Features like the Electoral College can lead to different incentives in close elections, but even that does not systematically favor Republicans. As recently as 2012, the Electoral College favored Democrats. Obama would have won in 2012 even if he had lost the popular vote: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/did-democrats-get-lucky... ("President Obama won the Electoral College fairly decisively last year despite a margin of just 3.8 percentage points in the national popular vote. In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney.")
You seem to try to imply that they are not important to legislation, which is just silly.
Yeah, but conditions have changed somewhat since 1787 — not least, what genteel white Southern ladies used to sometimes refer to as The Late Unpleasantness (1861-65).
> As recently as 2012, the Electoral College favored Democrats. Obama would have won in 2012 even if he had lost the popular vote
Except he didn't lose the popular vote. That "honor" is reserved for the last 2 republican presidents (2000 & 2016)
Because it clearly shows the president is not picked by the people but through an abstraction that steals voting power from some and gives it to others.
> The popular vote was never intended to decide presidential elections.
And black people counted as 3/5th, women couldn’t vote, black people couldn’t vote, the entire bill of rights, and more were “never intended”. That’s such a silly argument.
That "abstraction" is known as "degressive proportionality" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degressive_proportionality], which is also used by the EU to apportion seats in the European Parliament. The US's system aims to make sure that the President is elected by a broad base of voters across disparate states, the same way the EU elects its Chief Executive (today that's Ursula von der Leyen) in a manner that dilutes the power of highly populated Member States. You generally use counter-majoritarian institutions like equal representation and/or degressive proportionality if what you're trying to build is a Federal union, and not a unitary state. The United States is not and has never been a unitary state. The individual States are unitary in nature; it's impossible to elect the Governor of a State without winning the popular vote, in that State.
> And black people counted as 3/5th, women couldn’t vote, black people couldn’t vote, the entire bill of rights, and more were “never intended”. That’s such a silly argument.
This is a non-sequitur. The counter-majoritarian institutions of the Federal government aren't unique to the US (see: Australia's Senate, Switzerland's Council of States, Argentina's Senate, Mexico's Senate, the EU), and is certainly unrelated to the very real evils of slavery or disenfranchisement of Black people. It's just a way to organize large heterogeneous polities. The same way that it doesn't make sense to invalidate the Constitution's right to a free/fair trial just because it also happened to include some unrelated bad things, so too is slavery entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the US ought to be a Federal union. The core question at hand is: should the US be a unitary country or should it be a Federal country. As long as it's a Federal country (i.e. the status quo), you will have counter-majoritarian institutions at the Federal level.
Even in Canada, the Prime Minister's party won fewer votes than the rival party, but still won more seats in Parliament. In 2019(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election) the Liberal party won ~6M votes and won 157 seats in Parliament, while the Conservative Party won ~6.2M votes but only won 121 seats. The same thing happened in 2021 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_federal_election... ~5.5M votes to 160 seats vs ~5.7M votes to 119 seats. This means that the plurality vote getter did not win the plurality of seats, and thereby did not enjoy the possibility to drive the formation of a majority coalition. The reason for this is that many of the Conservative Party's votes were clustered in specific parts of Canada, and there were diminishing returns to driving up large majorities in those clusters; you have to appeal to multiple disparate clusters. This is a feature and not a bug of Canada's Federal system, because the goal is to optimize for the breadth of voters, not just the depth of voters, especially at the Federal level where policy impacts everybody, and not just a single state/province.
If people want to talk in an echo chamber (or to themselves) , than by all means, they should make every assumption they want.
If you want to talk about the issue, then address the root: Should states have power beyond their proportional population in congress and presidential elections?
This is a much more interesting discussion.
For congress I say no, but I would support states allocating their electoral college to match how their state votes, like Maine or Nebraska, opposed to winner take all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_12th_congre...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_12th_congre...
[2] https://www.nccivitas.org/2016/a-look-back-sheds-light-on-re...
And Republicans in California and New York feel like their vote doesn’t matter when it comes to the Presidential popular vote. So why do you act like that matters?
> Except he didn't lose the popular vote.
The point is that you can’t complain that the Electoral College is systematically stacked against Democrats.
Cherry-picked stats are banal.
Democrats won almost 5 million more votes in the CURRENT election, which is more than the entire population of Mississippi and West Virginia combined. That's why it's not unfair to claim a "minority rule" at play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Re...
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_pop...
For Row. Court took power away from itself and gave it back to elected officials.
You can vote for those elected officials. This is democracy working as intended.
Not when elected officials can pick their voters and throw out the election results they don't like. Please join the rest of us in reality and not the la la land where our system is working or even healthy.
The elected officials never lost this power, if congress didn't want the EPA to do something they could draft and vote on a bill to that effect by Tuesday.
The united states has never been a democracy. The united states was designed with a state being a nation, each nation joined a federation (the united states). This is similar to the EU (they're following the same model).
