I don’t see it this way. If anything, the past year and a half have shown just how well the system of checks and balances works. Even with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump hasn’t been able to get most of his agenda passed. Imagine what it’ll be like when Dems have both houses. Judges have blocked plenty of his moves. That border wall isn’t being built. SCOTUS is still split 4-4-1 between libs, cons and an independent. The system of checks and balances is in fact working pretty much as it was designed.
Maybe I’m misreading or misunderstanding, but this seems dead wrong. Clinton solidly won the popular vote in the Democratic nominating contests in 2016. It was Sanders who wanted (for a time, after the regular delegate contest was a foregone conclusion) to appeal to the superdelegates to overturn the voters’ will.
I know this is nitpicking, but it irks me when people assert or imply that Clinton won the nomination in some shady way. She won it because she was popular with Democratic primary voters.
IMHO, Trump has committed so many impeachable offenses already, that if checks & balances was working he’d be gone by now.
Limit the President’s pardon powers. Allow Congress to veto a pardon, and only allow a pardon to be issued after a person has been convicted of a crime.
Significant voting reforms to restore basic democracy. Abolish disproportional systems. All votes should count equally. Restrict vote grouping. Voter registration should be as broad as possible and disenfranchisement should be as narrow as possible.
Overturn the Buckley decision with a Constitutional Amendment. Establish broad transparency on political spending.
No, you are not correct. Early in the primary race, Sanders was was winning or getting a significant share of delegate votes before counting in superdelegates in many of the primary votes. Here is a Los Angeles Times article explaining in detail using actual numbers. Clinton still led overall even without superdelegate votes but by a distressingly narrow margin at some point given that her opponent was a literal outsider, not just of traditional DNC politics but from outside the party itself. Of course, many of those primary voters were also spoilers from the fringes of the party.
There is nothing “shady” about the superdelegate system, and I did not intend to imply it to be so; it is well understood and exists explicitly to allow the party leaders to control who gets nominations so that the party isn’t hijacked by an outsider with an agenda significantly different than the party mainline, and in that sense, it worked exactly as it was intended too. However, Clinton herself was an almost historically unpopular candidate in the general election, both among registered Democrats and voters at large, a fact that was partially masked by the system that ensured she would have a lead. Yes, she won the popular vote in the general election by a substantial relative margin but not across the broad demographicsor numbers that traditionally successful Democratic candidates for the presidency have, with many voting for “anyone but Hillary”.
And that speaks to the larger problem of our “two party system”: neither party does well to represent the interests of a broad swath of the potential voting population, but the alternatives aren’t remotely viable; and because it is known that they won’t be, the candidates for alternative parties are often poorly qualified as anything but a protest vote. Political parties that are entrenched in the desire to retain their traditional stances regardless of how well or poorly it represents its members are guaranteed to come apart at the seems and radically reform—as happened to the DNC when it was largely run by the Dixiecrat contingent—and if Bernie Sanders hadn’t been such an obvious bomb-thrower in his ambitions he could have mounted a serious progressive challenge to the DNC mainstream, or at least forced a party split.
The irony is that Clinton started out early in her career before ever running for elective office as a far-left progressive, as did Bill in his first tenure as Arkansas governor, and both apparently learned to mediate toward a very middling political stance in order to move up through party ranks. And there are still hints that Hillary retains an inwardly progressive view in her personal beliefs bit essentially says whatever she believes will appeal to the Democratic financial base, which makes sense because as bad of a campaigner as she is, she’s always been a great organizer and fundraiser and arguably as responsible for the success of Bill’s career as anything he’s done for himself. By trying to appeal to the DNC leadership and presuming that to be the same as Democratic voters overall she ended up alienating a lot of potential voters who either stayed home or voted for someone else whose’s plans to tear down the system (or “drain the swamp”) seemed to offer more to speak to their personal plight than flat slogans and a general appeal of having the first woman president.
On any merit or credibility basis Hillary Clinton should have won the 2016 election handily and across a broad spectrum of voters; regardless of what you believe about how she didn’t, the fact that she struggled in thr primaries to an avowed socialist feom Vermont, and in th general election to a bombastic fraudster whose antics should have alienated every woman, minority, and anyone with the good sense to open a door before trying to walk through it indicates that there is a serious problem with the DNC. It may not be superdelegates per se, but it is certainly the ability of the party to relate to the broad spectrum of voters as representing their interests and concerns.
