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#31
Sep 26 2020 06:30am
Quote (thundercock @ 25 Sep 2020 21:05)
This is why I'm fairly aggressive against libertarians, Andrew Yang, Sanders, etc. People like fender will shit on me for being a shill, but at the end of the day, EVERYTHING in our system is about consensus. That doesn't mean that their ideas are necessarily bad, it's just that discussing these things as it pertains to actionable policy is a waste of everyone's time.

Fundamentally, I believe that elections are the best term limits and that hard term limits are the wrong tool for our problems. I find that significantly increasing the size of Congressional staff would be an effective bulwark against lobbyists and the perceived anti-democratic interests they push. Gerrymandering is obviously an issue because most elections aren't competitive. It'd be interesting to look at voting scores of Congressmen from states that have independent commissions to see if these have any substantial effect. Really, ranked choice voting and/or multi-member districts are the panacea for this sort of thing but I think that's going to take several decades to implement. We'd be better served focusing on state level reforms I think.

Another thing to consider is why SCOTUS is even political. This should be by far the most boring branch of government yet people are obsessed with it. I think it becomes political because it allows certain issues to bypass the democratic process. Anytime there is an undemocratic ruling, it creates this positive feedback loop of rage because it seems "unfair." Frankly, the judiciary committee should probably just make a pact to cool things down and ensure that they vote "yes" strictly based on merit.


Great post, and I agree with most of it. Two points though:

- Elections indeed dont serve as a sufficient check on overlong Congress tenures - but that's not just due to gerrymandering, it's also due to political geography. Even without gerrymandering, Senators from states like MA or WY can serve as long as they want when they dont fuck things up colossally with their base.

- The main reason why the courts have become so political, imho, is that Congress has become so dysfunctional and gridlocked. Most of those deeply political cases appearing in front of the SCOTUS and the appellate courts only end up there because the policy dispute couldnt be resolved the way the founders envisioned, namely through the legislative process. The courts are inherently able to act, as long as there are no vacancies to create a 4-4 balance and such, they cannot become gridlocked. Simply put, the more policy disputes there are on which the courts have to weigh in, the more Congress has failed. Your point about courts allowing to bypass the democratic process in certain situation is a really good one though, I just think it applies to a relatively narrow set of cases/issues/situations and is not the main culprit for the politicization of the courts.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 26 2020 06:32am
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#32
Sep 26 2020 10:23am
It's interesting to me that many of the so-called radical Democratic proposals are efforts to democratize our system more.

Ending the filibuster, making DC and Puerto Rico states, expanding the Supreme Court, giving SC Justices terms, make voting more accessible, etc.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of all of these proposals... but it is an indictment of the Republican party, and right-wing thought generally, that many of these things are vehemently opposed by that side. They can't win the war of ideas, so they have to rely on structural advantages.

This post was edited by IceMage on Sep 26 2020 10:23am
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#33
Sep 26 2020 10:26am
Quote (IceMage @ Sep 26 2020 12:23pm)
It's interesting to me that all of the so-called radical Democratic proposals are efforts to democratize our system more.

Ending the filibuster, making DC and Puerto Rico states, expanding the Supreme Court, giving SC Justices terms, make voting more accessible, etc.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of all of these proposals... but it is an indictment of the Republican party, and right-wing thought generally, that many of these things are vehemently opposed by that side. They can't win the war of ideas, so they have to rely on structural advantages.


Should smaller states be completely at the mercy of larger ones? Democrats say yes. Republicans say no. We obviously know where our founders fell on the issue.

The United States was not intended to be a pure democracy, and every more radical democratization has not necessarily yielded the best results (see : direct election of US senators).

Your criticism starts with an assumption that "democratization" is inherently good. I would say that there's an enormous body of evidence that that's not the case.
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#34
Sep 26 2020 10:35am
Quote (bogie160 @ Sep 26 2020 11:26am)
Should smaller states be completely at the mercy of larger ones? Democrats say yes. Republicans say no. We obviously know where our founders fell on the issue.

The United States was not intended to be a pure democracy, and every more radical democratization has not necessarily yielded the best results (see : direct election of US senators).

Your criticism starts with an assumption that "democratization" is inherently good. I would say that there's an enormous body of evidence that that's not the case.


The founders also didn't want non-white or non-landowners to vote, so maybe trying to align the founders with Republicans is more apt than I initially thought....

That's sarcasm, since I know several who will read this and not understand it....

The point being that it's not just a "smaller states at the mercy of larger ones", our current system is hugely separated from the system our founders (who weren't a monolith) set up so trying to say "the founders wanted X and Republicans want X" is a ridiculous and pretty dishonest comparison.
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#35
Sep 26 2020 10:44am
Quote (bogie160 @ Sep 26 2020 12:26pm)
Should smaller states be completely at the mercy of larger ones? Democrats say yes. Republicans say no. We obviously know where our founders fell on the issue.

The United States was not intended to be a pure democracy, and every more radical democratization has not necessarily yielded the best results (see : direct election of US senators).

Your criticism starts with an assumption that "democratization" is inherently good. I would say that there's an enormous body of evidence that that's not the case.


The small states vs large states is an academic argument used in place of "if the massive structural advantages are taken away from the party I agree with, the voters are going to pick people I disagree with".

There's a lot of space between what we have now and "pure democracy". The Senate and electoral college are here to stay, and they are both anti-democratic.

That's an admission I wish more Republicans and right-wingers would make. It's kind of sad though... conservatives/right-wingers in the past were interested in persuasion. These days that's largely not the case.
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