Nowhere in the constitution does it limit the amount of SC justices. We can have 9 or 9000 if we really want.
Number 2
DC and Puerto Rico should have been states decades ago. Guam, too.
Number 3
The policies of Harris/Walz are what 70+% of the country wants. If they are far left, then I am the Queen of England
Number 4
Tell snaggletooth to shut the fuck up and die already.
This fucking lich has been the root cause of the court needing to be fixed
#VOTE!
"By the way, on packing the Supreme Court ... you may know this already. It's unconstitutional."
It's not unconstitutional if you fucking pack the court with people who aren't fucking traitorous fascists. What are ya gonna do? Sue all the way to the supreme court???
Fuck that weird old strokey bastard. You know what you do when you lose fuck face? Get good or go home.
It's good to know he's worried about it, means it'll probably work
He knows how this works. McConnell spent decades setting up the current Supreme Court to be the monster that it is, and he doesn't want that work undone in a single Presidential Administration.
The segment of the constitution relating to the supreme court is preposterously small. It's very weird that people think that no one is capable of actually reading the damned thing.
Never mentions any number of judges. Mentions numbers in a bunch of other places, and gets so detailed as to specify how to break up the initial batch of senators to ensure rolling terms.
But no, they specifically intended for there to be a specific number of justices that they just opted not to write down: 65679107 9 justices, just like the constitution forgot to dictate.
Other fun fact: you can pass a law that says the supreme court can't hear appeals to certain types of cases. It's explicitly stated that you could just write the supreme court out of hearing any case that involved the supreme court or any Justice, an executive who appointed any member of said court, or just about anything.
you could just write the supreme court out of hearing any case that involved the supreme court or any Justice, an executive who appointed any member of said court, or just about anything.
Yes, please!
Since the constitutional amendment process is literally impossible and has been for at least 40 years, SCOTUS is the final verdict on any constitutional matter.
Even if it WASN'T fundamentally broken, it's the mother and father of all conflicts of interest to make it the final arbiter on matters pertaining to itself and the ex president/wannabe dictator that appointed a plurality of them.
Other fun fact: you can pass a law that says the supreme court can't hear appeals to certain types of cases.
This is interesting, how would appeals work? Would there be a special committee formed by Congress, or would the circuit court be the final word?
There's no defined process. The constitution just specifies that the supreme court has appellate jurisdiction except where Congress defines exceptions.
Since Congress also has authority to actually create and organize the lower courts, they can do almost whatever they please.
The only thing that can't do is diminish or expand the original jurisdiction of the supreme court.
So they can't put a different court in charge of cases involving two states disagreeing over ownership of a river or it's water, or ambassadors and such.
So if Congress wanted it to be a single use court nominated, appointed and dissolved for one special case they could. Or they could say it just stops at the federal appeals court, the state court or wherever they want.
Personally, I think a single use court established for special high profile cases with a large potential for conflict of interest would be best. There's some trickiness that would be involved, since Congress can't actually appoint judges, only the executive can. So if the case involved the current sitting executive (in my opinion only in their personal capacity, as cases involving the office of the president lack the personal liability that makes for a conflict of interest), then they would still need to be the one to make the appointment. Might be able to sidestep it by having the house select already appointed judges without the conflict to hear the case, but it's very close to appointment with extra steps.
In any case, other than the caveat that's never happened, it would be so much more clearly unbiased.
Don't forget Samoa and the other island terrories. It's a bit of a tricky situation because of population size and such but there shouldn't be a single person on American territory without voting Congressional representation.
American Samoa essentially can't become a state because of the way land ownership rights work there. It's a FASCINATINGLY complex situation.
I think we should welcome any and all territories to become states or leave as they desire, but I also think that staying a territory should remain an option.
Given how lack of representation tends to kneecap funding allocation for things like infrastructure I think they would be unwise to eschew statehood, but I know that, specifically in Puerto Rico, there are groups that against statehood but also against going their own way.
Forcing statehood feels wrong, but so does cutting people off from what support they do get from us, to say nothing of them being US citizens.
I do think we should extend full citizenship to anyone from the territories though. Just because it's not a state doesn't mean it's not the US.
This fucking lich has been the root cause of the court needing to be fixed
Pretty sure the Lich is literally based on him. If I was coming up with a tabletop and wanted an "undead asshole, lord of assholes" I would certainly use his likeness.
His history is fucking wild. He graduated top of his classes and graduated college with a PoliSci, then went on to join MLKs March and speech "I have a dream" in person. Then he was appointed party whip by Frist. That time as whip is probably why he's such a hard-line ass-bag of bones now.
There is no “left” in USA, Democrats would be centre at best in Europe. Sure from the GOP pov they seem left, but that’s because republicans are extremely to the right.
For number 2. Some people have been fighting since the late 19th century to make Washington DC a state.
During his speech, Spectrum reports that McConnell called the Walz-Harris ticket “the far left of the Democratic Party.”
“And by the way, that’s most Democrats today,” McConnell said, according to Spectrum.
Oh, no! Harris and Walz are representing the will of the majority of the people! Whatever the fuck is to be done about democracy?!
It's also not possible for most democrats to be on the far left of their party (unless the remaining minority are on average even further to the right of their party). If everyone's further left than you're expecting, that's just the party's new average center position.
Majority of Americans: Support policies X, Y, and Z.
Democrats: Put policies X, Y, and Z into their platform.
Republicans: Extreme socialist Demoncrabs want to destroy America!!!
Literally every dem presidential candidate is the Most Furthest Leftistest candidate in history.
Biden was the most leftist politician ever the year he beat Sanders. Clinton was an extremists Marxist in 2016. Obama was literally Stalin in 2008. John Kerry was going to be to the left of the Vietcong in 2004. Al Gore was a Manchurian deep state CCP asset in 2000. Etc, etc.
So of course we just now discover the ultra-left agenda of a California AG and her friend the Minnesota hog father two months before the general election. Shame McConnell didn't think to warn us sooner.
Is this guy delusional? After the way his party treated him in the convention, he still doubles down that the problem is the democrats?
Can't stop felating trump ya know.
Republicans are like that abused and thrashed partner in a bad relationship. Where instead of figuring out ways to leave it and be better. They willingly stay and are like "But...but...I still love them miserably!".
