6 ms·

The consent was given in the ballot box, No?

TehCorwiz 9y ago
The FCC is appointed, not elected. And the current President, who appoints the FCC chairperson, lost the popular election by 3 million votes.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 9y ago
  >And the current President, who appoints the FCC chairperson, lost the popular election by 3 million votes. There is no "popular election" in the American system. Consent is, and has always been, given by proxy through the electoral college, as defined in the US Constitution. If you want to invalidate Trump's authority because of that, you have to invalidate every election prior as well, and claim that the US government has never governed with the consent of the people. Mind you, I don't like Trump at all, but to imply that his authority is any less legitimate than prior Presidents would be specious, it's not his fault if the system that grants him power isn't designed to enforce popular will, it's the electorate's fault for not having changed it. Or, to quote the legal scholar Ice-T, don't hate the player, hate the game.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    It is true the EC elected Trump, but the popular vote is often used to demonstrate a mandate based on the will of the people i.e. "The people have spoken and this is their decision." Well in November the people spoke and the man in the White House was not their decision. It was the decision of the electoral college. A system, btw, which was designed to give majority slave owning states a greater say in Presidential elections. We are not saying Donald Trump should not be President (for this reason), we are saying his agenda does not reflect the will of the people, and he certainly did not campaign on repealing net neutrality, so its hard to argue this issue was already decided by the voters. What he did campaign on was "drain the swamp". A Verizon crony working to dismantle consumer protections in favor of Verizon seems like exactly the opposite of that.
    - leereeves 9y ago
      Less than 50% voted for either candidate. Without ranked-choice voting we don't actually know whether Hillary or Trump was preferred by the majority of voters. (It's also quite possible that if we had a ranked-choice system instead of the two party system, someone other than those two would have won.)
    - ModernMech 9y ago
      > Less than 50% voted for either candidate. True. Another way of saying this is 64% of voters cast a vote for someone other than the President. This is reflected in his historically low approval ratings [1], and public opinions on both the healthcare push [2] and the current tax reform push [3]. But if we assume for a moment that the election was a mandate for the President to implement his agenda, we have to also note he isn't implementing the agenda on which he ran. He promised a wall paid for by Mexico, and several times has asked Congress to appropriate money for the wall. He promised he would not touch entitlements, and supported GOP measures to slash medicaid. He promised to drain the swamp and appointed interests to his cabinet with an agenda contrary to the agencies they represent. He promised to release his tax returns if elected and then claimed his election meant the voters decided he didn't have to. He promised to get tough on China and then capitulated to them over a cake dessert. This whole "mandate" idea, if we are going to accept it, should only be a mandate to implement the agenda on which the candidate campaigned. It cannot be used as a carte blanche for an elected official to turn around and do whatever they want. To be clear, I'm not saying how a President governs and how a President campaigns should be identical. There's room for improvisation and changing ideas. But the fact a President was elected cannot be used as a justification for every action his/her administration takes. [1]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/... [2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/28/suffolk-poll-obamacare-trump-senate-health-care-plan/103249346/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/28/suff... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-poll/fewer-than-a-third-of-americans-back-trump-tax-plan-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN1CT2TD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-poll/fewer-than-a...
  - mrob 9y ago
    And if there was a popular election, then there's no guarantee the result would be the same. Under the current system, the candidates focus their campaign on the voters with the most influence ("swing states"). Maximizing popular vote would require different methods.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Sadly, Ice-T, used a false dichotomy. We can hate the player and the game. And often should. But you define the game too narrowly. The technical mechanism of the election to the presidency is indeed currently via the electoral college. That's one game. One deeper game is mandate. If an election result is strong, the victor is seen as having a mandate to strongly pursue their agenda. See, for example, Bush's claim that his 3 million vote margin gave him political capital that he could spend as he pleased. [1] A still-deeper game is around the rules of the system. We ended up with electors chosen by the states as a dodge around the problems created by slavery [2], and because framers weren't sure the general populace would have sufficient education and information to choose the president. But that didn't work well in practice, so after assorted changes mid-1800s we ended up with what we have now, pseudo-direct elections implemented through the existing system of electors. [3] That's an obvious compromise chosen because nobody wanted to go to all the work of switching to fully direct elections. But we've had two failures this century. If Trump is a sufficiently bad president, I'm sure we'll change this. (E.g., imagine him starting a pointless war with North Korea that ends up with Seattle getting nuked. People would be very eager to Do Something, and the states could fix this without any federal changes.) This is driven by a deeper level still. American government is "government of the people, by the people, for the people". We hire temp workers to take care of the details for us. Trump's job isn't to represent Trump. It's to represent us. All of us. And, I'd argue, the best part of all of us. To the extent he fails at that, it's his fault and ours. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-claims-mandate-sets-2nd-term-goals-I-2637116.php http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-claims-mandate-s... [2] http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=002/llfr002.db&recNum=60&itemLink=r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28fr00218%29%29%230020061&linkText=1 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=00... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Evolution_of_selection_plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