Your local governments still have WAY more power over your life than the federal government. Think about your daily life, when you drive do you worry about speeding in town? If you do, that's because your local government. Local taxes, approvals for construction, education, health services, power, etc is all decided locally.
Local governments are decided within a community, they can ignore federal laws. Local officials are decided via a democratic way, direct votes. IMO that's actually becoming stronger, as the federal government weakens, it returns the power to where it belongs people and local government.
This was true a 100 years ago, i don't know if it's true anymore. My retirement, how much i pay in taxes, can I get healthcare, what does that healthcare look like, how much pollutants can the power plant produce, how safe is the car I drive, and many more questions are determined by the federal government.
Each state has the same weight in the senate because they are all equal players in that space.
The house has the bias towards population.
Most regulation is supposed to take place at the state level.
Except they represent wildly different populations and all have equal say in the senate.
> The house has the bias towards population.
One that has been capped by the DC Admission Act and perverted by gerrymandering.
> Most regulation is supposed to take place at the state level.
Says who? How in the world does that work for things like pollution (which isn't stopped at state lines) or basic rights such as the right to love who you love and/or get married?
Says the Constitution... 10th Ammendment: any power not explicitly enumerated to congress is left to the states.
Article 1 Section 8 enumerates the powers that the federal government has, along with some granted through ammendments.
How is a state supposed to, on it's own, handle regulation against pollution from it's neighbors? How do they stop the state upstream? How do they they stop the state next door?
You honestly think it's a good system to have congress be the ones legislating on every new way companies come up with to pollute?
> let it run wild.
We have very different definitions of "running wild".
All of this assume a functional congress which we absolutely don't have. I'm working with the cards dealt, you want to imagine some pie-in-the-sky idea of how congress should function. I agree it should function better but I don't see how letting companies pollute more is somehow a "win" and it certainly won't motivate the people in congress who don't even believe in climate change. All of this thinking seems to completely ignore that we need 60 senators to pass any legislation (due to the filibuster), a chamber of congress that is in no way representative of the people.
Absolutely not, and nobody (including SCOTUS in their ruling) says that they have to. Congress can still delegate authority to agencies, but at a certain point the agencies are limited in what they can do unilaterally without specific legislation.
> All of this assume a functional congress which we absolutely don't have. I'm working with the cards dealt, you want to imagine some pie-in-the-sky idea of how congress should function.
I agree that Congress is entirely dysfunctional. But I think that this sort of unconstitutional power that they've been so happy to delegate to the Executive has absolutely played a role in getting us the dysfunctional Congress we have today.
You can call it "pie-in-the-sky" but letting Congress continue to skate by without doing their jobs and letting Executive branch agencies unconstitutionally usurp the authorities of the other two branches is something I'm glad to see put to an end.
We can hold Congress accountable. I can't say the same for nameless, faceless bureaucrats.
A lot of the "it's the right interpretation" crowd seems to be completely uninterested in who gets hurt in the meantime and seem to look at it as if it's just cold logic executed in a vacuum. These ruling have real consequences and no amount of "congress should act" or "this was their job"-thinking will fix that. It also doesn't address the outsized power that some states/parties have, I grow less and less sure we are actually able to hold congress accountable.
Though I will say I hope for the future you foresee, I just can't see it becoming reality.
I do not agree that impacts states equally nor do I buy into the premise that states should have an equal say. We aren't seeing the tyranny of the majority, we are seeing the tyranny of the minority between the filibuster and the senate not being representative of the people.
As for the house I find it representative of the people in name only. By capping the total members we have done a gross injustice to people by letting the ratio of rep->constituant grow to an unreasonable number. Along with our two party system I certainly don't feel as if I'm represented by my senators or my rep.
Again, I understand how things currently "work", I'm just saying it's a shit status quo. I also understand this is just the opinion of a random person online and I'm not asking you to argue against it (though you're welcome to disagree).
If democracy died every time somebody got mad at the outcomes and made claims like that, it would have been dead before it even started, and subsequently re-died every year since. What exactly was so democractic about SCOTUS permitting the executive branch to write their own laws anyway? Writing laws is meant to be the job of Congress. You can claim Congress is insufficiently democratic due to gerrymandering, but less democratic than the judicial and executive branches? Give me a break. Congress remains the most democratic of the three, and this SCOTUS decision gives power back to Congress.
> the US is far more polarized and contentious than it ever was before.
This is completely divorced from reality. Everything that has happened in the past 10 years is a mere candle to the bonfire that was the Civil War. You must be discounting datapoints you didn't live through if you really believe what you've said here. Shit man, the present state of affairs is tame even compared to the 60s and 70s.
The decision to even hear the case is radical and affirming would represent a massive shift away from democracy in the US as we know it.
>Issue: Whether a state’s judicial branch may nullify the regulations governing the “Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives ... prescribed ... by the Legislature thereof,” and replace them with regulations of the state courts’ own devising, based on vague state constitutional provisions purportedly vesting the state judiciary with power to prescribe whatever rules it deems appropriate to ensure a “fair” or “free” election.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/moore-v-harper-2...