That's Republicans for Trump.
After the way his party treated him in the convention
Please just die already you turtlefaced googly eyed fuck
I'd rather he stroke out and have to sit drooling all over himself in a puddle of his own shit trapped in his mind and unable to communicate with anyone for a few years. Death is too easy for this asshole.
That's pretty much how he already is and is a big part of the problem
If he was able to communicate for this article he's not far enough gone.
Fun fact, Congress can change the size of the Supreme Court at will for any reason.
They SHRUNK the court in 1866 from 9 to 7 because they just fucking hated Andrew Johnson THAT MUCH and they wanted to deny him a nomination.
After Johnson was out, they raised it back up to 9 in 1869, Granting 2, and it stayed that way ever since.
"The Supreme Court had just ruled that paper money was unconstitutional, which would have 'wreaked havoc' with the U.S. Treasury, says Marcus. But Grant and Congress quickly confirmed two new justices who reversed the Court’s decision in the earlier case, saving the Republicans from having to undo the nation’s entire system of legal tender."
The Supreme Court had just ruled that paper money was unconstitutional
Jesus and I thought our court was making the most dumbass decisions. Wierdly gives me hope that the Harris administration can fix a whole bumcha bullshit though.
I misread Harris as Harrison and I thought that you were making a joke that it was the 1880s again...
This gives hell a bad name ..... I'd rather be burned alive for eternity than to spend all that time next to him.
Eh, upon review, seeing that Dante put Epicurus in hell, most of the people on lemmy would just go into the 6th circle too, buncha lefty heretics 😁
Meh, pretty sure the 9th/center of hell for most of the world. If betraying Caesar (lords, masters or those who serve them) is all it takes to get there then all who dispelled previous rulers are there.
what an assholish shitstain.
Well.....yeah. It's Mitch McConnell. Have you not heard of Mitch McConnell before?
I have. But he's still an assholish shitstain who manages to surprise me.
So he doesn't want DC or PR statehood, giving federal representation to millions of otherwise disenfranchised US citizens because...he thinks they'll elect Democrats. Cool.
the other downside of DC statehood is that we’d have to change the slogan on our license plates, as they currently read “taxation without representation” for this very reason. just think of how silly all the old license plates would be if all of a sudden we actually did have representation.
Just grab some sharpie and cross out the "out."
I see the man behind "making election day a national holiday is a power grab by the democrats"^[1] is rolling out some new hits. Never ceases to amaze that he can get away with saying this stuff out loud.
Well, of course. Consider your own reference. Mitch knows they are wildly unpopular, and making it easier for the common folk they've been fucking over for years to vote would be disastrous for them.
GOD if only they were RIGHT about how "dangerous" democrats were. IF ONLY THE DEMOCRATS WEREN'T COWARDS and would actually do this shit
By the way, on packing the Supreme Court ... you may know this already. It's unconstitutional.
The only things the constitution has to say on the matter of the supreme court are: there has to be one, the supreme court judges should be paid, and the president can appoint supreme court justices with the advice and consent of the senate. It is completely silent on matters of how many supreme court justices there should be, or how long their terms should be.
For all his many, many faults, Mitch McConnell is not a profoundly stupid man, so I'm sure he knows this. Since he very likely knows this already, he probably has a reason for lying to the public on the matter. If the president does appoint several more justices, it's not like the Republicans can sue: no lower court would take the case, and the supreme court would already be packed with people who will actually be faithful to the constitution. So legal threats are a complete non-starter. That just leaves non-legal threats, which is what I think this is. I think Glitch is previewing the Republican strategy in the case of Harris getting more justices hired, which is they'll stoke up the fear and hatred of their idiotic, mouth breathing supporters. It's a thinly-veiled threat of treason.
Isn't this fucker dead yet? I have a bottle of scotch waiting for this asshole's demise. Same as Betsy DeVoss and her shitty brother; and the final Koch brother...
Nah, he'll never die. You can't kill a flesh-golem directly, you have to find its master and break the summon.
He is going to die. When I don't know. But I heard speculation that he has some kind of skin cancer and degenerative disorders (as exemplified by him just suddenly freezing and needing someone to tap his shoulder to get him to come around).
But even if he dies before I finish this comment he has already groomed his successor to take place. Despite being in alleged democracy these people have their shit done in a way that their own party will never really change.
Whoever took care of Kissinger needs to share how.
This from Mr "elections have consequences" himself.
I mean, this isn't hypocrisy, he's acknowledging that there will be consequences for the GOP.
All I can say is that I hope that the consequences destroy the GOP.
McConnell called the Walz-Harris ticket “the far left of the Democratic Party.”
😆😆😆
This motherfucker is actually older than a Galapagos tortoise. Also, when did they unpause him? I thought his OS froze and he was shuffled off to hospice.
“Oh, no! I could be held accountable for my unfathomable corruption!”
[ geriatric tortoise noises ]
Too bad polio wasn't a better shot.
Did he almost die of polio or something?
My dad did. Almost died from it, I mean. I assume this is just about polio being rampant at the time. But if McFuckface got it and recovered, sucks for us.
whatever their 'worst nightmares' are, are more than likely just what we need, and what most of us actually want.
Anything that's a nightmare to Republicans sounds like a dream to Democrats
They're scared of Democrats stacking the courts? Is that what was said? He reminds me of an old timey western card game where a player is accusing everyone of cheating with cards tucked up his sleeves
McConnel is a true climber. He never thinks about how to weild power he only thinks about ways to obtain it. In his mind everyone else's is the same.
mitch mcconnel in three acts
Act I: desperado
A dastardly madman ties a damsel to the tracks. A masked hero is seen on horseback trailing a train that is rushing straight towards the tied innocent. Our hero dismounts his horse and gallantly boards the train. He fights off hoards of bad guys to get to the engine room. After fighting the conductor he runs straits to the brake lever and pulls it with all his might. In the final moments the trains comes to a screeching halt just before it cleaves the fair maid into a thousand pieces.
Act II: the dastard
A slobbernly old man stands before the city council, "if we allow such violence against innocent train workers then surely every train from here to Timbuktu will be sieged upon by ruthless bandits! This cannot be allowed, we must outlaw the masked hero!" The old man turns to face the camera and twists his dastardly mustache.
