A lot of the political articles we've been doing this week are focused on the upcoming election (naturally) but I wanted to spend at least one day talking about the state of the American political system, as it is, by most measures, broken. We live in a country where we talk about the "American dream" and how "anyone can become president," but that's not really the case, and it certainly isn't the case that "all votes matter equally."
You see this in a variety of ways in 2020. You can start with the long voting lines that we saw in Atlanta this week, a sign of oppression that we always see in Atlanta (and never in more conservative, whiter parts of Georgia). We see it in the push by one party to have more access (through absentee balloting, drop boxes, and early voting) to safe passages to voting, while the other does everything it can to prevent such a thing. And we see it in who represents us. There are millions out-of-work or dying right now, and the Senate is pushing through a nominee just days before the election with limited judicial experience, from a president who lost the popular vote (and looks likely to lose the overall election), from a Senate not represented by a majority of the people (and who is also likely to lose in less than three weeks). This is a broken system, and so I wanted to talk about five ways that I think we could fix our current system. These range from popular reforms to slightly unorthodox, and are focused mainly in how/who chooses our leaders in Washington DC, but I think are reforms I'd like to see considered in the next four years.
1. Expand the Supreme Court (with Term Limits)
Judge Amy Coney Barrett
President Trump will likely be successful in confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Mitt Romney & Cory Gardner both deciding to back Barrett indicated to me that this was a done deal no matter what, and as a result despite losing the popular vote by millions of voters, he will have effectively placed three people on the Supreme Court that could serve for forty years.
That's wrong, period, end of sentence, and it's time for us to grow up about the Supreme Court. We are now at the point where it's very easy to tell how a justice will decide on any given issue, and it almost entirely stems back to which president chose that justice. Those who want to cling to the past bemoan how we've turned the Supreme Court into a partisan branch, but that's not on us-it's on the justices themselves. At this point, we essentially should just have "R's" and "D's" behind the names of the justices they're so engrained into supporting their personal agendas (regardless of traditional readings of the law) and in our country, people with partisan letters behind their names do not get unchecked power for decades without having to stand before the people again. Additionally, we now are in a state where the partisan makeup of Congress determines retirements (look at the absences of Justices Kennedy, Stevens, & Souter in recent years), and whether or not a justice is confirmed at all.
So here's my proposal for how to handle the "court-packing" accusations. I think we should expand to 13 justices. There are currently 13 Courts of Appeals in the United States-it feels like a good stopping place. But I also think we'd run into the same issues pretty quickly regardless of the number of justices on the Supreme Court, so my second proposal is that we add in term limits for the justices. Long term limits, but term limits nonetheless, and put rules around how they are chosen.
My proposed system is this-let's say that Joe Biden becomes president in January, and thus will be president for four years, for two Congresses. Each Congress, Biden would get to select one new justice. If there's an opening (either through death, resignation, or as a result of the initial expansion) at the start of his term, he'd get to nominate to fill that seat. If there is no opening, the most senior justice on the Court would resign pending Biden's submission (with the expansion & assuming Barrett's confirmation, every current justice would get at least eight more years on the Court before the term limits would begin). The catch here would be that Biden wouldn't nominate one judge, but three. The House would be required by law to hold a hearing with all three nominees, and then vote as a body on which two they want to advance to the Senate. From there, the Senate could hold additional hearings, and would vote (the law would require a vote), with the majority picking the judge. This would all be required to happen (by law) before October 1st, so that the new justice would begin in the new term.
This fixes pretty much all of the issues with the Supreme Court confirmation process (and I'd support a similar process to lower federal courts, with first an initial expansion & then a term-limited retirement). For starters, it mandates when votes will happen-it will not be left to the partisan power of the Senate. Second, it limits the number of appointments a given president could make (but also ensures they'll get the same amount each term). Biden, were he to serve for eight years, would get four justices-no more, no less. There would be enough turnover in the Supreme Court to ensure that entrenched power couldn't last forever, but also would mean a long term on the Court (since experience matters). Biden's new judge would be guaranteed at least 26 years on the Court, and possibly more if there were deaths or resignations in the meantime, but no Court would have more than two years with the same power dynamic. Essentially, it would create enough change & regulation around the Court that it would feel like a people's branch of the government again, and not a partisan branch with unchecked authority.
This is an easy one, and I'm aware that several of these things require constitutional amendments (but I'm also aware we're never going to have constitutional amendments if we quit before we start & not force people to go on the record regarding these issues again, so Congress needs to start voting on constitutional amendments even if we know they'll fail). But it's absurd to me that there is absolutely no doubt that Joe Biden will win the votes of a plurality (and likely a majority) of Americans this fall, and yet Donald Trump has a 15% chance at winning the White House. This is only going to grow larger as time goes on-the population centers across the country continue to center in places like Florida, California, and Texas, but the electoral college depletes their power by including senators in the count for electors (and because we have states that are smaller than the size of the average congressional district in terms of population, even their House seats have more weight in the electoral college). If you're worried about a president winning on a plurality, I also support RCV (in general-this is my preference), but it's time for the electoral college to die. I'm also in favor of abolishing the Senate all-together, but I think starting with the electoral college is the right way to go.
