How all did the founding fathers screw up democracy, and what still needs to be done to fix it

Great Debates
1

I don’t have a very high opinion of the founding fathers. From what I see, they were young aristocrats who wanted an aristocratic democratic system. As a result we’ve had to spend the last 240 years fixing the damage they did to make the democratic system more just and equitable.

For example when US democracy first started off it had the following aristocratic traits:

Primary candidates were appointed, not directly elected

Senators were appointed, not directly elected.

You had to be a land owning, tax paying, white male age 21+. As a result barely 5% of people were eligible to vote. That number is now about 60% who are eligible to vote since now you just need to be 18+, mentally competent, and not in the criminal justice system (the definition of this varies).

The house and senate both had filibusters. The house got rid of their filibuster, the senate kept theirs.

The senate acted as a brake to stop legislation coming from the house

The electoral college was created to placate slave states

The senate rewards small rural states more than large, urban states

This wasn’t the founding fathers fault, but the house was capped at 435 in the 1920s.

We have a first past the post election system

The end result is a very aristocratic, dysfunctional democracy that is inferior to many other systems.

What can be done to keep up the improvements we’ve been implementing over the last 240 years to fix the damage?

Some improvements are realistic, some are not realistic

Realistic improvements:
Ranked choice voting on a state level by ballot initiative, hopefully someday followed by RCV on a national level

Lowering the voting age to 16

Allowing people in the criminal justice system to vote. In some states being convicted of a felony means you lose the right to vote for life. In some states you can vote even from prison. In some states you can’t vote until you’re done with probation or parole. But there can be improvements. Florida recently had a ballot initiative to give felons the right to vote.

Automatic registration of all voters when they fill out government or commercial documents

Mail in ballots for everyone with ballots along with the candidates stances provided in the packet.

Making election day a holiday (even with mail in ballots, hopefully it would give people a day to focus on the election). This would apply to both primaries and general elections on the state, local and federal level.

Empower small donors with either tax credits up to a small amount ($500-1000) for donating to politicians/parties, or use a matching fund system where every $1 you privately donate to politicians/parties is matched by $2-6 in public funds, up to maybe a max of $1000 per person in matching funds.

Make the filibuster harder to use. Still keep it, but require people to actually stand in the senate for hours on end. Then do a second round of voting with fewer senators and another filibuster. Keep doing that until you get down to maybe 50 or 52 senators then try to do a vote. This would have benefits and drawbacks for both parties.

Abolish gerrymandering and have impartial groups draw up districts.

More legal and financial oversight of courts with enforceable discipline, especially the federal courts.

Unrealistic improvements:

Don’t some systems have a system where the executive is picked by the legislature? I thought that was how the UKs system worked. I don’t know if that is superior or not.

Proportional representation. I don’t know if that would work with our system.

On the federal level, instead of having the executive office holder pick judicial nominees, have a group of legal experts pick a group of 5 nominees, and then the executive can pick from that batch to have the legislative branch vote on. Some states do this when appointing state level judges.

Federal ballot initiatives. If a majority in a federal election vote for a ballot saying they universal health care, we get universal health care.

2

15 posts were merged into an existing topic: Fixing the US Government

3

The “Founding Fathers”—nearly all landed European immigrants or children of, many of them slaveholders—didn’t want a “more just and equitable” system along the lines of modern thought. They wanted a system that was free of British (and other) rule, and of which they would maintain control. The Constitution and system of federal governance was by design including (or perhaps especially) the compromises.

People of all political stripes like to rail against gerrymandering but almost nobody can agree what that would actually look like. FiveThirtyEight.com did an in-depth podcast and series of articles on the topic, and it is quite complex.

Part of the problem is, of course, that US politics has evolved into a pretty strict two-party system which limits representation of positions that are not popular with either or both of the major parties. That being said, eliminating the most egregious forms of gerrymanding by imposing some basic cartographic, demographic, and “community of interest” requirements to assure competitiveness and prevent packing and cracking by the tortured drawing of electoral district lines. What hypothetical “impartial groups” bells that particular cat, on the other hand, is the hanging question.

Stranger

4

This seems weirdly complex.

Just go back to the days of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibusters.

Demand a quorum so the senators have to sit there listening to someone read the phone book.

The person doing the filibuster has to remain standing and can not leave for any reason (even to use the bathroom) and they have to talk mostly non-stop.

There’s a reason the filibuster is the way it is today because absolutely none of the senators wants to do that. That want drinks with donors.

I think a filibuster can be a useful tool for the minority to exert some pressure legislatively.