Act III: it's in the news
News paper headline; "All trains from here to timbuktu sieged."
Newpaper byline: "masked hero outlawed."
Election news: Das le Turd III elected king after amassing mysterious train cargo fortune.
So his main objection is a loss of power
Fucking die already.
By the way, on packing the Supreme Court ... you may know this already. It's unconstitutional.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation.
You know, if the orange shithead is such a liability, maybe you should have condemned his actions leading up to J6, you melted bastard. Then maybe he wouldn't be the guy running the show.
During his speech, Spectrum reports that McConnell called the Walz-Harris ticket “the far left of the Democratic Party.”
“And by the way, that’s most Democrats today,” McConnell said, according to Spectrum.
I didn't realize the Dems were the far left party I'd been asking for. In this country, you can just say whatever and nobody checks. Apologies for multiple main-thread posts.
Everyone looks like a leftist when you're an avowed fascist.
I see the necromancy is still serving him well.
Die mad about it.
Oh, he's more worried about the nightmare for the GOP. Not for the country. Imagine that - he's more worried about the potential for the power of a political party to be diminished than he is about the end of the country.
Mitch needs to go away. Retire already you old bag.
He is. That's why you rarely hear anything from him any more.
This warms my heart
That Turtle Mitch dares comment on packing the supreme court is just inconceivable
Sounds Iike an amazing dream andaybe we can curb stomp the fascists ideas into the ground.
Is anybody writing this down? Sounds like an excellent roadmap to me.
Don’t threaten me with a good time, you creepy old shirtball!
Wow, a nightmare for republicans that everyone is fairly represented. That would be so horrible, wouldn't it be?
Come on. PR should have been a state a long, long time ago at the bare minimum.
His nightmare isn't imaginative enough. What if the Cancun Zodiak Killer loses to Allred? What if the Dems grow spines and fix the gerrymandering? What if they impeach bribe taking Supreme Court justices? What if they amend the Constitution to reverse Citizens United (hah, like any politician favors that)?
Man, that's the worst nightmare scenario? Fucking weaksauce. They'd still be breathing, instead of, y'know, put up against a wall and shot, like SCOTUS has ruled is perfectly legal now. As always, every word out of his mouth is self-serving bullshit.
I thought someone finally destroyed McConnell's phylactery. Did he have a second one hidden away somewhere?
It's weird just how many things that are a Republican's nightmare are also in my dreams.
Hahaha, I had almost forgotten how good that face is. The eyes, the lip, the ears.. perfection.
He got enough time between TIAs to rattle off a complete though, eh? Good for him, so proud.
If this were true, I'd be tempted to drop everything and volunteer for the Harris campaign.
Recently Pete Buttigieg has been saying that Trump losing would actually be a savior to the Republican party. Currently Republicans who privately abhore him choose to support him because he is their ticket to power. If he is shown to lose 2 elections in a row, he would most likely lose his grip on the GOP, and you would see more adaptability in their positions.
Losing one should've done it. But he replaced party leadership with his people, so that means he'll be at the top of the GOP ticket until he kicks the bucket.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's Harris v. Trump (from prison) in 2028, and Walz/Ocasio-Cortez v. Trump (from deathbed) in 2032. By that time, the GOP will be well and truly cooked.
We're missing 2036 when the GOP does a Weekend at Bernie's with Trump's corpse.
Hopefully by that point they'll be so broke they can't even afford the heroin.
Will someone inject heroin into Trump's ass?
I heard that when the GOP lost to Obama twice. People were saying the GOP would have to change to keep up with the demographic shifts. Boy were they right 🙃
Yeah, that's accurate. Been that way for quite awhile.
Oh, no, many of the things he did. What a nightmare. Won't anyone consider the plight of the male, pale, and stale. Oh the humanity.
McConnell continued. "By the way, on packing the Supreme Court ... you may know this already. It's unconstitutional."
Alternative headline
'McConnell Admits Packing Supreme Court Unconstitutional'.
Is that a promise?
Oh is he still alive?
I feel like they should be a lot more scared of getting shot by a bunch of crunchy purple haired anarchists or cringelord neostalinists who basically get off to giving them the wall after they push their shit too far and do our propaganda for us.
but maybe I don't have the best understanding of fear.
I never expected to see 'cringelord neostalinists' portrayed as being heroic, but here we are, and honestly, I don't hate it. I'll take communism over fascism any day.
hell, ill take bolshevism over fascism, and their whole thing was killing people like me.
Hey Mitch, freeze!
Flatly wrong about packing SCOTUS. It's probably a bad idea--as is ending the filibuster--but it's not unconstitutional.
As to why it's a bad idea - Republicans haven't increased the size of the court when they've held the legislature and presidency; packing the court would encourage them to do the same the next time they have power--and they will eventually, because that's the way politics have gone in this country--and we'd quickly end up with a court that's even more unwieldy than it is now.
The same principle applies to ending the filibuster; if it's ended now, then Dems can't use it when they are out of power in the Senate. Because, again, Republicans will win again at some point--possibly even this fall--and giving absolute power to a single party is a bad idea.
And that's how we keep scooting to the right.
People think there's a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn't the case. Look at what happened for appointments to the supreme Court under Obama vs trump as an example. I understand why you might feel this way considering that the nuclear option for ending cloture wasn't used by Republicans until Harry Reid did it, but 20 years later honor and decorum are no longer foundational to government.
Anymore, I think the best thing to do is use tools available to terrible effect, then with any luck all the "honor system" stuff can be written into law.
Bring back the talking filibuster, and pack the court to fix it's rules, ethics, and enforcement (the court doesn't even respect stare decisis anymore), add states, expand the cap on the house, blow the electoral college. No more gentlemen's agreements.
At least that's how I see it.
I'm absolutely fine with the talking filibuster; I love it, and think we should do it. Killing it entirely? No.
Packing the court? Also no. If anything, I think that the size should be reduced. I'd be fine with term limits on judges (say, 16 years), along with a code of ethics and mandatory financial disclosures and recusals for conflicts of interest. But packing the court is not a good idea.
People think there’s a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn’t the case.