    - mygo 9y ago
      But I don’t want to have to wait until Seattle gets nuked before we do something about our problems.
      - 9y ago
- dominotw 9y ago
  > lost the popular election by 3 million votes Oh no not this again.
- dgzl 9y ago
  I really wish people would stop using the "he/she won/lost by 3 million popularity votes" line. Something I don't think people realize: 3 million people isn't that many. Considering there are ~325M American citizens, ~231M are eligible to vote, with ~63M and ~66M actual votes going to the Donald and Hilldog respectfully, the margin between the two runners is pretty small. The Donald collected 27.2% of eligible votes, and Hilldog collected 28.5%. At best, Hillary won popular vote by less than two percent of the available votes, which even though it's a victory, it's still very very close.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    > Something I don't think people realize: 3 million people isn't that many. It's not that many in relative terms, but it's certainly a lot of people. It's more than the population of some countries and 20 US states.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      > It's more than the population of some countries and 20 US states. That last part (the margin of victory was tiny relative to some state populations) provides valuable insight into how broken the Electoral College is as a selection system. (I don't mean that small-in-population states are solely responsible for electoral skew, but they're a good example of the problem.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 9y ago
  Nope, he just got 3 million votes less - but the way the voting system works is that absolute number of votes doesn't count, how they're distributed in states count. The current President didn't design this system, and the opponent could just as well have benefited by it (and previous presidents had). Lacking direct democracy, it's not even necessarily a bad system in itself (whatever one believes for the current president). It might even be more representative of the average American than the popular vote (if e.g. the majority of the 3 million votes are concentrated in a particular state or two. IIRC the President got something like 50 million votes? Imagine an exaggerated (but possible) case where 3 states push 50 million votes for one side, and the 49 rest of them push 47 million votes for the other side between them. Would you say that would be a good result, to have a president that has a majority that is based on 3 out of 52 states? It might not have been as bad in the elections, but a huge part of those 3 million votes where mostly from one state, not distributed more or less evenly across the country. Which is the kind of issue the idea behind the election system wanted to avoid.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
travmatt 9y ago
Pretty much, elections have consequences and interpretations of federal regulations is the quintessential example of that. There are means by which the other branches could restrain or affect these interpretations, but I have a hard time believing most voters didn’t or couldn’t ascertain the intentions of most candidates regarding net neutrality this past election cycle.
- wfo 9y ago
  When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Every person who has voted for a president has voted against their own policy positions, often hundreds or thousands of their own policy positions. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN). It is of course ridiculous to suggest that people voted for Trump hoping he would destroy a free and open Internet; we have clear and incontrovertible evidence that the vast, vast majority of citizens (90%? 80%? I think it depends on which poll you take) hates what he is doing. The president has a good-faith responsibility to represent the citizens and when they come down on an issue like this which was non existent or tangential to his campaign so fervently it's most certainly a betrayal of that consent. When he tries to build a wall? Sure, he definitely has consent there. On NN? Not a chance. He does have power though.
  - travmatt 9y ago
    >When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN). I don’t disagree with you on this at all, but again I think it boils down to ‘elections have consequences’. I don’t think that just because an issue was judged not as critical by voters (and therefore given relatively short shrift) means the interpretation is any less valid. That’s the function of the powerful executive branch made around the time of the new deal-ww2 era reforms, to manage complex federal issues. Just because I disagree with the decision and think most other Americans do as well doesn’t mean I think the president shouldn’t have the ability to make politically unpopular decisions.
colanderman 9y ago
You say that like Trump ran on a platform of deregulating internet service providers, as opposed to populist rage. If anything, this election cycle demonstrates that the executive holds far too much power, that it can act with impunity at the behest of lobbyists on issues unrelated to, and in conflict with, the issues which drove voters to elect it.
- dboreham 9y ago
  In this case the problem isn't with the executive though, but in congress (where's the outrage from our representatives?). Actually my senator is outraged, but he doesn't have a big telco presence in his state. Congress certainly has the power to stop this.
mindslight 9y ago
One bit of input is clearly insufficient to express any actual opinion, so this idea that the citizens act through the ballot box is a reversal of the actual effect. Rather, the ballot box is how consent is manufactured - "I voted for this, therefore I must support it". Try making the argument for net neutrality with some Trump groupies and you'll soon find the simplistic attitude that whatever is happening must be good because it's going against those entrenched insiders at the FCC. Permanent revolution, indeed.

