ALEC’s scary plan for electing your senators

[Skeptic Ginger]

Pay attention. I am not saying Bob was right. I'm saying that's what he meant. Do you understand the difference?

No, you probably don't.

So my saying, "Why did I vote for who?"* was too subtle for you?

*

IOW, Bob, you are wrong about who I voted for.

 

[Ziggurat]

So my saying, "Why did I vote for who?"* was too subtle for you?

*

IOW, Bob, you are wrong about who I voted for.

You still don't get it. I made no claims about who you voted for. If I'm right about what Bob meant, that doesn't mean that HE was right, and I never claimed he was.

This isn't complicated, and yet you can't grasp it.

 

[acbytesla]

Yes, it's much easier to buy into a vast right-wing conspiracy theory.

I'm not personally a big fan of the proposal, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. If senators are elected by their state legislatures, then they become more beholden to state legislators, who could quite easily take their job away if it is felt that they are not representing the state diligently enough. As things stand today, senators are more beholden to their national party.

The problem as I see it is that the system is open to corruption. It's relatively hard to buy your way into the Senate because you have to buy millions of votes. Under this proposal, you might only have to buy a few votes. Wikipedia notes that at least one senator was removed from office when it was discovered that he had bought votes in the Montana state legislature.

Why do you keep referring to it as a conspiracy? Why not say 'it is a strategy' for accumulating power?

Do you really believe it has anything to do with anything other than promoting a conservative agenda?

But it doesn't matter. No way does it go any further than wishful thinking

 

[Brainster]

Why do you keep referring to it as a conspiracy? Why not say 'it is a strategy' for accumulating power?

Do you really believe it has anything to do with anything other than promoting a conservative agenda?

For varying definitions of promoting a conservative agenda. Might it work out to the Republicans' benefit, by giving them more senators? It might. It might also work to the Democrats' benefit by upping the ante in state legislature races.

But it doesn't matter. No way does it go any further than wishful thinking

Here we agree. It's like the endless pontificating on getting rid of the electoral college--ain't gonna happen.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Won't happen because, as of now, it is simply peculiar conservative philosophy. Back when the amendment was passed there were regular deadlocks, complete absences, and corruption allegations, as well as a decades long grassroots campaign.

 

[Solitaire]

Not going to happen. It's a pipe dream. Far harder than Trump being elected.

Article Five of the United States Constitution detailed the two-step process
for amending the nation's frame of government. Amendments must be properly
Proposed and Ratified before becoming operative. This process was designed
to strike a balance between the excesses of constant change and inflexibility.

So I did a search for Article Five and found this.

Article V Convention Advocates Admits 1 Downside To Plan

Currently, 12 states have passed a Convention of States application calling
for a convention to limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.
Nine more states have passed such an application in one chamber of their
legislature. A total of 34 states need to pass an application to force Congress
to call a convention.

Coburn is optimistic the COS project will soon usher in a convention.

“I think it’s going to take us two or three more years,” he asserted.
“I think next year we’ll probably get 10 states.”

So, if I do the math right they will have: 12 + (10 / 2) = 17 states.

 

[lomiller]

Gerrymandering is not a problem. If it is by political affiliation, all you have to do is convince people of the opposite affiliation to vote for you.

Another seriously stupid take from our resident anti-democracy shill. If you’ve already convinced a majority of people of something rules that are created to allow the remaining minority to control the country anyway are bad.

 

[Belz...]

All arguments in favor of this idea are fundamentally anti-democracy. Period.

Well, some things shouldn't be democratic, or not entirely democratic, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The goal of the founders of this country wasn't to empower state governments. It was to empower people.

And yet plenty of branches of government were originally non-democratic.

 

[Hellbound]

Another seriously stupid take from our resident anti-democracy shill. If you’ve already convinced a majority of people of something rules that are created to allow the remaining minority to control the country anyway are bad.

Just to add a bit to the problem of gerrymandering with an example. This is highly simplified, mainly to illustrate the effect.

Say we have a state that is 58% democratic, 42% republican. There's no rules to limit gerrymandering. We have to divide the state into 10 equal voting districts, and we want each one to have about 10% of the population.

So, we make 7 districts that each contain 6% of the republicans and 4% of the democrats. The remaining 3 districts will all be 100% democrat.

Now when voting a 16% popular lead in democrats becomes a 7-3 win for republicans. You could reverse it too, if the democrats made the districts for their benefit, and do 6% democrats in 8 districts and 10% in a 9th, with the republicans making up the difference. A significant minority now becomes marginalized at 9 to 1.

That's the problem with gerrymandering (and incidentally, also why you get presidents elected who lost the popular vote; the states they won were tight races, the [fewer] ones they lost were landslides, more or less).

 

[lomiller]

The point of having states elect senators is to push more government power back to the states.

Not likely. The pattern of Republicans undermining the basic principle of majority rule and turn the US into a nation where a small minority can rule against the wishes of the majority is becoming too well established to accept such a flimsy claim at face value.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Another seriously stupid take from our resident anti-democracy shill. If you’ve already convinced a majority of people of something rules that are created to allow the remaining minority to control the country anyway are bad.

A) I'm not a shill. There is no profit in it.

B) democracy is bad

 

[Ziggurat]

Not likely. The pattern of Republicans undermining the basic principle of majority rule and turn the US into a nation where a small minority can rule against the wishes of the majority is becoming too well established to accept such a flimsy claim at face value.

This isn't coming from the Republican party. And it's unlikely to get much support from the Republican party either.

 

[acbytesla]

Well, some things shouldn't be democratic, or not entirely democratic, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.


And yet plenty of branches of government were originally non-democratic.

Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

But the United States doesn't have a democracy. It has a republic based on democratic principles. Democracy itself is unwieldy and can be just as tyrannical as a dictatorship. That said the people are the ultimate check against unbridled power.

vox populi vox dei

I worry when some believe that power should be taken away from the people. There is a certain arrogance to that idea.

 

[lomiller]

This isn't coming from the Republican party.

Pure pedantry. ALEC is a right wing organization that actively promotes the interests of the Republican party, the fact that they are not formally part of the Republican party is irrelevant and quite frankly a little silly.

 

[lomiller]

B) democracy is bad

Minority rule is worse than democracy in every way.

 

[WilliamSeger]

It doesn't. It does shift power from the people in that state to that state's government.

It's not a merit. It's a power grab.

Exactly right. I remember when the Supreme Court overruled Colorado's Amendment 5 that prohibited the state and municipal governments from adding sexual orientation to anti-discrimination laws, conservatives had a hissy fit about "states rights" and how we needed put "power closer to the people" rather than be dictated to by Washington. In fact, the amendment movement started because the more progressive communities (e.g. "The Peoples Republic of Boulder") had already added those clauses, so conservatives used state-wide majoritarianism to take that power away from them.

Most people don't pay much attention to their state government, which is why corruption is far more prevalent there than the federal government.

 

[Belz...]

I worry when some believe that power should be taken away from the people. There is a certain arrogance to that idea.

That's nice. But it doesn't address the argument, which is that the short-term whims of the electorate shouldn't determine everything. We don't vote on scientific conclusions, for instance, nor do we directly elect Supreme Court justices to represent their voters rather than the law.

That's why full democracy isn't a good idea. Not everything is a matter of public opinion. It does not follow that democracy isn't a good idea in a limited form (which is what most democracies in the world use). So I don't understand your comment above.

 

[Hellbound]

Quite frankly, I find a lot of problems with democracy. Even in the early days, it was recognized that the success of a democracy depended heavily on having an educated an motivated voting populace, that would vote their conscience. Here, we've gotten so far into this adversarial two-party system, with most people simply voting a party line (I may not agree with all their views, but you have to pick one or the other to get anyone elected...). Not that I'd know how to fix it, but I've pretty much lost any faith that the U.S. government actually represents the people, or even that if it did that would be a good thing.

Eh, just getting cynical as I age, most likely. Ignore the curmudgeon in the corner.

And get off my lawn!

 

[BobTheCoward]

Minority rule is worse than democracy in every way.

I don't advocate minority rule.

 

[Belz...]

I don't advocate minority rule.

Well if you think rule of the majority is bad, what's left?