Trump Kicking and Screaming Transition Thread

But the states pictured with the 40 million population have 60 House Representatives compared to California’s (also 40m pop) 53.

In every way possible our system ensures minorities have less voting power than whites.

If only there were a term for when the system has racism built into it...

Minorities are free to move to smaller states if they wish. The racist aspect of the Senate and EC is accidental, and harping on this point only serves as a polarizing distraction from why these institutions are actually a problem:

. They privilege land over people.

. They represent archaic political divisions no longer relevant to governance in the 21st century. What percentage of voters made federal choices in 2020 based primarily on their state's unique problems? Probably none.

Unsurprising given a system developed when "We the people" meant a group of landowners.

Your point, if I may paraphrase, is that the system is inherently biased against anyone in a dense population centre?

Given that tends to mean those who are already disadvantaged it will exacerbate pre existing inequalities, of which race is but one.

Am I on the right track?

I disagree.

The senate gives states equal power in the federal government regardless of population. The need and benefit of this is questionable, but I feel a certain justness for this aspect of congress. It's countered by the house.

But the electoral college was very much to give the slave states the power they felt they needed to elect the president. It is based on census; they were gaining electoral votes on slaves (at 3/5 rate). It's the total of the number of senators plus house representatives (who are determined by census).

Today the EC may not be racist, but that's how it got started and it doesn't privilege land over people. It distorts the popular vote with winner take all in most states.

Jefferson is a great historical figure, but boy did he screw us with the idolization of farmers. There is nothing more inherently moral about work on a farm than work in a city.

Piss them off and you starve. That's a moral reality. Except today the breadbasket is mostly corporations.

Just so that this doesn't get lost...... we should also point out that this senior homeland official incharge of election security - appointed by Trump to this position was...... fired by tweet!

so those corporations are "the state" who's interests the senate exists to serve?

sounds legit.

This is 6 years old, so it might have changed, but I wasn't correct. It's 61% owner operated

It’s changed as the number of family farms has been in decline for some time. Additionally, chicken farmers are often little more than serfs for companies like Tyson, even if they do own the farm.

Welcome to the point where capitalism becomes corporatism.

We're very much in a place where private enterprises are individually more powerful than nation states.

To my mind thats reason no. 144764 to question the relevance of the Constitution in the modern world, but what do we furriners know?

What do the states represent?

which brings us back around to the comparison I've mad in the past to "rotten boroughs" that most other democracies adjusted for before the Civil War...

...
That's excellent.
We knew you'd agree.
The companies will be very pleased.

A check on federal power.

under the auspices of who's authority?

I thought there was supposedly no higher authority in America than the will of the electorate as expressed through congress?

and goddammit we are the federal power. What he's really against is those guys in the other states.

@Spaceturkey got there ahead of me but I think the question is worth reiterating from the opposite side of the equation.

A check on whose behalf?

Who is being protected by that check and why does it require this quite mystifying distribution of the values attached to votes?

"All men are created equal" is quite clear, it makes explicit the inherent equality under law of everyone, yet the EC quite explicitly violates that principle. That, to my mind, is a discrepancy worth exploring if you cannot put a literal identity onto the benefactors of those checks.

Mitch McConnell was certain to the marrow of his bones they could make Obama a one term president, so their spite ridden bullshit isn't invincible, and they aren't geniuses.

I know there's basically no practical path to it being implemented across the US for a bunch of reasons, but it seems like proportionally appointing Electoral Votes based on a states popular vote would greatly increase the influence of individuals votes while still keeping the weighting that people like Lanz feel is necessary?

Like if a state has 10 electoral votes, give 1 to a candidate for each 10% of the vote they get in that state.

*sigh*

Lemme splain.

When the US was founded - as in the current Constitution, not the Articles of Confederation - the men who hammered out the form of the federal government were motivated largely by the Enlightenment thinking of the time. This means that they thought the era of kings and royalty and rule by divine right was over and that the only just government derived its powers from the consent of the governed. In other words, that people could govern themselves. But they were also well aware of the failures and dangers of "pure" democracy. And, they needed to balance the interests and concerns of the several states, which at the time were largely autonomous entities, each one practically its own country. The northern states were much more metropolitan and industrial than the southern ones, which were massively agrarian and relied heavily on slave labor. You must bear in mind that at the time, slavery was an accepted part of society, although there were already many people who found it abhorrent and wanted the new federal government to abolish it.

