I liked Poppy Bush. That whole family have a bit of upper-class twit to them; and I didn’t agree with everything he did; but I think he had some sense when it came to foreign policy.
I was a Republican who despised Bill Clinton. He was never the Antichrist. He was just smarmy and full of himself and somehow kept stumbling into ways to embarrass himself and the office. From a GOP point of view, his administration was pretty reasonable, actually. As I have moved left, I am more disappointed in him.
Then I left the GOP over Dubya’s disregard for the Geneva Accords. Do not normalize him.
Obama had so much terrible nonsense said about him that a bunch of us started reflexively defending him and biting our tongues, which may have meant he didn’t get called out enough for parts of his foreign policy. After a while, he was immune to criticism; he was going to be yelled at no matter what, so he just did whatever. So congratulations, TEA Party, you made him worse. Fortunately, some of what he wanted to do was pretty good. Unfortunately, he basically continued the Global War on Terror.
I think Trump is in his second childhood and shouldn’t be in office.
Unless things have changed in the last few years, the US doesn’t have a proportional representation system, it has a first past the post system. So I’m not sure why you think this would make sense… Of course, the US has a badly broken first past the post system and a weird-ass 2 party system with a convoluted mechanism for getting those party nominees identified, but that’s a story for another day.
True, but…consider how they “won”. They have won in recent years not by landslide election victories as in the presidential elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, or the Congressional elections of 1994. They have “won” by exploiting loopholes in our political system, twice winning the presidency without winning the majority of votes, and they’ve won control of congress despite having more voters vote for Democrats. They’ve “won” with gerrymandering, voter purges, voter ID laws, and by getting the Supreme Court to ignore the Voting Rights Act, which encouraged the inclusion of minority participation in democracy, over the objections of specious “state’s rights” arguments. Stated another way, Republicans aren’t interested in winning with ideas; they’re interested in using levers of power to ensure that fewer of the “wrong” voters participate in democracy. The irony for the “right” voters is that in voting R, they’re also voting against their own future interests, as they are voting themselves right into a political system that discourages their participation too.
But let’s not get into false equivalency. Most of the country didn’t want Clinton impeached at all; they obviously didn’t care for his personal conduct, and his legacy probably ruined both Al Gore’s and Hillary’s chances at getting elected. But Clinton left with a high approval rating.
Bush, OTOH, left the country with 2 foreign conflicts raging and unresolved, increased global instability, and a massive global financial crisis that in part were encouraged by his party’s position on financial deregulation. I personally would not have wanted GWB impeached (Dick Cheney should probably have been put in jail, but that’s a different matter), but I can see how at least some voters got to that point.
Barack Obama? Again, his “crime” was healthcare reform. He was voted into a 2nd term and although politics had become intensely tribal by the time he left office, he still left with an approval rating in the 50s, which is pretty good by today’s standards.
With Trump, it is obvious why people want him impeached. The outrageous levels of corruption alone are enough to have him tossed out of office, without even touching on the apparently well-founded allegations of colluding with a foreign power.
It’s bad enough that our politics are poisoned, but false equivalencies make the situation worse, because with false equivalency, everyone’s conduct is the same, no matter how fundamentally ‘good’ they are, or how outrageously bad they are. It’s a symptom that voters have checked out, which spells the end of democracy.
Nobody is confused by the rules. They have been the same since 1804. There is no national popular vote for President, nor is there a national plebiscite for control of Congress. Both parties run within the confines of these rules and the GOP won the last time while preaching tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare.
Winning elections aren’t enough to vote in your policies? You have to have a certain amount at the latest CNN/Gallup poll?
Actually, a lot has changed since 1804 – like, a lot.
Women can vote. Blacks can vote. People don’t have to be property owners and pay poll taxes to vote. People over the age of 18 can vote. Nobody said that there’s a popular vote for president, but the fact is that our understanding of what a democracy should be in 2018 is quite different than what it was in 1818. Christ, we’ve given other countries democratic governments and written their constitutions for them.
Of course winning elections is important, but again, Republicans are anti-democratic. They’re using procedural warfare to hold on to their districts, despite the fact that the majority of people don’t like their policies and voted for democrats than republican. They just didn’t vote Democrat in the right places. Keep believing in your democracy, but sooner or later, ordinary people are going to shove conservative “democracy” up their asses.
The extensions of the franchise you mentioned are all non-controversial today. No major party or anyone with any status at all suggests that blacks, women, or 19 year olds should not be able to vote.
But I take issue with “our understanding” of what democracy means. The “our” doesn’t include me. I don’t agree that the large population centers of New York and California dictate what policies affect my life and that politicians should be able to influence high minded liberals and ignore people in flyover country.
That was what the compromise in 1787 was all about. Small states did not agree to be dominated by large states and no “understanding” has changed that.