The FCC is appointed, not elected. And the current President, who appoints the FCC chairperson, lost the popular election by 3 million votes.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
krapp 9y ago
>And the current President, who appoints the FCC chairperson, lost the popular election by 3 million votes. There is no "popular election" in the American system. Consent is, and has always been, given by proxy through the electoral college, as defined in the US Constitution. If you want to invalidate Trump's authority because of that, you have to invalidate every election prior as well, and claim that the US government has never governed with the consent of the people. Mind you, I don't like Trump at all, but to imply that his authority is any less legitimate than prior Presidents would be specious, it's not his fault if the system that grants him power isn't designed to enforce popular will, it's the electorate's fault for not having changed it. Or, to quote the legal scholar Ice-T, don't hate the player, hate the game.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  It is true the EC elected Trump, but the popular vote is often used to demonstrate a mandate based on the will of the people i.e. "The people have spoken and this is their decision." Well in November the people spoke and the man in the White House was not their decision. It was the decision of the electoral college. A system, btw, which was designed to give majority slave owning states a greater say in Presidential elections. We are not saying Donald Trump should not be President (for this reason), we are saying his agenda does not reflect the will of the people, and he certainly did not campaign on repealing net neutrality, so its hard to argue this issue was already decided by the voters. What he did campaign on was "drain the swamp". A Verizon crony working to dismantle consumer protections in favor of Verizon seems like exactly the opposite of that.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    Less than 50% voted for either candidate. Without ranked-choice voting we don't actually know whether Hillary or Trump was preferred by the majority of voters. (It's also quite possible that if we had a ranked-choice system instead of the two party system, someone other than those two would have won.)
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    > Less than 50% voted for either candidate. True. Another way of saying this is 64% of voters cast a vote for someone other than the President. This is reflected in his historically low approval ratings [1], and public opinions on both the healthcare push [2] and the current tax reform push [3]. But if we assume for a moment that the election was a mandate for the President to implement his agenda, we have to also note he isn't implementing the agenda on which he ran. He promised a wall paid for by Mexico, and several times has asked Congress to appropriate money for the wall. He promised he would not touch entitlements, and supported GOP measures to slash medicaid. He promised to drain the swamp and appointed interests to his cabinet with an agenda contrary to the agencies they represent. He promised to release his tax returns if elected and then claimed his election meant the voters decided he didn't have to. He promised to get tough on China and then capitulated to them over a cake dessert. This whole "mandate" idea, if we are going to accept it, should only be a mandate to implement the agenda on which the candidate campaigned. It cannot be used as a carte blanche for an elected official to turn around and do whatever they want. To be clear, I'm not saying how a President governs and how a President campaigns should be identical. There's room for improvisation and changing ideas. But the fact a President was elected cannot be used as a justification for every action his/her administration takes. [1]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/... [2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/28/suffolk-poll-obamacare-trump-senate-health-care-plan/103249346/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/06/28/suff... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-poll/fewer-than-a-third-of-americans-back-trump-tax-plan-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN1CT2TD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-poll/fewer-than-a...
- mrob 9y ago
  And if there was a popular election, then there's no guarantee the result would be the same. Under the current system, the candidates focus their campaign on the voters with the most influence ("swing states"). Maximizing popular vote would require different methods.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Sadly, Ice-T, used a false dichotomy. We can hate the player and the game. And often should. But you define the game too narrowly. The technical mechanism of the election to the presidency is indeed currently via the electoral college. That's one game. One deeper game is mandate. If an election result is strong, the victor is seen as having a mandate to strongly pursue their agenda. See, for example, Bush's claim that his 3 million vote margin gave him political capital that he could spend as he pleased. [1] A still-deeper game is around the rules of the system. We ended up with electors chosen by the states as a dodge around the problems created by slavery [2], and because framers weren't sure the general populace would have sufficient education and information to choose the president. But that didn't work well in practice, so after assorted changes mid-1800s we ended up with what we have now, pseudo-direct elections implemented through the existing system of electors. [3] That's an obvious compromise chosen because nobody wanted to go to all the work of switching to fully direct elections. But we've had two failures this century. If Trump is a sufficiently bad president, I'm sure we'll change this. (E.g., imagine him starting a pointless war with North Korea that ends up with Seattle getting nuked. People would be very eager to Do Something, and the states could fix this without any federal changes.) This is driven by a deeper level still. American government is "government of the people, by the people, for the people". We hire temp workers to take care of the details for us. Trump's job isn't to represent Trump. It's to represent us. All of us. And, I'd argue, the best part of all of us. To the extent he fails at that, it's his fault and ours. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-claims-mandate-sets-2nd-term-goals-I-2637116.php http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-claims-mandate-s... [2] http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=002/llfr002.db&recNum=60&itemLink=r?ammem/hlaw:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28fr00218%29%29%230020061&linkText=1 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=00... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)#Evolution_of_selection_plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
  - mygo 9y ago
    But I don’t want to have to wait until Seattle gets nuked before we do something about our problems.
    - 9y ago
dominotw 9y ago
> lost the popular election by 3 million votes Oh no not this again.
dgzl 9y ago
I really wish people would stop using the "he/she won/lost by 3 million popularity votes" line. Something I don't think people realize: 3 million people isn't that many. Considering there are ~325M American citizens, ~231M are eligible to vote, with ~63M and ~66M actual votes going to the Donald and Hilldog respectfully, the margin between the two runners is pretty small. The Donald collected 27.2% of eligible votes, and Hilldog collected 28.5%. At best, Hillary won popular vote by less than two percent of the available votes, which even though it's a victory, it's still very very close.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  > Something I don't think people realize: 3 million people isn't that many. It's not that many in relative terms, but it's certainly a lot of people. It's more than the population of some countries and 20 US states.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    > It's more than the population of some countries and 20 US states. That last part (the margin of victory was tiny relative to some state populations) provides valuable insight into how broken the Electoral College is as a selection system. (I don't mean that small-in-population states are solely responsible for electoral skew, but they're a good example of the problem.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 9y ago
Nope, he just got 3 million votes less - but the way the voting system works is that absolute number of votes doesn't count, how they're distributed in states count. The current President didn't design this system, and the opponent could just as well have benefited by it (and previous presidents had). Lacking direct democracy, it's not even necessarily a bad system in itself (whatever one believes for the current president). It might even be more representative of the average American than the popular vote (if e.g. the majority of the 3 million votes are concentrated in a particular state or two. IIRC the President got something like 50 million votes? Imagine an exaggerated (but possible) case where 3 states push 50 million votes for one side, and the 49 rest of them push 47 million votes for the other side between them. Would you say that would be a good result, to have a president that has a majority that is based on 3 out of 52 states? It might not have been as bad in the elections, but a huge part of those 3 million votes where mostly from one state, not distributed more or less evenly across the country. Which is the kind of issue the idea behind the election system wanted to avoid.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

