Newsweek has a diagram of 8 Ways to Fix Our Politics:
* Independent redistricting. 13 states already have independent redistricting commissions. This will result in fewer unyielding partisans.
* Clean elections. Several states already have public funding of campaigns for candidates who forgo private donations. I mentioned this to my state senator, a Democrat, a few years ago. Alas, he simply said we in Michigan can't afford it.
* Open primaries. Three states allow all candidates for all parties appear on one ballot voted on by all citizens. The top two go on to the general election even if both are GOP or both are Dem. Less rigidity is the result.
* Adopt a National Popular Vote for presidential elections. Switch from winner-take-all to a proportional allocation of state Electoral College votes. This requires candidates to consider all states, not just the big swing states. So far, eight states have signed on. It will only take effect when enough states, totaling 270 Electoral College votes (the same number to elect a prez.), agree.
* Fill congressional committee assignments by lottery. Committees are supposed to be the first deliberation of legislation, not tools of partisan power. Currently, assignments are made by party leaders, so low seniority members are beholden to those who appoint them.
* Limit secret holds. Prevent a single unnamed senator from torpedoing a bill or appointment.
* Require a filibuster to be conducted from the Senate floor. Only a threat of filibuster is needed now, meaning all legislation requires 60 votes.
* Eliminate the debt ceiling. Denmark is the only other country that has one. The only purpose of a debt ceiling now is to allow for a hostage situation.
Just five pages later is an opinion column by Jane Harmon. She was elected to the House in 1992. Though she was reelected last year, she was offered and took the job of CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars which works for bipartisan solutions. She is now frequently asked when did Congress become so dysfunctional?
It started in the 1980s, she says, when politicians shifted focus to winning election and building single-party majorities rather than responsible governance. Now they would rather blame the other guy for not solving the problem instead of working for a solution in which the other side might be able to claim a scrap of victory. As we saw recently the GOP's only goal is to take down Obama, even if our economy and standing in the world are collateral damage. The Dems aren't blameless in this game.
Harmon offers three solutions.
* Obama needs to build relations with the frustrated bipartisan core in Congress.
* Redistricting reform (see above).
* The middle needs to become militant so that the shrilly partisan pay a price.
Most of the reforms discussed require legislative action. Neither article discusses how to get such action through any legislative body (including state legislature in Michigan) where the goal is party victory and not government solutions.
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The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
ReplyDeleteThe National Popular Vote bill is a state-based approach. It preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College. It assures that every vote is equal and that every voter will matter in every state in every presidential election, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states wins the presidency.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don't matter to their candidate. With National Popular Vote, elections wouldn't be about winning states. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. Every vote, everywhere would be counted for and directly assist the candidate for whom it was cast. Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in the current handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country.
National Popular Vote does not use a state-by-state proportional system.
ReplyDeleteAny state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Owens and to reject this proposal in November 2004 by a two-to-one margin.
If the proportional approach were implemented by a state, on its own,, it would have to allocate its electoral votes in whole numbers. If a current battleground state were to change its winner-take-all statute to a proportional method for awarding electoral votes, presidential candidates would pay less attention to that state because only one electoral vote would probably be at stake in the state.
If the whole-number proportional approach had been in use throughout the country in the nation’s closest recent presidential election (2000), it would not have awarded the most electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. Instead, the result would have been a tie of 269–269 in the electoral vote, even though Al Gore led by 537,179 popular votes across the nation. The presidential election would have been thrown into Congress to decide and resulted in the election of the second-place candidate in terms of the national popular vote.
A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every vote equal.
It would penalize states, such as Montana, that have only one U.S. Representative even though it has almost three times more population than other small states with one congressman. It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).
Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person's vote equal and guarantee that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states becomes President.