May I ask just what level you are comfortable with? Three million votes is a trivial matter to you, how about six? Nine, fifteen, what? At what point do you say “Hold, enough!”? If ever?
At what point do you say that a minority of voters overruling the majority is…not in our best traditions, or best interests?
(I’m assuming that Il Douche’s absurd claim of five million “illegal voters” does not enter into your considerations.)
It isn’t about the popular vote and never has been. If a president wins despite a 15 million vote deficit in the popular vote, that shows a disconnect between large and small states. Also, keep in mind that small states only have the “plus 2” advantage because of the senators. Large states have a huge advantage in the electoral college, just not as much as they would based upon pure population.
So, no, a president who failed to get a majority of the electoral votes should not preside over the small states. We are not an absolute democracy and indeed we would never have formed a nation had your view been imposed on the smaller states.
So, you feel that the underpopulated states like North Dakota and Wyoming should dictate what policies effect the lives of the actual people and that politicians should be able to influence easily misled conservatives and ignore the people living in states that people actually want to live in?
Let me start by insisting that I have never advocated any bullying of the smaller states. Taking Rhode Island’s lunch money would meet my firm disapproval. And the Trumpsters are to be commended for not offering us any callow bloviations like “The people have spoken!”, apparently a capacity for embarrassment does exist, however feeble.
Of course, the question I actually asked had to do with what level of disconnect would trouble you. Apparently, it is somewhere North of fifteen million.
Yours is an exceptional interpretation of Constitutional law, I daresay “unique”. It would be enlightening and entertaining to hear you debate these matters with Obama, what with his so-called “expertise” in such law.
But I confess, I have never actually considered these issues in light of the “small state - big state” insight, perhaps he has not either? But then, of course, the question becomes “Has anyone, ever?”.
I may have mentioned this once before, but they don’t run campaigns in order to win the so-called popular vote. Or, the ones who run smart campaigns don’t. So, no, I’m not particularly concerned about who gets the most votes. That’s not how things are set up.
And, it’s not at all unusual even for the winning candidate to get less than 50% of the total vote. Hell, Bill Clinton only got 43% of the vote in 1992. And he still got < 50% when he ran as an incumbent in 1996. Hillary’s 3M surplus in 2016 wasn’t enough to get her a majority of the vote (48.2%).
Now, I get that that is the way that the electoral college is set up, so we don’t need a repeat of that lecture.
It is just that you cannot claim a mandate, you cannot claim that the people have spoken, when more of them spoke for the other person, and the majority spoke against you.
Well, OK, John, I’ll ask you the same question that was so deftly evaded: At what point of disparity between the popular vote and the electoral vote would you begin to feel a mite squeamish?
Politicians claim all kinds of shit all the time, and there isn’t anything in the constitution that says a president has to do things differently if he doesn’t win decisively. I agree that it isn’t wise to claim such a mandate, but I don’t expect Trump to do anything wise, so no surprise there.
I didn’t evade anything. I was correcting a mistaken premise on your part.
Besides, I don’t think the question is particularly relevant as the odds of a 15M vote difference between the winner and loser are so low as to be impossible. And, I don’t think either one of us had any problem with Bill Clinton getting into the Oval Office in 1992 and he would’ve needed about 7M more votes to win a majority.
I like the Electoral College. Much higher on my list of things that need to be changed is just how much power Congress has ceded to the president over the years. I’d like to see Congress reclaim more of its authority. Neither of those things is likely to change (the EC or Presidential authority), but I think the latter one would be easier to change than the former.
It’s not just trump, it’s the republican party as a whole, and their supporters, claiming that a procedural victory is the same as having support of the people you govern.
Congress would have to actually act in order to reclaim its authority. The reason that the executive has claimed some parts that would be more apt to be authorized by congress is specifically because congress has become entirely dysfunctional. It cannot take action to deal with the issues that it needs to deal with as the country and the world changes, and it also cannot stop the president from stepping in to do the stuff that needs to be done, but congress is incapable of doing.
I’d like to see congress step up and be an effective branch of the government too, but in asking it to reclaim its authority before it reclaims any semblance of effectiveness is putting the cart before the horse, IMHO.
ETA: as far as the odds that you consider, I wouldn’t go so far. When I was about 9 was when I first learned of the electoral college, and that the president could be elected with less than a plurality of the popular vote. I thought that was odd, but as it had only happened once before, I thought it was unlikely to happen again. When I pointed this out to others, they also thought it was very unlikely to happen again, and were it to happen, we’d fix it then.
Well, it’s happened now twice, both times benefiting the same party. As campaigning changes to try to win electoral votes, rather than the votes of people, I do see the popular vote becoming less important, and harder to get, for the republicans, with squeezing out victories in enough states to win the electoral college as being the objective. With this, the gaps will become greater and greater, and a 15+ million vote loss in the popular and a narrow win in the electoral could be the new normal for republican candidates.