travmatt 9y ago

Pretty much, elections have consequences and interpretations of federal regulations is the quintessential example of that. There are means by which the other branches could restrain or affect these interpretations, but I have a hard time believing most voters didn’t or couldn’t ascertain the intentions of most candidates regarding net neutrality this past election cycle.

wfo 9y ago
When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Every person who has voted for a president has voted against their own policy positions, often hundreds or thousands of their own policy positions. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN). It is of course ridiculous to suggest that people voted for Trump hoping he would destroy a free and open Internet; we have clear and incontrovertible evidence that the vast, vast majority of citizens (90%? 80%? I think it depends on which poll you take) hates what he is doing. The president has a good-faith responsibility to represent the citizens and when they come down on an issue like this which was non existent or tangential to his campaign so fervently it's most certainly a betrayal of that consent. When he tries to build a wall? Sure, he definitely has consent there. On NN? Not a chance. He does have power though.
- travmatt 9y ago
  >When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN). I don’t disagree with you on this at all, but again I think it boils down to ‘elections have consequences’. I don’t think that just because an issue was judged not as critical by voters (and therefore given relatively short shrift) means the interpretation is any less valid. That’s the function of the powerful executive branch made around the time of the new deal-ww2 era reforms, to manage complex federal issues. Just because I disagree with the decision and think most other Americans do as well doesn’t mean I think the president shouldn’t have the ability to make politically unpopular decisions.

colanderman 9y ago

You say that like Trump ran on a platform of deregulating internet service providers, as opposed to populist rage. If anything, this election cycle demonstrates that the executive holds far too much power, that it can act with impunity at the behest of lobbyists on issues unrelated to, and in conflict with, the issues which drove voters to elect it.

dboreham 9y ago
In this case the problem isn't with the executive though, but in congress (where's the outrage from our representatives?). Actually my senator is outraged, but he doesn't have a big telco presence in his state. Congress certainly has the power to stop this.

mindslight 9y ago

One bit of input is clearly insufficient to express any actual opinion, so this idea that the citizens act through the ballot box is a reversal of the actual effect. Rather, the ballot box is how consent is manufactured - "I voted for this, therefore I must support it". Try making the argument for net neutrality with some Trump groupies and you'll soon find the simplistic attitude that whatever is happening must be good because it's going against those entrenched insiders at the FCC. Permanent revolution, indeed.