One vote per lifetime? That seems a tad limited.
Where are voters allowed to vote more than once in an election?
I appreciate your sentiment, but it’s a little unfair to balance risk with death. We expect those politicians have family and friends who will be affected. I don’t have any problem with further increasing the difficulty of declaring war though.
And you can say it, but that doesn’t make it fucking true backatcha.
The Democrats and the Republicans didn’t just happen to become the two big mainstream parties. They got there by finding out what the political views were of the overwhelming majority of voters and then embracing those political views.
The reason libertarian principles don’t win elections isn’t because the system is rigged. It’s because ninety-nine percent of the voters in this country don’t agree with libertarian principles. And no tinkering with the system is going to change that reality.
And if those libertarian principles ever do become popular, guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans will embrace those principles. They go where the voters are.
Finally the presidential debates aren’t a platform for every political ideologue to have a chance to spread their message. That’s what we have the internet for. It’s a chance for the real candidates to appear before the public so the voters can look them over. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are real candidates. Rocky Anderson, Virgil Goode, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein are not real candidates.
You have a choice. You can participate in the real political system or you can participate in a make-believe political system. But don’t expect people in the real political system to take your make-believe political system seriously.
This is basically it. The two parties define the issues in an either/or way making alternatives seem inconsequential. Some countries have managed to avoid this but their parties just aren’t good at it yet. I suppose the nature of some countries would allow them to always maintain coalition type governments with more plural political philosophies, but this country doesn’t seem like it will ever do that. Perhaps we are too large to operate successfully in that mode.
I’d pick a winner take all parliamentary system instead of our current system which doesn’t work.
Also politicians couldn’t redistrict themselves. And elections would be funded via public money and small donations.
Plus there would be mandates and funding for smaller parties, a system with 5+ parties that have to form alliances would be better than our current system.
Voting would be easy and incentivized. But there would be write in options as well as a ‘none of the above’ option.
Obama won 51.1% of the vote, Romney won 47.2. All the other parties won 1.7% of the vote combined one would assume.
With the way our system is set up if you live in a swing state, voting for a 3rd party is basically just a way to make the opposition main party win.
“The church building shall not be subject to property tax.” The rest of the organization? Tax those guys.
And if you take two steps back, the parties are essentially indistinguishable from each other. Even the Rand Pauls and Berkeley congresscritters blend into the gray from not too distant a viewpoint.
So since Americans are not likely to ever have truly radical (markedly divergent) political parties beyond the smallest fringe level, because the historical record is that no notable majority wants them, two near-clones are plenty to settle most elections.
The fostered notion that vast divides between Pubbies and Crats are what drives politics, for good or bad, is, IMVHO, a fantasy. The real engine and real problems lie elsewhere, but Red! V! Blue! makes for great spectacle. Pass me some bread.
The problem is not so much radical political parties greens,libertarians ,socialists so on. Where only a minority would vote for them. It is lack degrees of two party system.
Those two parties are locked in script book saying this my believe and platform. If a liberal or conservative as any views different it not following party line book.
This why countries in Europe have left,center left,center, right center and right wing parties.
The thing is that Democrats and Republicans, as different yet similar as they are now, were MUCH CLOSER in the past. BOTH parties used to have conservative, moderate and liberal wings. Now, the Republicans really have no liberal wing at all. Unfortunately, neither do the Democrats, in any meaningful way. The Democrats have mostly gotten rid of their venomous Southern reactionary contingent, though. So we have the Republicans, who are right and far right, and the Democrats, who are center and center-right, with a completely ineffectual cloud of leftists kind of dragging along behind.
That would not be a parliamentary system, it would be a proportional representation system. A parliamentary system would be one where Congress (however constituted) elects and can at any time dismiss the POTUS and Cabinet.
That is so true.
The Democrat party would be Canada conservative party and republican party would be far right conservative party in Canada.
The US people are more center-right in way of thinking:eek::eek::eek: where people in Canada are more center-left in way of thinking.
Countries in Europe are more mix center,left and far left in way of thinking.
I would empower Congress to dissolve states, make new states, redraw state boundaries, at any time and without consulting state governments. In most modern democracies, local government is reorganized by the national government every few decades for better efficiency, as a matter of course.
In with this. States’ rights are out. State sovereignty is out. States as simply an organizational construct would be much better.
So much for the laboratories of democracy. So much for progressive movements advancing state by state.
So much for recalcitrant rearguard footdragging on slavery, Jim Crow, marriage equality, etc. There’s as much negative about states’ rights as there is positive.
The US founding fathers wanted the states to be more like countries where most every thing is at state level. The feds have no control on abortion,homosexuality,same sex marriage,welfare or other matters.
Only military, defense and immigration is federal manor. The founding fathers would be shocked at FDR being a federal manor and not a state manor to decide if they want it or not or what degrees of the FDR.
The Founding Fathers are dead and were, moreover, not supermen or Time Lords. Their opinions are to be studied but are not binding. They created the Constitution with a way to modernize it for the ways that the country and society would change which they could never predict. It’s enlightening and interesting to examine their motivations and opinions about things, but it’s not in any way mandatory.
How do you change the constitution to make THAT happen? :dubious:
So if most people in Florida oppose food stamps and social security is it far for the feds to say sorry it is federal thing and you got to pay for it.
Is it far for state of California if most people oppose abortion,same sex marriage for federal government to say sorry it is a federal thing.