at all.
No need to go that far. Just exclude radical reactionaries and radical right-wingers from the term “conservative.”
I’ve been preaching thst for years now. The rest of the public and, most importantly, the organized MSM seem unwilling to stop using the term “conservatives” to describe what are really Fascists.
They’ve morphed into rabid wolves under their natural sheepskin exterior. And people just keep calling them “sheep”.
Fucking Republicans can do what they want with their goddamned tent. I’m talking about the sane, critically-thinking people of the world, pushing back on radicals assigning themselves the label of “conservatives.”
I really wish that more Dopers would join me and LSLGuy in our preference for denying radicals the use of the term “conservative” for themselves and their policies.
I don’t think it’s a mystery at all. I think the psychology is exactly the same as that of the nazis and their supporters in the 1930s. And MAGA seems to be about 1/3 of the country, not 1/2.
Further, we have seen the same sickness in the UK with Brexit and in continental Europe with the resurgence of right-wing parties.
It’s a dark part of human nature that can affect any country. Some people are authoritarians who want a dictator and want to hurt their perceived enemies. They don’t give a rat’s hindquarters about the rule of law or protecting traditions that keep society stable. There will be some who are able to be honest with themselves about, say, wanting Hitler or Trump to be a dictator, and there will be those who make excuses about such changes and try to see them in terms of a standard narrative (e.g., the Jan. 6 rioters are “patriots,” etc.).
I think the SC wingnuts are in a deluded state about what they are doing, although perhaps Thomas and Alito fall into the category of those who are honest with themselves about wanting a dictatorship. In any case, they are completely corrupt scum.
Wow, that’s so incredibly cynical, and it’s hate in a bucket.
I get that the current Republican Party has fallen hard. I get that the right wing has gone so far over they’re crossing the International Dateline. We had the neo-cons that morphed into the Tea Party, and now have gone full-tilt looney with MAGA. The Party of Romney and John McCain has lost any principles.
But dismissal of the concept of conservatism as a political philosophy is too much. Conservative used to mean
limit government power (conservative of authority);
limit government spending (fiscal conservative).
Socially, there was the “keep social structure as it has been”, which is where the idea of protect white male power, keep minorities under their thumb. That’s social conservatism.
It’s something of an artifact of the US two party system that those two elements are bound together, mostly by the same descriptive word. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Libertarian is in principle a political philosophy that ties “keep the government out of our personal lives” with “keep the government small, limit spending, and allow free market economy instead of regulated business”. They use the label “liberty” as a coherent unifying label, but that’s the conservative politics expanded to mean “apply limited government to control over people’s lives”.
It’s the festering of the persecution complex fed to whites, christians, and men (especially the intersection of those three) and isolating them into an echo chamber that had driven the White Supremacy, christian backlash, xenophobia, and misogynists to the surface.
Donald Trump successfully identified these people and their fears, and he made them feel not just heard, but respected. That’s his base, and why they are so adamantly behind him.
But there are people who identify with controlling government spending, reducing government power over our personal lives, and reducing government control over businesses. Throwing them in with the “Jewish space lasers” and “inject bleach to fight covid” crazies is unfair.
I wish more of these conservatives had louder voices within their circles, but it’s the extremists that draw the attention.
And I have tried to argue some of them that as long as the Republican Party has gone MAGA, they are better served personally as well as the country to refuse to support the Republican party.
But they don’t see it. They are stuck with the “winner take all” mentality of the two party system and can’t see that the GOP no longer stands for their values. They just see outcomes and results conforming to simple expectations.
To address @Desertdog’s question again, we have to find a way to break the echo chamber and false narratives as a society. It won’t be easy, because we didn’t get here overnight, it’s the culmination of decades of information spin and filtering. That’s why I don’t have the answer on how to do that.
Yes, the problem is it was not an abrupt change, it was a sliding transition. That makes the inertia of the label harder to overcome, because at what point is the line?
Right, but I wasn’t speaking about MAGA when I said half.
Yeah, MAGA has killed “real” conservatism in the US for at least 20 years.
We now have a very confused Venn diagram with overlapping areas for MAGA, Conservative, and Republican.
I don’t think the Republican party can recover from Trumpism, personally, and I think it will be very difficult for a true Conservative Party to coalesce.
No, I’m sorry, but it never really meant that at all. Conservativism is always and only about conserving hereditary power. There is no “social conservatism” or “fiscal conservatism”. Those are the false rationalizations of Reaganism for the real types of conservatism:
Conservation of white power over nonwhites
Conservation of male power over nonmales
Conservation of hereditary wealth over workers
Contrary to Red Trihs above, I wouldn’t say conservatism prioritizes cruelty. All things being equal they’d rather be peacefully obeyed as in ages past. But they prioritize the right to be cruel because this creates the atmosphere of intimidation that underpins the other forms of power they do prioritize. And you can only credibly claim the right to cruelty if you’re seen exercising it.
There is no “social conservatism” or “fiscal conservatism”, these are just different ways conservatives describe how they’re willing to treat others to conserve their own power. We all need to be clear that this was always just Reaganite whitewashing over conservatism’s uglier realities.