I think that if we're ever going to get back to a point where we aren't hyperpartisan, we need to operate in good faith, even if the other side isn't. Constantly escalating ends up hurting us in the long run. And, again - as soon as you create the tools to get your way, those tools will be used against you; a hammer doesn't care which ideologue is swinging it.
expand the cap on the house,
Bad idea. Getting 400+ people to stop arguing long enough to vote on a thing is already hard enough. You'd just be adding more layers of bullshit.
add states
Eh. Last I knew, PR didn't really want to be a state; I recall that under 50% of the island population wanted statehood. D.C. might, but I'm not sure that making a city a whole-ass state--particularly since most of the city is actually in Virginia and Maryland--is a good idea. That would have the effect of ensuring that voters in D.C. would be far more powerful than any other voters, since you would have a fairly small number of voters selecting two senators. (I can't find exact populatino data for D.C. alone; all population figures I can find are for metro D.C., which counts large parts of Virginia and Maryland; those voters already have representatives and senators.)
blow the electoral college
I oppose this for the same reason that I oppose getting rid of the Senate and going to a direct democracy; an electoral college balances the interests of the states as a whole against the population, because they're not always the same. An electoral system forces candidates to try and balance a message, rather than focusing solely on the most populous areas. Rather than eliminating the electoral college, I'd rather see some form of ranked-choice voting, which would tend to eliminate candidates that had the most extremely unpopular platforms. (E.g., Trump consistently won about 30% of the votes in the 2015 primaries, but a strong majority of voters would have selected him as their last choice. Some form of ranked choice in the Republican primaries likely would have resulted in a candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio instead of Trump.)
All of this is a balancing game of competing interests and priorities. Steamrolling people and hammering them isn't going to make anything better. Yes, I hear what you're saying about the Overton window, but frankly, that's a messaging problem that the left has created. If the right is able to move the Overton window, it's because the left is doing a really shitty job at meeting voters where they are, while the right is doing a damn good job at outreach.
There's some common ground here and some... not so common ground.
If you go back to the talking filibuster, you've essentially eliminated the filibuster as it exists today, but with the added benefit of potentially bringing attention to issues. It's not possible to just kill progress with an email. So on that we're agreed.
For packing the court, I could go one of two ways: Either just do it so that we codify how many justices and the rules for appointments (which I think is good) and potentially term limits OR pivot and leave justices as serving for life, appoint them into the federal court circuit. Every new case--or new term-- select 7, 9, or 13 justices and let's go for that term. The more justices sit the bench, but more likely they are to reach non-extreme outcomes.
With respect to fair play and hyperpartisan politics I think you missed the point. We are currently in a two party system with a penchant for minority rule. We don't get back to a good place by trying to be nice guys and all play together again. What we do instead is overhaul the voting system in such a way that ranked choice or proportional representation or some other more modern approach is used instead of FPTP. We got here by groups coalescing into two polarized super-parties, and that need not be the case. But we have to break it to fix it.
RE adding states and capping the house, your opinions are at odds. Apportionment is totally busted right now with a lower cap. Either we have to write off states with low population, or you have to up the cap so that voters in LA and Boseman are approximately equally represented. It sounds weird to say "hey DC doesn't get 2 senators, but CA gets 750k people per congressional rep and Montana gets 500k people per rep." I'm seeing quick facts here of DC with about 60% the population of Montana. It's small, but it's not beyond compare.
RE electoral college: The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is already well on the way. The EC doesn't make sense to me. Using the senate makes sense with states being equal, but land doesn't vote, people do. The idea originally is just to let the more "sophisticated" delegates overrule the populace if necessary, and also make it easier to count votes in the days before the telegraph. The EC should have prevented Trump, it shouldn't have enabled him. It's busted. Since the EC votes are managed by the states as well, we have arrived at a position where only swing states really matter and that means I don't get to see candidates in Indiana because they're going to MI and PA instead and the message is not balanced: it's only for those competitive areas. IMO it's doing more harm than good. I see the intent of balancing out the desires of all the parts of the country, but instead of doing that, it allows gaming the system. See also gerrymandering for this, because that's also busted AF.
Your last paragraph almost deserves its own reply. Rather than write it in full, I'm going to leave this video which does a great job. If you haven't seen it, please watch it in full. The left isn't that good at messaging I agree, but their job is much MUCH harder than the right.
The perspective that I'm approaching this from is that some people and politicians will use any crack as leverage to break a system. Any changes that are made need to be done in such a robust way that abusing it in an unanticipated way would be extremely challenging. Anything that can be used for positive change can also be misused for regressive, negative change, unless it's managed very, very carefully.
The more justices sit the bench, but more likely they are to reach non-extreme outcomes.
Not necessarily correct. As it stands, we have 5 extremely far-right judges (Thomas, Alito, Goresuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), one that's moderately right-wing (Roberts), and three that are moderates-pretending-to-be-liberal (Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Even if we managed to nuke two conservative justices and capped it at 7, that would still be a 4-3 conservative court, and probably still a far-right court. Term limits would certainly help, but I strongly suspect that SCOTUS would shoot down term limits unless it was a constitutional amendment. Moreover, you could still get cases where a justice vacated their seat early and a president ended up being able to pack the court with justices that matched their ideology, much like Trump did with Kavanaugh, Goresuch, and Barrett.
But we have to break it to fix it.
I don't think that's wise. Breaking it in order to fix it assumes that the majority of the people will want to fix it. As we've seen with the number of people that support outright fascism, I simply don't believe that. I do think that we need some form of ranked-choice so that there's not a duopoly, but I also think that, given where we are now, that needs to start at a local level and work up to a state level before we even consider taking it national.
RE adding states and capping the house, your opinions are at odds.
Not exactly. The house is supposed to represent the people of the state, and that's based on population, with an absolute floor of 1 (technically, each state gets 1 representative, and then the remaining representatives are apportioned by population; practically, each state has at least two representatives). Senators represent the state, and each state gets two, in total. Given that states have a population, that means that senators in low-population states can be representing a much smaller number of people. The idea was to balance states that were far more rural against states that were much more urban, and force compromises.