Maybe add a rule that there can be no more than three different people rotating to sustain the filibuster. Those senators would have to be really committed to the task.

5

The government has had to grow and change. Things get better in spurts, it seems like.

It’s still a great experiment.

But, the 16yo voting age? Nope.
Our society of late has not aged like we did in the 20th century. They are younger by years. I don’t know many 18yos to vote with conscience, unless their phone told them to.

I have a 22yo. that doesn’t even understand why she likes her choice except her boyfriend does. No. No. That ain’t good. I’ve tried, I really have, to explain things to her.
Not interested.
Otherwise well adjusted, educated(nurse), employed young lady.

6

Nope, they were elected by their state legislatures.

That was changing rapidly, even before the Constitution.

No, it rewards all state equally.

Oh HELL no. I am not even a fan of 18. It was put in as we were drafting them and sending them off to war. We do not do that anymore.

No, it wont- first of all the voters who need this the most dont get holidays off- retail, food service, medical, etc. And the rest will just go on vacation, taking Monday off and making it a 4 day weekend.

Boris Johnson. Netanyahu .

Most were farmers or working people- lawyers, cobblers, etc They made the most durable Democratic Constitution ever. Does it have a few bugs? The Electoral College, sure- which still favors the small states- thus it will never be abolished. The Founding fathers had to do a few compromises, otherwise many states would not sign up. In all, they were geniuses.

It has. Senators are now elected directly. Nearly every adult can vote.

7

Anyone who thinks this will make voting more accessible has never worked a job that wasn’t 9-5 Monday to Friday. The rest of us don’t get a day off work just because the government says today is special.

For that matter I once worked a job where certain holidays were mandatory all-hands-on-deck occasions where nobody was allowed to request the day off nor was anyone given it.

8

It can change more.

There are things that are getting pushed backwards that need to be stopped, first and foremost.

9

I’ll add that the number of representatives in congress should have been made to grow with the population. We are waaaay off what the ratio was in 1789 and has only helped conservatives.

10

It’s only thanks to the Founding Fathers that we can hope to modify and improve on the system of government they established. They set it up that way and wanted us to do so.

If we find it difficult or impossible to make those reforms in practice, that is the fault of people living in our own era.

11

Given the lack of contemporary points of reference they did a very reasonable job of the task. Win some, lose some. Whether they thought their concepts of American should be preserved in aspic through the centuries is a interesting question. But IMHO they made two errors that could well have been foreseen at the time.

  1. They combined the role of Head of Government and Head of State. And you can see the political attraction and so, to make a symbolically and chasmic shift from the separated roles as used in England, they went down the French model which gave us The Sun King Louis XIV, and Napoleon.

  2. Secondly, for a document which intrudes so deeply into the ingress and egress of daily doings of American life, it is far too difficult to amend.

These "nobody"s of whom you speak would be exclusively American, no? Lots of other democracies recognise the implications in terms of frustration and ill-allocated resource caused by disproportional representation and have national, non-partisan bodies to oversee and deliberate and determine equitable electoral boundaries. But American problems must require American solutions.

And even if it was not possible to see through American eyes what non-gerrymandered district boundaries would look like, the issue can be eliminated at a state level. Pennsylvania has, what 17 congressional districts? So rather than run 17 separate polls to get a different representative to your neighbour living across the road, merge them into a single multimember pan-state electorate. Makes sense even from an economic perspective. Declare the 17 representatives for Pennsylvania based on first past the post, or STV or proportionally. Whatever. There are even example of US States who do this now, so all hope is not lost.

Non-merkins are continually amused by declarations of “… I am from the great State of …” and “I share my own States values of …”. But nobody says "I am from the great 4th District of Texas and I live by the particular values of my district, as distinct from those godless infidels in adjoining 5th District … until the boundaries are redrawn.

12

Senator Duckworth has an advantage/disadvantage here depending on specifics.

:joy:

My son is employed by the prison system in Florida. His coworkers were vocally very much against giving felons the right to vote, while the prisoners in the system had no real interest in the idea.

13

We cannot fix the problem of gerrymandering - poor representation - as long as we retain single member districts. Partisan groupings, either racial or rural/urban divides, make it impossible.

So we can do one of two things. We can implement proportional representation as called for in the proposed Fair Representation Act. Or we can gerrymander fairly by utilizing a “you cut/I choose” process every 10 years.

14

But you can. There’s a flourishing example a few degrees of latitude north of you.

@Northern_Piper, apologies for disturbing your goodself, but could you play that song again, please? :upside_down_face:

15

This sounds bad by the standards of 2024. But let’s remember it was set up in 1789.

