I wish people would stop referring to “Supreme Court.” It gives that desecrated institution an honor it no longer warrants. Since most cases are decided by the Court’s centrist, Anthony Kennedy, I’d just refer to it as “Kennedy, Four Justices and the Four Little Pigs.” In the case CJJ mentions, Kennedy did find that the 23rd District violated Federal law, but by only a 5-4 margin, with all four Pigs dissenting. Does anyone sincerely wonder if any of the Pigs would have moved its vote had the partisan alignment been reversed?
Kennedy ordered a lower court to redraw districts; Texas appealed the redraw and in a late-breaking news development, AFAICT, Kennedy recently decided for the Texas GOP. Are the individual Justices’ positions known? Anyone want to bet which way the Pigs went?
What’s the problem? This is nothing more than getting back to the original intentions of the Founding Fathers. By my calculations, after the bill passes, black votes will be worth three-fifths of a white vote.
Florida and Virginia are good news as well since hopefully the push-back there will lead to plans falling apart in other states. The more states with Republicans saying “This is a bad idea and we reject it”, the worse it’ll look for the other states.
Tempus fugit - “Time flies,” Latin. fugeddaboudit - “Forget about it,” North American. Tempus fugitaboutit - 'lucism combining the two.
Well, the Constitution as of 1790 could also be construed as protecting specific classes of people–influential landowners, say. The elites of large states like Virginia were in effect disenfranchising small landholders in their states–compared to those who were able to create small states like Vermont, and mostly compared to themselves. It was the law as respecter of persons, or at least of groups of people. Solutions designed to weight power-sharing among a handful of wealthy landowners 222 years ago don’t mean the same thing today, and may not be desirable.
Technically, it’s a form of party list. I think he threw some sortition in there, which is a neat idea. STV, SNTV, and MMP are also proportional or proportional-tending systems.
No, it is not. Many people who have no vested interest in a representative from, e.g., their city or county, nonetheless want a choice in the individual for whom their vote goes. Pit Susan Collins against Bob Conley, for example, and I’d vote for the Republican. What he is suggesting mandates party unity over intelligent weighing of issues – which is what has gotten us to the present impasse. Voting for a party and letting the party leaders choose who gets the seats their party is allocated from the voting, removes the choice of your supposed representatives from the people nominally being represented.
You almost might better have ExxonMobil, SmithKlineGlaxo, a Prudential/Hartford/State Farm coalition, and G.M. choose their candidates directly, and be done with it.
So long as we are getting the history right, there are problems with this assertion. States were not popular in the federal convention. After all they were knuckling under to popular pressure for paper money and debt protections, much to the horror of elites. If the idea were to empower states then there would have been no need to mandate Electors.
A larger issue is the fact that poor communications was a major factor in how the presidential election system was originally set up. They were at the heart of the requirement that Electors cast 2 votes, one for someone from out of state. It was believed that otherwise Electors would favor local leaders who would be the only well known candidates within the state and the president would regularly be chosen by Congress. Also, the reason for having Electors meet in their own states on the same day was intended, due to poor communications, to prevent collusion. Obviously all of that was extremely shortsighted.
This though is fairly accurate so long as we realize that the intent was to empower people (elites really) within the states rather than the states themselves. Certainly power-sharing rather than popular participation was the goal. A popular vote would never have been acceptable. Not only was the franchise far more broad in the Eastern and Middle states but the geographical structure of slavery (legal then in all but one state) would have significantly reduced the influence of Southerners. In Creating the Constitution Thornton Anderson offers a compelling argument that Electors were intended to represent property as much as people.
Details aside, the thrust of Martin Hyde’s post is accurate. It wasn’t the slow pace of communications in the eighteenth century which prevented the election of the POTUS by popular vote.
Nothing I said prevents the parties from having primaries to select the list. And, the people we vote for now in the present system are certainly selected in large part by ‘party leaders’.
Every system has a drawback or two. I think my idea gives every person in a state some sense of being represented in Congress, even if by only one person.
We have to do something to prevent gerrymandering. What is it going to be?
You could simply let people vote for their first, second, third choices etc. from a list of candidates in each party, or even just vote for one person out of a list. The highest vote-getters on each list would win the seats allocated to their party.
But every district is required to have the same number of people in it (one-person, one-vote). So concentration of voters is irrelevant. When they are concentrated, you could simply draw a district line between them. In fact, you must do so in order to follow the equal population rule.
Not necessarily. For example even if one were to draw “natural” district lines (ie one designed to incorporate city, and county borders as much as possible), if most Democrats lived in a 80% Democratic area, but Republican areas are only 60% Republican on average, the former will be at a disadvantage when the district lines are drawn.