Rather than intentionally undermining the bicameral system, I think it would be more productive to break the duopoly by creating some form of ranked choice voting at a local and state level (...and I believe that a few states have preemptively banned it because it worries the parties in power so much). The primary reason that the system seems so broken is that you have two parties that, while not truly monolithic, tend to vote that way. E.g., my state--Georgia--is quite pro-gun, but the two Senators--Warnock and Ossoff--will vote against 2A rights because they're Democrats, even though that's not the will of the people in the state as a whole. (My rep, Andrew Clyde, is good on that single issue, and fucking awful on everything else. Which makes sense, since he owns a gun store.) (That also gets into other questions about whether elected representatives are supposed to follow the will of the people, or whether they should do what they feel is best for the people, and these are not the same thing. I tend to lean towards elected officials doing what is best regardless of the will of the people, but that assumes you're electing smart people with integrity.)
land doesn’t vote, people do
Yes, but. The general idea is that you need to balance the states in some way. Ignoring for the moment the two-thirds compromise (because jesus fucking christ...!), the less populous southern states never would have joined with the union in the first place had there not been some way to balance their needs and desires against the needs and desires of the more populated northern states. When the other 37 states joined, that was the basis upon which they joined, including the way that the constitution could be amended. I understand the interstate compact, and it's a clever way to get around amending the constitution, but note that the states that have approved it so far tend to be more left-leaning. It will likely be an uphill battle to get right-leaning states to agree to that, since they would likely see it as a dilution of their votes. (E.g. Texas is unlikely to sign on, because it's the second most populous state and gerrymandered to shit so that Republicans dominate it despite not having a huge statistical advantage over Dems. Texas would want to keep all of their delegates red.)
In my opinion, I'd rather see the constitution amended to change these things, rather than creating work-arounds that can themselves be undone. The compact only works as long as the states don't change their laws to unwind it, and you could very well see a state like California do that if their electoral votes went to someone like Trump or DeSantis.
their job is much MUCH harder than the right.
Oh, absolutely. I don't disagree. I don't have great solutions there aside from one-on-one discussions, and that's much harder to do than mass media.
I think the perspective you're coming from makes a lot of sense, which is why I think that generally speaking it's better to have rules written explicitly and try to minimize interpretation.
RE Justices on the court: Yeah anything and everything has to be a constitutional amendment. It would be smart, for example, to make a ruling saying the SC may not take up cases about the SC, and outline cases in which justices must recuse. My argument about size is only true for random selection from a pool, not to appoint 25 justices; of course that can be an unbalanced court as easily as 9 justices.
RE break it to fix it: I agree the source problem is voting method (and by extension money in politics), but I don't think you can do it from the ground up. Consider even recent laws in FL (HB433) where the state disallows counties and municipalities from requiring water breaks etc to workers in high temperatures. If the rot is already in the state house, they legislate down and prevent it from happening. I think you have to pass clever master-stroke legislation to fix this problem, and there will probably not be many chances to do it. I say do it.
RE representing people: People do not and are not obliged to vote in their own best interests unfortunately. But poll testing can be weaponized. A good start to addressing the problem (besides changing voting method) is to make it easier for people to vote. But making election day a holiday is one of those things Mitch says is a blatant power grab by dems lol. While I'm all for a meritocracy, that is absolutely not what a democratic republic is. Especially not in the US (See MTG since you're a georgian).
RE EC: I don't see you arguing FOR the EC, only justifying why it originally existed. The big picture of the EC is resolved by the senate: all states are represented equally. I don't think you need to equally represent states in every branch of government. Why SHOULDN'T the people choose the executive if the EC isn't going to be independent of the state or party? At present, the EC disenfranchises everyone not in a swing state.
Did you by chance watch the video? It's a goody. Only 18 minutes or so.
::: spoiler Raw Story - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Raw Story:
Number 1
Nowhere in the constitution does it limit the amount of SC justices. We can have 9 or 9000 if we really want.
Number 2
DC and Puerto Rico should have been states decades ago. Guam, too.
Number 3
The policies of Harris/Walz are what 70+% of the country wants. If they are far left, then I am the Queen of England
Number 4
Tell snaggletooth to shut the fuck up and die already. This fucking lich has been the root cause of the court needing to be fixed
#VOTE!
It's not unconstitutional if you fucking pack the court with people who aren't fucking traitorous fascists. What are ya gonna do? Sue all the way to the supreme court???
Fuck that weird old strokey bastard. You know what you do when you lose fuck face? Get good or go home.
It's good to know he's worried about it, means it'll probably work
He knows how this works. McConnell spent decades setting up the current Supreme Court to be the monster that it is, and he doesn't want that work undone in a single Presidential Administration.
The segment of the constitution relating to the supreme court is preposterously small. It's very weird that people think that no one is capable of actually reading the damned thing.
Never mentions any number of judges. Mentions numbers in a bunch of other places, and gets so detailed as to specify how to break up the initial batch of senators to ensure rolling terms.
But no, they specifically intended for there to be a specific number of justices that they just opted not to write down:
656791079 justices, just like the constitution forgot to dictate.Other fun fact: you can pass a law that says the supreme court can't hear appeals to certain types of cases. It's explicitly stated that you could just write the supreme court out of hearing any case that involved the supreme court or any Justice, an executive who appointed any member of said court, or just about anything.
Yes, please!
Since the constitutional amendment process is literally impossible and has been for at least 40 years, SCOTUS is the final verdict on any constitutional matter.
Even if it WASN'T fundamentally broken, it's the mother and father of all conflicts of interest to make it the final arbiter on matters pertaining to itself and the ex president/wannabe dictator that appointed a plurality of them.
This is interesting, how would appeals work? Would there be a special committee formed by Congress, or would the circuit court be the final word?
There's no defined process. The constitution just specifies that the supreme court has appellate jurisdiction except where Congress defines exceptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisdiction_stripping
Since Congress also has authority to actually create and organize the lower courts, they can do almost whatever they please.
The only thing that can't do is diminish or expand the original jurisdiction of the supreme court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_jurisdiction_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
So they can't put a different court in charge of cases involving two states disagreeing over ownership of a river or it's water, or ambassadors and such.
So if Congress wanted it to be a single use court nominated, appointed and dissolved for one special case they could. Or they could say it just stops at the federal appeals court, the state court or wherever they want.
Personally, I think a single use court established for special high profile cases with a large potential for conflict of interest would be best. There's some trickiness that would be involved, since Congress can't actually appoint judges, only the executive can. So if the case involved the current sitting executive (in my opinion only in their personal capacity, as cases involving the office of the president lack the personal liability that makes for a conflict of interest), then they would still need to be the one to make the appointment. Might be able to sidestep it by having the house select already appointed judges without the conflict to hear the case, but it's very close to appointment with extra steps.