3. Implement the Wyoming Rule
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)
In addition to eliminating the electoral college, we need to implement the "Wyoming Rule" for the House. The House arbitrarily sitting at 435 members has racist roots (what part of American elections law doesn't?), meant to limit the power of black voters and immigrants in the 1920's, and it's kind of absurd that a congressional district in Rhode Island has 400,000 less people than a district in Montana does. So what I propose we do is impose what is called the "Wyoming Rule" to expand the number of people in the US House of Representatives.
Essentially what the Wyoming Rule is that Wyoming, currently the least populous state, would be the jumping off point for all seats in the House-Wyoming as of the 2010 census had about 560,000 people, and so we would use that number as the median number we'd want to achieve for congressional seats. Using the 2010 census, this would mean we'd have a grand total of 547 members of the House. Alaska would be the largest congressional district in the country, while South Dakota (which would get two seats under this plan) would be the smallest, but the ratio of largest seat to smallest seat would decrease by about 20%, a significant number. This is one of the few things on this list that could be passed without issue through Congress (it doesn't require a constitutional amendment, just a repeal of current law), so we need to discuss this in January if Biden/Senate D's prevail. Doing this prior to a census reapportionment (and with the potential for two new states) would also be ideal timing.
4. Make Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia States
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC)
This one seems easy to me, and is something we are probably going to see in the next year. Puerto Rico has a statehood referendum on the ballot in November, and I think if it passes (as limited polling indicates it will), it's time to admit Puerto Rico as a state. This isn't a Democratic or a Republican advantage for the record (it's not clear how Puerto Rico, whose partisans politics are very different from the rest of the United States' would fit in a two-party system, though they've in recent memory elected Democrats and Republicans to Congress), but if they want statehood, they should get it.
The same is true for the District of Columbia, who overwhelmingly wants statehood. There are some constitutional aspects of this (the Constitution asks for DC to remain its own separate territory), but those are easily diverted if you make the Capitol, the White House, and the National Mall (where no permanent residents live), their own national park/territory (and remove the electoral votes allocated to it), and made the remainder of residential DC its own state, you'd be covered. I'm quite frankly sick of having this conversation about DC. Maryland doesn't want to annex it back, neither do the people of DC, and there are more people in DC than in Wyoming or Vermont (so DC doesn't even trigger the Wyoming Rule). Yes, it would result in two more Democratic senators (unlike Puerto Rico, there is no chance this would be a swing state), but this isn't a problem for three reasons. One, only once in recent history (a six month period in 2001) would two more senators have changed the majority. Two, we have states like California & Idaho already that never vote statewide for the other party and we don't say anything against them. And three, a state's partisan decisions should not dictate whether they have rights-that's kind of textbook oppression, and as a result we need to make this happen next year (and if the Democrats win enough seats in the Senate, I suspect we will).
5. Limit Presidential Firing Abilities
FBI Director Robert Mueller
One of the clear problems of the Trump administration has been that the threat of losing one's job is making it easier for the president to attack certain sections of the government that might be investigating his own administration. I get why people would be reluctant to sign off on this, but one of the ways we need to curb this is through limiting presidential authority to fire certain figures in the government. The specific positions I'm thinking of are the Attorney General, the CDC Head, the Postmaster General, leaders of major National Intelligence bureaus (the DNI, CIA, and FBI, specifically), and all Inspectors General of federal agencies.
Under my plan, at the beginning of each term an incoming president would put forward names for all of these positions, and we'd wait to see if they are confirmed by the Senate. If they are confirmed, then these men & women would serve until the end of the presidential term-they would not be able to be fired by the president, even if they were investigating him or publicly disagreeing with him (like with the CDC). The power to fire these individuals would reside not with the president, but with Congress, and they would have to be formally impeached to be removed from office.
There are practical aspects here (specifically, what to do if the President wants to keep a US Attorney but the AG doesn't due to open insubordination, which I'd defer to Congress), but it would mean that someone like Jeff Sessions wouldn't have to worry about whether or not his job was at stake in handling the Mueller investigation, or that leaders in the CDC could publish their findings about Covid without worry about losing their jobs & being replaced by someone unqualified because the president looks bad. These are problems that we clearly have in our country if a President Trump can exploit them, and so I think we need to revisit presidential authority, and implement more checks-and-balances into our government. For those that protest that these figures are getting a lot of power even though they aren't elected...this is just for a four year term (they'd have to undergo renomination even if the president won reelection). Amy Coney Barrett wasn't elected by anyone, and she's about to get a lifetime appointment, so let's keep this in perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment