Happy Saturday and early labor day wishes to all. The weather here in northern Virginia is incredible today. I hope you all get to enjoy some sun this long weekend.
I was reading REDESIGNING DEMOCRACY: More Ideas for Better Rules, a book by swiss economist Hans Gersbach, this week. It got me rethinking some of what I’ve written about potential reforms over the past ~year. Not that I think I was wrong, but that I believe we need to do more, and soon.
So here are five ideas for reforms I think would help us a great deal.
Note that this post is not a manifesto (it is quite short), but rather a draft of reforms I hope can foster good conversation in the comments. Additionally, everything in this post is my ideal — I leave all remarks on pragmatism for another time. Indeed, some of these proposals are quite impossible given our current politics. But it helps to start from the maximal position and work back to the optimal combination of improvement and expediency. I am also limiting the list in scope; Fox News is normatively bad for democracy and probably should not exist, but I am focused on political reforms rather than the ills of unregulated corporate media.
Expand the House of Representatives and use state- or muti-district-level proportional representation to assign membership via party lists. Among other things, this would have the effect of increasing the magnitude of the electoral connection — making legislators “closer” and more responsive to the will of their constituents — and deflating the extremely high incentives for bad behavior in two-party, zero-sum politics. Affective polarization is generally lower in countries with proportional representation.
Abolish the legislative filibuster and reduce the responsibilities of the Senate to providing consent for Constitutional changes regarding state-level powers. Elect members with ranked-choice voting. Our political system awards landed interests and geographic polarization more than it ought to. There are some benefits to a bicameral legislature that are worth keeping, however, so we shouldn’t get rid of the Senate entirely. But we can reduce its responsibilities and improve the psychology of its leaders and electors. Additionally, it might also make sense to have some sort of inflator for the votes large states get to cast in the chamber, so that jurisdictions with 800,000 voters cannot overwhelm those with 39,000,000. Perhaps member_vote = 1 + √(population) ?
Abolish the Electoral College.Our political system is also too skeptical of the people. There is little reason in modern times to support a system that will give more weight to the voters that just so happen to live in marginal, medium-sized, as the Electoral College does. The chief concern is that the executive has too much power for the voters to make a “wrong” decision. but by definition, the will of the majority is usually "right”. So the solution can come in the form of Congress reasserting its rights to many Article One powers, such as in temporary war. Hopefully, in a world with a lower chamber with more representatives distributed more fairly, the House would feel emboldened to do so — and the Senate would not stand in the way.
Enact federal standards for voting rights, especially in (a) building a system to provide and require federal voter identity cards and (b) for partisan fairness in redistricting. If you have geographic polarization, you can more easily have gerrymandering. That matters less in a system with proportional representation, but it can still matter on the margins (especially if you use multi-district assignment of representatives). We should do our best to stamp out the adverse incentives that from elected officials selecting their voters, rather than the other way around. It would also help reform efforts a great deal of people had faith in the process, and giving everyone a national voter ID card (and requiring that card be presented at the polls) may help.
Revoke lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices and expand the size of the bench. The politicization and gamification of Supreme Court nominees is a great example of how factionalism breaks the current design of the Constitution. We cannot completely remove the existence of factions in our government — and there are even some benefits to having (multiple, preferably!) polarized parties — so the better move is to decrease their ability to poison our institutions. Decreasing the stakes of the high judiciary could help. You can do that by increasing the circulation of justices so that every executive is guaranteed one or two per term, and by shrinking each justice’s individual role to decide cases. It would also be smart to constitutionalize our way out of the shadow docket.
Alright, five is good enough for now. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What do you think I have missed?
“I can’t win under the current rules so let’s change the rules” remains a popular position.
Democrats are lazy if their only solution to temporary political coalitions being inefficiently distributed is to change the system. There’s no point to a senate under your rules. You’re just pretending to care about it to make yourself seem more reasonable.
We've talked before about splitting executive power between the President and a more powerful Speaker of the House. I think the President's executive power is too great, especially given what we've seen when Trump was in office.
This is a pet peeve of mine: I cannot see a viable third party emerging under the current election system. I don't understand why people believe a third party is the answer. I do not think the Republican Party will go extinct as some do (I think that is a pretty crazy idea).
“I can’t win under the current rules so let’s change the rules” remains a popular position.
Democrats are lazy if their only solution to temporary political coalitions being inefficiently distributed is to change the system. There’s no point to a senate under your rules. You’re just pretending to care about it to make yourself seem more reasonable.
Great list. Even two or three would be progress. Worth working for.
5 great ideas. Zero chance of any ever coming to be.
Elliott, can you elaborate on #1?
Hi Elliott,
These are great ideas!
We've talked before about splitting executive power between the President and a more powerful Speaker of the House. I think the President's executive power is too great, especially given what we've seen when Trump was in office.
This is a pet peeve of mine: I cannot see a viable third party emerging under the current election system. I don't understand why people believe a third party is the answer. I do not think the Republican Party will go extinct as some do (I think that is a pretty crazy idea).
I hope you are having a good weekend,
Elliot
How would a good professional, e.g. Elliott Morris, rate the likelihood of any of these occurring?
Also, a perpetual motion machine, squaring the circle, and a philosopher king.
How would a good professional,