In any case, other than the caveat that's never happened, it would be so much more clearly unbiased.
Don't forget Samoa and the other island terrories. It's a bit of a tricky situation because of population size and such but there shouldn't be a single person on American territory without voting Congressional representation.
American Samoa essentially can't become a state because of the way land ownership rights work there. It's a FASCINATINGLY complex situation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/why-some-american-samoans-don-t-want-u-s-citizenship-n1103256
I think we should welcome any and all territories to become states or leave as they desire, but I also think that staying a territory should remain an option.
Given how lack of representation tends to kneecap funding allocation for things like infrastructure I think they would be unwise to eschew statehood, but I know that, specifically in Puerto Rico, there are groups that against statehood but also against going their own way.
Forcing statehood feels wrong, but so does cutting people off from what support they do get from us, to say nothing of them being US citizens.
I do think we should extend full citizenship to anyone from the territories though. Just because it's not a state doesn't mean it's not the US.
Pretty sure the Lich is literally based on him. If I was coming up with a tabletop and wanted an "undead asshole, lord of assholes" I would certainly use his likeness.
His history is fucking wild. He graduated top of his classes and graduated college with a PoliSci, then went on to join MLKs March and speech "I have a dream" in person. Then he was appointed party whip by Frist. That time as whip is probably why he's such a hard-line ass-bag of bones now.
There is no “left” in USA, Democrats would be centre at best in Europe. Sure from the GOP pov they seem left, but that’s because republicans are extremely to the right.
For number 2. Some people have been fighting since the late 19th century to make Washington DC a state.
Oh, no! Harris and Walz are representing the will of the majority of the people! Whatever the fuck is to be done about democracy?!
It's also not possible for most democrats to be on the far left of their party (unless the remaining minority are on average even further to the right of their party). If everyone's further left than you're expecting, that's just the party's new average center position.
Majority of Americans: Support policies X, Y, and Z.
Democrats: Put policies X, Y, and Z into their platform.
Republicans: Extreme socialist Demoncrabs want to destroy America!!!
Literally every dem presidential candidate is the Most Furthest Leftistest candidate in history.
Biden was the most leftist politician ever the year he beat Sanders. Clinton was an extremists Marxist in 2016. Obama was literally Stalin in 2008. John Kerry was going to be to the left of the Vietcong in 2004. Al Gore was a Manchurian deep state CCP asset in 2000. Etc, etc.
So of course we just now discover the ultra-left agenda of a California AG and her friend the Minnesota hog father two months before the general election. Shame McConnell didn't think to warn us sooner.
Is this guy delusional? After the way his party treated him in the convention, he still doubles down that the problem is the democrats?
Can't stop felating trump ya know.
Republicans are like that abused and thrashed partner in a bad relationship. Where instead of figuring out ways to leave it and be better. They willingly stay and are like "But...but...I still love them miserably!".
That's Republicans for Trump.
Wait, what? Tell me more…
e.g. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/15/mitch-mcconnell-republican-convention-2024-trump
Thanks - totally missed that story somehow
Please just die already you turtlefaced googly eyed fuck
I'd rather he stroke out and have to sit drooling all over himself in a puddle of his own shit trapped in his mind and unable to communicate with anyone for a few years. Death is too easy for this asshole.
That's pretty much how he already is and is a big part of the problem
If he was able to communicate for this article he's not far enough gone.
Fun fact, Congress can change the size of the Supreme Court at will for any reason.
They SHRUNK the court in 1866 from 9 to 7 because they just fucking hated Andrew Johnson THAT MUCH and they wanted to deny him a nomination.
After Johnson was out, they raised it back up to 9 in 1869, Granting 2, and it stayed that way ever since.
https://www.history.com/news/supreme-court-justices-number-constitution
"The Supreme Court had just ruled that paper money was unconstitutional, which would have 'wreaked havoc' with the U.S. Treasury, says Marcus. But Grant and Congress quickly confirmed two new justices who reversed the Court’s decision in the earlier case, saving the Republicans from having to undo the nation’s entire system of legal tender."
Jesus and I thought our court was making the most dumbass decisions. Wierdly gives me hope that the Harris administration can fix a whole bumcha bullshit though.
I misread Harris as Harrison and I thought that you were making a joke that it was the 1880s again...
The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland...
https://youtu.be/0_HGqPGp9iY
They also shrank the court to 8 in 2016.
That was a little different, they didn't actually change the size of the court, they just maintained the vacancy.
In 1866 they actually went and said "Nah, 7 is good." Which not only kept Johnson from filling a vacancy, it bounced someone else out.
Paper money unconstitutional? Wow.
what an assholish shitstain.
he's totally okay with handing fascists over as long as those fascists "promise" to give him a seat at the table when they take over the country
and you know what they say about people who sit at the table of fascists? (they're also fascists)
https://www.thoughtco.com/dantes-9-circles-of-hell-741539 he's right there at the bottom.
This gives hell a bad name ..... I'd rather be burned alive for eternity than to spend all that time next to him.
Eh, upon review, seeing that Dante put Epicurus in hell, most of the people on lemmy would just go into the 6th circle too, buncha lefty heretics 😁
Meh, pretty sure the 9th/center of hell for most of the world. If betraying Caesar (lords, masters or those who serve them) is all it takes to get there then all who dispelled previous rulers are there.
Well.....yeah. It's Mitch McConnell. Have you not heard of Mitch McConnell before?
I have. But he's still an assholish shitstain who manages to surprise me.
So he doesn't want DC or PR statehood, giving federal representation to millions of otherwise disenfranchised US citizens because...he thinks they'll elect Democrats. Cool.
the other downside of DC statehood is that we’d have to change the slogan on our license plates, as they currently read “taxation without representation” for this very reason. just think of how silly all the old license plates would be if all of a sudden we actually did have representation.
Just grab some sharpie and cross out the "out."
I see the man behind "making election day a national holiday is a power grab by the democrats"^[1] is rolling out some new hits. Never ceases to amaze that he can get away with saying this stuff out loud.