Aside - the whole conception of slavery was based on the idea of white superiority, and in fact white European superiority. Black Africans were largely viewed as not being human at all, so anything done to them was okay in the same way as how any other draft animal was treated. From 2020 we can easily judge this mindset and see the evil of it, but back then it was part of European-descended society. Even though by the late eighteenth century slavery was well on its way to being abandoned by most of Europe.

Anyway. Had abolition been a part of the Constitution, the southern states would never have ratified it and there would have been no United States. So there was a series of compromises, on this and other issues. The Constitution as finally adopted divided the federal government into three branches: the legislative, which at the time was seen as the primary branch; the executive, seen as the office manager, more or less; and the judicial, under the theory that judicial review of laws allowed for correction of errors and restraint of the legislature. The entire thing was based on the idea of "checks and balances," as the Federalist Papers make very clear. One of the balances was the bicameral legislature, divided into House and Senate.

The original idea for that, despite what some here seem to believe, was to balance out metropolitan areas with agrarian ones by providing for proportional representation based on population in the House, and equal representation based on the states in the Senate. There was a huge amount of debate during the Constitutional Convention about how to accomplish this balancing and the bicameral legislature was the compromise arrived at. The wartime experience with the unicameral Continental Congress played a part in that compromise. It was also set up so that Representatives were popularly elected, since they were supposed to represent the people, and Senators were appointed by the state legislatures as they were supposed to look after the interests of their state as a whole. Since at the time the states were viewed as semi-independent powers in a confederation, having the Senate structured this way also acted as a check on the centralization of federal power. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that so that Senators were popularly elected, which was a major mistake and removed an important check on federal power.

Since the Revolution had been spurred largely by the sentiment that the British Parliament and King were ignoring the concerns of the colonists, who by the way saw themselves as British subjects entitled to all the rights and protections of proper Englishmen, the Constitution was structured to allow the people to control the government. This was in opposition to how most of Europe worked, where the government controlled the people. Notice for example that Brits are called "subjects" and Americans are called "citizens." Subtle but important difference.

Now, the issue that we can easily see from our perch 250 years later is that at the time of the Constitution's adoption, the only people seen as full and important members of society were landowning white men. No-one else need apply. But the appropriate foundation was there and the language of the document clearly expressed a higher, more encompassing set of ideals. It's taken a couple centuries to live up to those ideals, and we're still not all the way there, but to sit here saying the whole thing is junk and needs replaced is a damn dangerous sentiment, because if you remove the foundational document and its lofty ideals, what you're inevitably going to wind up with is a much more complicated, restrictive, and authoritarian government. One has only to look at the European Union to see the direction that would be taken.

So you'll forgive me if I look askance at all you nitwits sitting in your smug seats of moral certitude wanting to burn the whole thing down and start over. History shows us that such things rarely work out for the betterment of the masses.

This reminds me of those bozos who break into people's houses and post videos on Twitter while they're doing it...

There's a term for that, and I forget what it's called, but yeah. Apportioning electoral votes based on districts or something rather than winner-take-all in each state (there's a couple exceptions to that, like IIRC Maine) would be a better system.

Who has advocated for that?

No one here since @Amaris left. Or maybe the voices in Lanz's head.

I don't think that it is impossible to implement a change along these lines. It just is a question of getting a groundswell of states to agree to it.

Right now, a state can prettymuch allot its electoral college votes however it wants to. The default in most states is 100 percent for the winning candidate.

If each state/enough states changed it so that the winner in each congressional district in that state got that electoral vote, it would be closer to representative democracy without having to amend the Constitution.

The problem is that there's no real incentive for, say, heavily Democratic California and its Democratic legislature to risk some of its EC votes going to a Republican until it can be sure that some of Texas's go for a Democrat, etc. etc.

Anyone who's advocated for direct election of the President, anyone who thinks some of the Bill of Rights needs some editing, anyone who has ever wanted to give the Fed MORE power . . .

Interesting, I was under the impression that the election of a president, extra amendments, and changes in federal government power had all happened since the founding of the US.

Were the proponents of any of those changes nitwits who wanted to burn the whole thing down, or was there a point at which you feel the system was perfected?