I would think the non-merkin contingent active on these boards don’t understand why, over stateside, appointing the right person for the job “isn’t very nice”, when it should be the norm.
I’m stateside and I’m confused.
I’m not confused, nor am I stateside.
Appointment is vulnerable to “jobs for the boys”, and it’s not as if we in the UK haven’t had some questionable examples of governments getting their partisans into directorial jobs in what are supposed to be non-partisan specialist agencies.
It all depends on the “good chaps” principle, the perception that sooner or later, if you go too far, The Other Lot will have the opportunity to take revenge, and on the possibility/probability that an intended partisan appointee will soon “go native” and be absorbed by the agency’s institutional culture (called, by some disappointed Tories “the blob”).
I would think it depends on who does the appointing.
I don’t think we want to go back to political appointments where the winning mayor/governor/president appoints all the offices. That’s the political appointee system we used to have, and is rife for corruption, and also for discrimination.
The government civil service system is a response to that kind of tyranny, whereby the agencies cultivate knowledgeable employees who grow through the system and don’t face replacement every election.
Something like a civil appointment board made up of the leaders of that profession, such as a cadre of judges oversee appointment to judgships.
The idea is to create a strong culture of competence without political bias, and have the system have teeth to monitor for bad acts.
Like having an ethics review board for the Supreme Court Justices, maybe the same one that applies to all federal judges. Complaints about partisanship being taken seriously within the profession a well as the government. Recusal being less optional and more directed.
What has struck me in this and related threads is some agreement on what the problems are and almost complete agreement that nothing can be done to fix them. Even apparently “easy fixes” are shown to be nearly impossible to put into place. Given this, centrists and mild reformists seem as utopian as anarchists and other leftists.
The questions I have is, to what degree can people start to withdraw from electoral politics and capitalism to start to create new ways of organizing and providing the necessities of life? Is this the “reform” needed to “fix the US government”? Given the admitted impossibility of reforming voting and the constitution, is it more “utopian” than such reform?
No No No No No!
Sorry but this myth is a bugaboo of mine. While the undemocratic nature of the Senate is a real problem, the quantum nature of the house has basically no effect on our politics. Expanding the house so one Wyoming equaled one house seat would not significantly increase California’s relative influence. Sure it would go up to 67 votes, but so would everyone else at exactly the same rate. So the influence of the larger states would be unchanged. Wyoming would lose influence but that would just cause it to go from a basically nothing 1/435 to a slightly less basically nothing 1/574.
. So it would just shuffle to problem somewhere elsewhere. Now if things were different and there were a some truly rotten burroughs where say 5,000 people got you a representative, or if there were scads of Wyoming like states all of whom were over represented this a problem. But as it is its all just a rounding error. Wyoming is over represented by about 1/3 of a deligate, while Idaho is under represented by about 1/5 of a delegate. Expanding the house by another 149 delegates could right size Wyoming, but then some other state would have too few or too many. In order to really get the rounding error down, you’d have to the increase the size of the House into the thousands which would be unwieldy. Is it really worth it to quadruple the number of MTGs and Gaetz’s out there in the world just to fix that Wyoming’s influence is a staggering 0.22% of the house when it really should be only 0.17%?
If you want to propose expanding the house so that the house portion of the electoral college dilutes the senate portion, then sure why not, the larger the house is relative to the senate, the better. (although that doesn’t fix the many other problems with the winner take all nature of the EC that makes only swing state matter) But if you feel that following the “Wyoming Rule” will in any significant way make the House more democratic you’re wrong.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted that, but I’m pretty sure my focus was on making the EC better reflect the popular vote. You seem to agree this would be the case.
I also wrote …
… which is what you’re disagreeing with. You’ve done way more homework than me, so I imagine you’re right. California and New York would have more reps, but so would Texas and Florida. And given gerrymandering, who’s to say populations would be fairly represented by the additional districts?
I’m easy on being outvoted here, this isn’t the hill I’ll die on so I’m just answering to answer what my thinking is, but I agree that this particular item is easily and reasonably contested.
My general thinking is that we live in a post “election faith” world. As little as 10 years ago, maybe there were a few crockpots concerned about election integrity but, on the whole, there was no general fear that a vote that was cast would be counted or that there would be votes counted that had never been cast by a real person. Generally, the concerns were around things like gerrymandering (controlled by Congress) or other laws that might affect things around the edges.
Today, there’s a notable percentage of the public who has no faith that the Deep State will allow the end-tally to match anything but what they have decided it needs to be.
And so while the best system is to create a strong selection system, strong selection systems are generally long, complex, and arcane. The criminal system forces things to be fair and yet you still have people believing that Trump is being given guilty sentences by Liberal judges - ignoring the jury, that Trump chose his own lawyer, that Trump’s lawyer is well-funded, that Trump’s lawyer got to challenge an unlimited number of jury candidates if there was any real reason to suspect partisanship, etc. And that’s because the average person can’t be bothered to sit down and learn about the complexities of the system.
For the average person, the easy sell and the one they’re most liable to trust is the one that you put in their own hands.
So you need to figure out some way to tie those two things together because the one thing that you can’t have is a lack of faith in the integrity of elections. You need to be able to trust that person who is running it all and ensuring that what the people are saying is what’s actually happening. That’s the foundational element for everything else and, minus that faith, no other election matters.
But, importantly, while I did advise an election, I also specifically provided that it should be a more nuanced election. The exact rules for that, I’d need to do some research for since trying to accomplish a “non-partisan” election runs into 1st Amendment issues and it’s better to look up the things that have survived that test than to roll off a bunch of ideas that may have already been tried and ruled unconstitutional.
I didn’t mean to pick on you in particular. As I said, the belief that Wyoming getting a full representative gives Republicans a big advantage in the house, is widely held and is a particular bugaboo of mine so I try to stamp it out every time I see it.
The (#Reps+2) formula for the EC certainly does give an influence/voter advantage to the smaller states, many of which are Republican, but on the other hand the winner take all nature that all but two states use gives an advantage to the larger states since all else being equal they are more likely to end up being one of the few swing states that actually matter. Its not clear which is more of an advantage. But in any case the whole system where the votes of the 80% of the population who don’t live in a swing state are irrelevant is screwed up and needs to change.
No worries! I didn’t take it that way.
Not doubting you, but are you aware of anyone who’s worked out what today’s House would like if one Wyoming equaled one rep and state delegations retained the same D/R ratio?
True. Certain states having even more electoral votes would make the EC more fair (i.e., closer to one person = one vote) but every election would still come down to a few 50/50 states, rendering most votes meaningless. At least we’d be less likely to end up with elections where the winner of the popular vote loses the EC.
The way left over representatives are assigned is pretty complicated, and I don’t have the representative coalitions of the states at my finger tips so I don’t want to do a full analysis but It would be pretty much the same.
Using a simpler method to assign reps. making some relatively conservative assumptions, and doing a bunch of complicated statistics and variabilty estimates. I’d guess that such a calculation would probably shift the relative proportion of Democrats by less than 0.3%.
If the change was actually made of course the resulting difference would be substantially larger since the new representatives form a state wouldn’t perfectly match the distribution of the existing delegation.