Well, of course. Consider your own reference. Mitch knows they are wildly unpopular, and making it easier for the common folk they've been fucking over for years to vote would be disastrous for them.
GOD if only they were RIGHT about how "dangerous" democrats were. IF ONLY THE DEMOCRATS WEREN'T COWARDS and would actually do this shit
The only things the constitution has to say on the matter of the supreme court are: there has to be one, the supreme court judges should be paid, and the president can appoint supreme court justices with the advice and consent of the senate. It is completely silent on matters of how many supreme court justices there should be, or how long their terms should be.
For all his many, many faults, Mitch McConnell is not a profoundly stupid man, so I'm sure he knows this. Since he very likely knows this already, he probably has a reason for lying to the public on the matter. If the president does appoint several more justices, it's not like the Republicans can sue: no lower court would take the case, and the supreme court would already be packed with people who will actually be faithful to the constitution. So legal threats are a complete non-starter. That just leaves non-legal threats, which is what I think this is. I think Glitch is previewing the Republican strategy in the case of Harris getting more justices hired, which is they'll stoke up the fear and hatred of their idiotic, mouth breathing supporters. It's a thinly-veiled threat of treason.
Isn't this fucker dead yet? I have a bottle of scotch waiting for this asshole's demise. Same as Betsy DeVoss and her shitty brother; and the final Koch brother...
Nah, he'll never die. You can't kill a flesh-golem directly, you have to find its master and break the summon.
He is going to die. When I don't know. But I heard speculation that he has some kind of skin cancer and degenerative disorders (as exemplified by him just suddenly freezing and needing someone to tap his shoulder to get him to come around).
But even if he dies before I finish this comment he has already groomed his successor to take place. Despite being in alleged democracy these people have their shit done in a way that their own party will never really change.
Whoever took care of Kissinger needs to share how.
This from Mr "elections have consequences" himself.
I mean, this isn't hypocrisy, he's acknowledging that there will be consequences for the GOP.
All I can say is that I hope that the consequences destroy the GOP.
😆😆😆
This motherfucker is actually older than a Galapagos tortoise. Also, when did they unpause him? I thought his OS froze and he was shuffled off to hospice.
“Oh, no! I could be held accountable for my unfathomable corruption!”
[ geriatric tortoise noises ]
Too bad polio wasn't a better shot.
Did he almost die of polio or something?
My dad did. Almost died from it, I mean. I assume this is just about polio being rampant at the time. But if McFuckface got it and recovered, sucks for us.
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-ap-top-news-mitch-mcconnell-politics-ky-state-wire-f696c0bff070b46f9c62e03be50bd187
Yup....
Ah damn. Close call.
whatever their 'worst nightmares' are, are more than likely just what we need, and what most of us actually want.
Anything that's a nightmare to Republicans sounds like a dream to Democrats
They're scared of Democrats stacking the courts? Is that what was said? He reminds me of an old timey western card game where a player is accusing everyone of cheating with cards tucked up his sleeves
McConnel is a true climber. He never thinks about how to weild power he only thinks about ways to obtain it. In his mind everyone else's is the same.
mitch mcconnel in three acts
Act I: desperado
A dastardly madman ties a damsel to the tracks. A masked hero is seen on horseback trailing a train that is rushing straight towards the tied innocent. Our hero dismounts his horse and gallantly boards the train. He fights off hoards of bad guys to get to the engine room. After fighting the conductor he runs straits to the brake lever and pulls it with all his might. In the final moments the trains comes to a screeching halt just before it cleaves the fair maid into a thousand pieces.
Act II: the dastard
A slobbernly old man stands before the city council, "if we allow such violence against innocent train workers then surely every train from here to Timbuktu will be sieged upon by ruthless bandits! This cannot be allowed, we must outlaw the masked hero!" The old man turns to face the camera and twists his dastardly mustache.
Act III: it's in the news
News paper headline; "All trains from here to timbuktu sieged."
Newpaper byline: "masked hero outlawed."
Election news: Das le Turd III elected king after amassing mysterious train cargo fortune.
So his main objection is a loss of power
Fucking die already.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation.
You know, if the orange shithead is such a liability, maybe you should have condemned his actions leading up to J6, you melted bastard. Then maybe he wouldn't be the guy running the show.
I didn't realize the Dems were the far left party I'd been asking for. In this country, you can just say whatever and nobody checks. Apologies for multiple main-thread posts.
Everyone looks like a leftist when you're an avowed fascist.
I see the necromancy is still serving him well.
Die mad about it.
Oh, he's more worried about the nightmare for the GOP. Not for the country. Imagine that - he's more worried about the potential for the power of a political party to be diminished than he is about the end of the country.
Mitch needs to go away. Retire already you old bag.
He is. That's why you rarely hear anything from him any more.
This warms my heart
That Turtle Mitch dares comment on packing the supreme court is just inconceivable
Sounds Iike an amazing dream andaybe we can curb stomp the fascists ideas into the ground.
Is anybody writing this down? Sounds like an excellent roadmap to me.
Don’t threaten me with a good time, you creepy old shirtball!
Wow, a nightmare for republicans that everyone is fairly represented. That would be so horrible, wouldn't it be?
Come on. PR should have been a state a long, long time ago at the bare minimum.
His nightmare isn't imaginative enough. What if the Cancun Zodiak Killer loses to Allred? What if the Dems grow spines and fix the gerrymandering? What if they impeach bribe taking Supreme Court justices? What if they amend the Constitution to reverse Citizens United (hah, like any politician favors that)?
Man, that's the worst nightmare scenario? Fucking weaksauce. They'd still be breathing, instead of, y'know, put up against a wall and shot, like SCOTUS has ruled is perfectly legal now. As always, every word out of his mouth is self-serving bullshit.
I thought someone finally destroyed McConnell's phylactery. Did he have a second one hidden away somewhere?
It's weird just how many things that are a Republican's nightmare are also in my dreams.
Hahaha, I had almost forgotten how good that face is. The eyes, the lip, the ears.. perfection.
He got enough time between TIAs to rattle off a complete though, eh? Good for him, so proud.
If this were true, I'd be tempted to drop everything and volunteer for the Harris campaign.
Recently Pete Buttigieg has been saying that Trump losing would actually be a savior to the Republican party. Currently Republicans who privately abhore him choose to support him because he is their ticket to power. If he is shown to lose 2 elections in a row, he would most likely lose his grip on the GOP, and you would see more adaptability in their positions.