Stranger
I wish the next President would do to his laws, reforms and ex. orders what he’s doing to Obama’s ; namely hunting them down to the most insignificant, taking them behind the shed and setting the dogs on them. This to really illustrate, not for The Donald (who hasn’t learned a thing in his life and isn’t going to start now) but for every other politician out there who’s stroking his chin at what Chief PantsOnHead is doing : “This is why we don’t do it. Because if we did it, the next guy could do it to us and WE DON’T WANT POLITICS TO WORK THAT WAY. It’s disrespectful, asinine, unstable and it is Just Not Done. We haven’t done that bullshit for 400 years. Let this be the only time - and let’s erase that time as an example.”
Unfortunately I think that most reforms would require constitutional amendments as I don’t think Congress has the right to limit presidential power. But if I had my wishes:
1- No relative by blood or marriage to the president shall be allowed to hold any position in the federal government other than career civil servant.
2- No electoral votes for president or vice president shall be cast for any person who has failed to release their tax returns for the ten years preceding the election.
3- The person elected president shall have put all of his or her businesses in a blind trust prior to the casting of electoral votes and any person failing to do so shall forfeit those votes.
4- A president who fails to hold a full press conference in any calendar month shall immediately resign.
5- If the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader are of the same party as the president, the minority leaders of each house shall have the authority to call for votes on any piece of legislation.
Most likely, much of the nation - and certainly most R’s - would simply see this as the latest episode of “New-president-overturns-whatever-previous-president-did” and it would just set off the latest round of partisanship and Tea-Partying and radicalization.
Tying Trump to a post sounds good to me.
We could call it the “Washington Post”.
The flailing Washington Post.
Given that Trump was massively out spent in the election, how is this going to help people like Trump from being elected? Trying to keep people from spending money on candidates is only going to help celebrity candidates because they already have the name recognition other candidates need to spend millions to achieve.
Eliminate the President’s pardon power, and put the authority to clear convictions in the courts where the convictions occurred, or the appeals level above them. Judges have more expertise in judging character, and are much less susceptible to political influence.
Yes, and them saying things that are uncivil provides perfect justification to keep on doing things that are evil, right?
YES YES YES! But let’s make it President PantsOnHead.
5 is trivial to circumvent.
And incumbents. Nor does it address the whole issue of PACs.
Right.
“We’ll do all these things to undo the results of a election that we lost - BUT THEN EVERYBODY HAS TO STOP! NO BACKSIES!”
Regards,
Shodan
Agreed, to some extent. The underlying problem is Executive Orders – anything accomplished by E.O. can be undone by E.O. by the next asshole who occupies the office. Perhaps there should be limits on E.O.s.
In an Instant-Runoff/Ranked Choice election. Screw plurality voting that marginalizes all other parties than Republican/Democrat.
Allow all registered voters to vote in whichever primary they want to in any election again using RCV. IOW, nobody has to declare their party of choice upon registering to vote. Voters vote for the candidates, not the party.
Word. But I would go further and treat districting like jury duty. The committee is rebuilt every census from a pool of registered voters across each state. They are paid a daily stipend for their service and are presented with several proposed plans submitted by an independent election body made up of retired judges, civil servants and political scientists.
Funding campaigns with solely public money levels the playing field and reduces the ridiculous amounts of money wasted on media blitzes also. We’ll all be thankful we don’t have to be subjected to months of endless ads and robocalls. Every candidate at is given the same meager amount (more for national candidates than local) and they figure out how best to spend it. They are all also invited to several debates hosted in different regions and an online debate which are paid for out of the general election fund. In order to qualify for general election funds you must be able to obtain the endorsement as a candidate by a specific percentage of eligible registered voters.
Agreed. Transparency of ballots cast must also be a priority. There should always be a paper trail. Vote-by-mail (with voter information pamphlets included) to ensure all registered voters can access the election without undue influence or interference. Vote tabulations may be reviewed by the public and challenged by an independent election committee resulting in recount of paper ballots.