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It’s a feature, not a bug. The United States federal government was set up as a representative republic, not a democratic republic, and not a democracy. We ar

• mothballed 9mo ago
  OK but the constitution effectively cannot be amended now (the last one, in the early 90s, took 202 years to pass [no not a typo]) and we're stuck with what we have. The population also isn't even remotely good with the powers restrained by the 10th amendment and hasn't been since at least the 1930s and maybe even before that, and there is zero chance the court changes that. So what is next. It seems the only option is to just use the courts to re-interpret the constitution, so that things like growing your own wheat is "interstate commerce" and so that stuff like a post-86 machinegun isn't an arm even within the context of being a member of (by federal statute) the unorganized militia.
  • efitz 9mo ago
    Repeal the 17th amendment - popular election of senators - and all of a sudden it gets much easier for states to amend the Constitution in ways they want. Popular election of senators has been a disaster, it essentially turned to the Senate from a deliberative body into a pure partisan body like the House.
    • FridayoLeary 9mo ago
      Which is something people arguing to make the house of Lords fully democratic don't appreciate.
      • efitz 9mo ago
        Senators aren’t hereditary and never were; they used to serve at the will of elected officials but were isolated from electoral influences.
    • jrs235 9mo ago
      Been saying this for almost two decades. State governments no longer have a direct seat and representation at the table. Federal mandates (coercion) like enforce this or don't get funds would never, or at least rarely, happen. It's also the only nonviolent way to dissolve the union, intentionally or through strangulation (state legislatures refusing to elect and seat senators, if a majority of them do this then a quorum can't be reached and funding dies).
      • foogazi 9mo ago
        > It's also the only nonviolent way to dissolve the union, intentionally or through strangulation (state legislatures refusing to elect and seat senators, if a majority of them do this then a quorum can't be reached and funding dies). Sounds like a bad idea and far from non-violent
    • defrost 9mo ago
      There are many systems, the Australian Federation of independent States adopted a "Washminster" system based on both the UK Westminster system and the USofA Washington system. Popular election of senators in the senate / upper house hasn't been a disaster there. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate Australia also has political weightings wrt various regions populations.
      • ikr678 9mo ago
        The Australian Electoral Commision as an independent body does a lot of heavy lifting towards keeping the washminster system running (no gerrymandering and a world class voting system).
        • defrost 9mo ago
          Independent checks and balances are an essential part of any system of government. The people vote in Representatives to debate policy, an independent merit based civil service carries it out, overwatched by independent scrutineers, judged by and independent legal system and enforce by a spectrum of LEOs and peace officers. A feature of the Australian system (IMHO) is how rapid the churn on Prime Ministers can be ... the Washington system by contrast can't even toss out a corrupt felon grifting hard in public view.
        • qcnguy 9mo ago
          The AEC did nothing to stop the Australian government trying to criminalize the views of its political opponents, so it's not doing all that much heavy lifting.
          • defrost 9mo ago
            Specificity helps here; which government and which political opponents? eg: Do you refer to the government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and its clandestine actions wrt organisers of the Vietnam moratorium protests? * https://mhnsw.au/whats-on/exhibitions/persons-interest-asio-files/ https://mhnsw.au/whats-on/exhibitions/persons-interest-asio-... etc.
    • axus 9mo ago
      I don't think that solves what I see as the root problem, the national parties' control of the state organizations. The money would only need to be focused on the state politicians instead of them plus the senators.
    • bcrosby95 9mo ago
      Holy shit, imagine of the whole of federal congress could be controlled with gerrymandering rather than just the house: the house through districts, and the senate through districts for state representatives. The fireworks would be insane. Put another way: it would do nothing. If it did something, it would likely make everything worse, not better. Legislatures would pick the most partisan hack. They would be answerable to fewer, more partisan people. It would pour fire on an already tenuous situation. It would also make congress significantly less representative of the country, but I guess that's the point.
    • rfrey 9mo ago
      Lack of elections hasn't seemed to save your supreme court from becoming a pure partisan body.
      • johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        Yeah, I think the people need a way to eject people without waiting for 2-6 years (or never for the supreme court). it needs to be a high bar, but if we use the same 75% state ratification to start up an impeachment process, it might keep some pressure under people who otherwise feel like they can run rampant.
      • qcnguy 9mo ago
        It did. An average of 48 percent of Supreme Court rulings from 2010 to 2018 were unanimous. Another eight percent were nearly unanimous. That happens even though justices were appointed by different parties and the issues under discussion are normally complex and contentious. Clearly they can't be a partisan body if they so regularly agree despite having different politics. But it's not clear how long that can be sustained now. The recent appointment of KBJ takes it in that direction. She has stated in court opinions that are themselves clearly unconstitutional, like: "Having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.Ds and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States… These issues should not be in presidential control." A SCOTUS judge should not be concerned with the "best interest of the citizens". That's not her job, that's the job of politicians. Making decisions on such a basis renders SCOTUS merely another House, but one that considers itself above the others in the power rankings. And what she's asserting is that the President should have no power over the executive branch, which is what Democrats want but isn't what the constitution says.
        • deleted 9mo ago
          [deleted]
        • rfrey 9mo ago
          Do you feel like there have been any significant changes to the political landscape in the 8 years since?
    • 0xDEAFBEAD 9mo ago
      My understanding is that states already have the ability to appoint presidential electors however they want. No need to repeal any amendment, if a state wanted to do things differently in that regard. My proposed elector appointment algorithm is as follows. For each elector seat, summon 20 grand juries according to standard methods (distribute across various counties, weighted by population). Each grand jury spends a day getting to know one another, then appoints one member as a representative using approval voting. The 20 representatives from the 20 grand juries form a secondary grand jury, which also spends a day getting to know one another, then appoints one member as a representative using approval voting. This produces 1 elector. Electors serve 8-year terms, staggered so that their appointments occur midway through a presidential term when emotions are relatively placid. If you persuade a few big swing states to adopt this approach for appointing electors, the nature of the presidential contest changes dramatically. This is more along the lines of how the presidential elector system was supposed to work in the first place. Presidential electors were supposed to be leading individuals of the community, not otherwise involved in politics, exercising their independent judgement. That's what the founders intended.
    • deleted 9mo ago
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    • specialist 9mo ago
      Naw. Bicameralism is dumb. Abolish the Senate. End our vetocracy. (h/t Francis Fukuyama)
    • amalcon 9mo ago
      This argument has always seemed odd to me. The 17th amendment first took effect in 1915, and the whole Senate had been directly elected by 1919. Are we really going to claim that the late 1910's are when things really went off the rails? For example, to your specific point here, it seems unlikely that this made amending the Constitution harder. Excluding the Bill of Rights and the 27th Amendment (each a special case for its own reason), there have actually been more amendments in the fewer years after the 17th was enacted. It's also unclear why one would expect that the Senate would be less partisan if its membership were selected by state legislatures. State legislators have a lot more partisan loyalty than the rest of us, both because they tend to be more ideological and because they are deeply dependent on the party for future career prospects.
  • johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    well, I'm never a fan of "this is hard so lets break/bend the rules" as a justification. The constitution still can be amended. But congress has been in gridlock for 30 years so we can't even get over the first hurdle. Lets work on fixing that gridlock and then we can review if 38 states signing on is too big a burden. It was already a Herculean task convincing 10/13 states to accept the Bill of Rights.
  • huhkerrf 9mo ago
    >the last one, in the early 90s, took 202 years to pass [no not a typo] I mean, it's not a typo, but it's also misleading. It wasn't an active campaign for 202 years. It was largely forgotten for most of that time.
• baubino 9mo ago
  This exactly. But the country never figured out how to deal with one state’s laws conflicting with another state’s laws (see the Fugitive Slave Act for example). The lack of resolution around conflict between the states (which remained unresolved even after a civil war was fought over it) is partly why the federal government began to grow as it took on the role of enforcing laws (like desegregation) that certain states would not.
• jdsully 9mo ago
  Wickard V Filburn is simply bad law... The federal government has way too much power and MUCH more than was ever intended. Its not a feature it is indeed a bug. One caused by the Supreme Court.
  • johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    >The federal government has way too much power and MUCH more than was ever intended. Its not a feature it is indeed a bug. we got bigger and thus we got permutational orders of issues arising as a result. We had to redo the articles of confederation within 20 years of their drafting and that was with 13 states. Bug or feature, I see it as an inevitability as we grew to 50 states and multiple territories that the federal government would need a stronger hand today than in 1787. Of course, that hand shouldn't be bypassing every section of the constitution to serve the federal government itself. These are the exact fears that caused Shay and Whiskey way back in the day coming to fruition.
• Nursie 9mo ago
  > not a democracy Democracy comes in many flavours and it's very hard to see the US federal system as outside of that when it is composed of elected representatives. It's not a direct democracy, it's not a democracy where each vote counts the same, but it certainly falls within the very wide definition of democracy - "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
• scoofy 9mo ago
  Republic, res publica, means state power comes from the people. Democracy, dēmos kratos, means state rule comes from the people. They mean the same damn thing. They are just two different words that mean not ruled by monarchs.
  • IAmBroom 9mo ago
    Only if you believe "violet" and "mauve" are both the same thing, because they both mean "purple".
    • scoofy 9mo ago
      Look, I'm a descriptivist, but my point is that there is nothing about the word "Republic" than implies representative democracy more than "Democracy." This distinction boils down to Federalist No. 10, when Madison uses the two terms differently... but he specifically says he's using these terms in a technical way to make a point: >A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure, and the efficacy which it must derive from the union. >The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic, are first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. He's using affected meanings, and he's going out of his way to say "varies from pure democracy" before referring to "pure democracy" as "democracy." Why is he doing this? Because the words mean the same damn thing!
    • skissane 9mo ago
      People who are distinguishing them here are relying on peculiar definitions of these terms, which are largely peculiar to Americans-and I’d add, only some of them. To an Australian or Briton or Canadian or New Zealander, “Republic” means not being a constitutional monarchy. I think it means something similar in a lot of other countries. Australia is a democracy but not a republic, because it has a King instead of a President. The US, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel (putting aside the Palestinian issue) are democratic republics, because they are democracies with Presidents instead of a King/Queen. China or North Korea are republics but not democracies; Saudi Arabia is neither a republic nor a democracy.