McConnell has done more harm to the USA than any other politician I can think of in recent memory.
Seeing trump as a cause and not a symptom or as the leading disaster for American democracy is a very common distraction.
McConnell is the heart of all of it. He is nothing but an appetite for power. He’ll do anything. No morals whatsoever (and I say that neutrally, as a fact and not a moral judgement.)
And he wins.
Please remember that luck (chance) is an important and sometimes decisive component in conflict. Today it seems the Republicans are lucky; who knows what the future will bring.
Regardless of which side you're on - I don't think that's a worthwhile basis for political discourse and shouldn't be the modus operandi for what basically determines the development of a country.
Then again, you're right of course - the fact that McConnell and other don't actually overstep in legal terms just shows that the rule set isn't suitable for the current political climate in a time which is shaped by disregard of norms and mutual respect.
Had Reid not pulled the 'nuclear option' the filibuster from the minority would stop the confirmation.
EDIT: One might argue that Mr. McConnell correctly anticipated the desires of the USA electorate because in November of 2016 they expressed a wish for more conservative judges in federal courts. If the voting public was outraged by McConnell's actions, one might expect they'd vote accordingly.
This doesn't follow. There is no way to amend the Constitution by a national popular vote so the opinion of the majority of Americans is irrelevant to the question of any Amendment's passage.
A more likely reason such an Amendment wouldn't exist is that a majority of states favor the status quo, because most states are small and benefit from their current outsized representation in government.
Source: Article V
Edit: Corrected 3/4 -> 2/3
Edit2: I stand corrected. The Bayh-Celler proposal was passed by the House and filibustered in the Senate in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...
I believe this is factually incorrect. I'll offer Article V of the Constitution as my citation. Do you have a contrary citation to support this claim?
The major geographic divide in US politics is urban vs rural, not state vs state
He's Senate Majority Leader. That's literally exactly what he does.
Besides, he's whipped his party so hard they basically never break rank. Even Mitt "I'm not like the others" Romney votes with him nearly 100% of the time.
Take a look at any number of votes in the past year. There are plenty of Republicans who don't vote on party line (Republican and Democratic)
There absolutely are, they just happen to be a side-channel in this particular system.
We thankfully don’t (yet) live in a country where New York, LA, and Chicago control everything.
So much better!
What choice would you have made in 1787?
The Reapportionment Act of 1929 is the cause of the worst distortions.
It fixes the HoR at 435, and is the main cause of the gross imbalance of power.
Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.
As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.
So Wyoming gets 4 EC votes.
So... WY gets 4 EC votes with it's 578k population.
My state of NC only gets 15 with it's population of almost 11M.
In what universe is that fair or just?
Those states are 20% of the population and 17% of the EC.
By taking advantage of the tiny states the EC can be won with less than 30% of the vote
https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-pres...
We were supposed to be a group of states with a fairly limited federal government. I think it’s really unfortunate that’s been largely done away with.
McConnell rules through the consent of half the senate, not alone.
This is literally the purpose of the senate. We are a union of states, and the senate is where each state is granted equal power. One could argue that states should have been defined differently, but the point was that large states should not have absolute control over small states.
Edit: I'm loving the downvotes without comments. They're clear indication that some people are either not arguing in good faith or that they simply do not understand how and why the us is set up the way it is.
This is nonsense. Trump got three million fewer votes than Clinton.