The Americans were setting up a system that was significantly more progressive than the British one they were familiar with. And the British system was more progressive than pretty much all others.

16

My modest proposal:

Preparation:
Measure the total north-south and east-west extent of a state measured in miles. Then choose the long axis. So for California that’d be north-south. For Tennessee that’d be east-west. Even approximately square states have a distinctly longer axis if you measure them with modern precision. Also take the total census population and divide that by the number of reps. That gives the desired headcount per district.

Process:
Starting at the extreme north end of a tall state or the extreme west end of a long state, salami-slice across the long axis exactly EW or NS respectively across the full width / height of the state respectively until you’ve lopped off the right number of people for the first district. Lather rinse repeat to the other side of the state.

The same methodology can be applied to federal reps, statehouse reps, and within counties and municipalities, to those entities’ council members, alderpersons, etc.

Results:
Viola! No cheating possible.

With modern GIS this is trivial to program and trivial to verify. It does require that the redistricting process knows the residential population per land parcel, but that is, or ought to be, standard knowledge.

As a bonus, it will tend to reduce the partisanship of any given rep since it’s far more likely that most reps’ districts incorporates folks of all orientations. It’s a lot harder to be a hard-left or hard-right rep when many of your constituents are not that way. You have to be a semi-centrist.

What is actually missing from US politics is any political gravity towards the center. IOW: over the last ~50 years we’ve build a system full of centrifugal force with little to no counteracting centripetal force to prevent the whole assembly from flying apart. It’s well past time to inject some centripetal back into the system.

17

You mean like this?

The difference to your proposal is that he is deliberately choosing the short axis, but you can modify the script…

18

I agree with this. They created the most successful nation in the past 250 years with opportunities and civil liberties that have been a model for others. Yes, it is not a utopia, there are very real problems. And our democratic ideals and underpinnings are being stress-tested at the moment with radicals on both sides of the spectrum, with Trump and his followers seeming willing to cast aside the very foundations of our country. But I believe we will weather these times like we have every moment in our past (civil war, the great depression, etc.)

19

Which benefits small (low-population) states. Fine, that’s kind of the whole point. Some states wanted equal representation regardless of population, other states wanted representation based on population. The “have their cake and eat it too” solution was to break up the legislature into two chambers, one which represents states equally, and one which represents states based on population, then give them equal powers. That’s brilliant.

The trouble is that the Senate is more powerful than the House, tilting the scales towards the smaller states. The House is also tilted towards smaller states because there’s not enough congresspeople to proportionately balance out the different populations. This extends to the Electoral College which further preferences small states. The thumb is on the scale in every case, and it’s always pushing the same direction. Combine that with our winner-take-all first-past-the-post two-party voting system and we’re constantly flipping back and forth between Democrat and Republican presidents whereas with a straight popular vote George HW Bush would’ve been the last Republican president, assuming the same candidates and that George W Bush couldn’t unseat Al Gore.

The other major problem I see is that the government’s procedures, rules, and codes of conduct are predicated on a gentleman’s agreement to operate in good faith. It assumes all parties actually want to govern. It is not equipped to handle those who are actively opposed to government in and of itself, and who are trying to “drain the swamp” from inside. There’s way too many procedural loopholes and allowable stalling tactics.

20

That’s what I was going to say. By the standards of its time, the original 1789 system was wildly progressive.

And a lot of the “mistakes” weren’t even mistakes at the time. They didn’t want a direct democracy- they wanted a federal republic, and in the system they envisioned, the people interacted primarily with their State, and the Federal government interacted almost exclusively with the States, not the people. This is because at the time the States held all the power and sovereignty, and were voluntarily giving up some portion of it to the Federal government, and not the other way around. (this is IMO, a critical point in how the US system works vs. systems in other countries).

Hence the Electoral College, the way that Senators were elected prior to the 17th Amendment, and the way the NJ Compromise works out. They’re all things that make sense within that particular framework where the Federal government is conceived of as where the States themselves are governed, not the people.

If we’re going to assign blame for the way our current system works, the blame ought to really lie with the subsequent politicians who failed to amend the Constitution and modify the system to reflect contemporary (for whenever that was/is) thoughts on government. Blaming the guys in 1789 for our Electoral College problems is absurd.

As far as fixing it goes, I’d say that not a lot of the original set-up was bad. But some of the subsequent changes have done more harm than good; in particular the 435 member cap in the House. If I had to pick something that I think they probably ought to have done, it would be to word some things better (i.e. the 2nd amendment), and put better guardrails in against things like gerrymandering and rely less on assuming that legislators put the best interests of the country first and foremost.