Losing one should've done it. But he replaced party leadership with his people, so that means he'll be at the top of the GOP ticket until he kicks the bucket.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's Harris v. Trump (from prison) in 2028, and Walz/Ocasio-Cortez v. Trump (from deathbed) in 2032. By that time, the GOP will be well and truly cooked.
We're missing 2036 when the GOP does a Weekend at Bernie's with Trump's corpse.
Hopefully by that point they'll be so broke they can't even afford the heroin.
Will someone inject heroin into Trump's ass?
I heard that when the GOP lost to Obama twice. People were saying the GOP would have to change to keep up with the demographic shifts. Boy were they right 🙃
Yeah, that's accurate. Been that way for quite awhile.
Oh, no, many of the things he did. What a nightmare. Won't anyone consider the plight of the male, pale, and stale. Oh the humanity.
Alternative headline 'McConnell Admits Packing Supreme Court Unconstitutional'.
Is that a promise?
Oh is he still alive?
I feel like they should be a lot more scared of getting shot by a bunch of crunchy purple haired anarchists or cringelord neostalinists who basically get off to giving them the wall after they push their shit too far and do our propaganda for us.
but maybe I don't have the best understanding of fear.
I never expected to see 'cringelord neostalinists' portrayed as being heroic, but here we are, and honestly, I don't hate it. I'll take communism over fascism any day.
hell, ill take bolshevism over fascism, and their whole thing was killing people like me.
Hey Mitch, freeze!
Flatly wrong about packing SCOTUS. It's probably a bad idea--as is ending the filibuster--but it's not unconstitutional.
As to why it's a bad idea - Republicans haven't increased the size of the court when they've held the legislature and presidency; packing the court would encourage them to do the same the next time they have power--and they will eventually, because that's the way politics have gone in this country--and we'd quickly end up with a court that's even more unwieldy than it is now.
The same principle applies to ending the filibuster; if it's ended now, then Dems can't use it when they are out of power in the Senate. Because, again, Republicans will win again at some point--possibly even this fall--and giving absolute power to a single party is a bad idea.
And that's how we keep scooting to the right.
People think there's a sense of fair play involved here and a dislike for hypocrisy, but it isn't the case. Look at what happened for appointments to the supreme Court under Obama vs trump as an example. I understand why you might feel this way considering that the nuclear option for ending cloture wasn't used by Republicans until Harry Reid did it, but 20 years later honor and decorum are no longer foundational to government.
Anymore, I think the best thing to do is use tools available to terrible effect, then with any luck all the "honor system" stuff can be written into law.
Bring back the talking filibuster, and pack the court to fix it's rules, ethics, and enforcement (the court doesn't even respect stare decisis anymore), add states, expand the cap on the house, blow the electoral college. No more gentlemen's agreements.
At least that's how I see it.
I'm absolutely fine with the talking filibuster; I love it, and think we should do it. Killing it entirely? No.
Packing the court? Also no. If anything, I think that the size should be reduced. I'd be fine with term limits on judges (say, 16 years), along with a code of ethics and mandatory financial disclosures and recusals for conflicts of interest. But packing the court is not a good idea.
I think that if we're ever going to get back to a point where we aren't hyperpartisan, we need to operate in good faith, even if the other side isn't. Constantly escalating ends up hurting us in the long run. And, again - as soon as you create the tools to get your way, those tools will be used against you; a hammer doesn't care which ideologue is swinging it.
Bad idea. Getting 400+ people to stop arguing long enough to vote on a thing is already hard enough. You'd just be adding more layers of bullshit.
Eh. Last I knew, PR didn't really want to be a state; I recall that under 50% of the island population wanted statehood. D.C. might, but I'm not sure that making a city a whole-ass state--particularly since most of the city is actually in Virginia and Maryland--is a good idea. That would have the effect of ensuring that voters in D.C. would be far more powerful than any other voters, since you would have a fairly small number of voters selecting two senators. (I can't find exact populatino data for D.C. alone; all population figures I can find are for metro D.C., which counts large parts of Virginia and Maryland; those voters already have representatives and senators.)
I oppose this for the same reason that I oppose getting rid of the Senate and going to a direct democracy; an electoral college balances the interests of the states as a whole against the population, because they're not always the same. An electoral system forces candidates to try and balance a message, rather than focusing solely on the most populous areas. Rather than eliminating the electoral college, I'd rather see some form of ranked-choice voting, which would tend to eliminate candidates that had the most extremely unpopular platforms. (E.g., Trump consistently won about 30% of the votes in the 2015 primaries, but a strong majority of voters would have selected him as their last choice. Some form of ranked choice in the Republican primaries likely would have resulted in a candidate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio instead of Trump.)
All of this is a balancing game of competing interests and priorities. Steamrolling people and hammering them isn't going to make anything better. Yes, I hear what you're saying about the Overton window, but frankly, that's a messaging problem that the left has created. If the right is able to move the Overton window, it's because the left is doing a really shitty job at meeting voters where they are, while the right is doing a damn good job at outreach.
There's some common ground here and some... not so common ground.
If you go back to the talking filibuster, you've essentially eliminated the filibuster as it exists today, but with the added benefit of potentially bringing attention to issues. It's not possible to just kill progress with an email. So on that we're agreed.
For packing the court, I could go one of two ways: Either just do it so that we codify how many justices and the rules for appointments (which I think is good) and potentially term limits OR pivot and leave justices as serving for life, appoint them into the federal court circuit. Every new case--or new term-- select 7, 9, or 13 justices and let's go for that term. The more justices sit the bench, but more likely they are to reach non-extreme outcomes.
With respect to fair play and hyperpartisan politics I think you missed the point. We are currently in a two party system with a penchant for minority rule. We don't get back to a good place by trying to be nice guys and all play together again. What we do instead is overhaul the voting system in such a way that ranked choice or proportional representation or some other more modern approach is used instead of FPTP. We got here by groups coalescing into two polarized super-parties, and that need not be the case. But we have to break it to fix it.
RE adding states and capping the house, your opinions are at odds. Apportionment is totally busted right now with a lower cap. Either we have to write off states with low population, or you have to up the cap so that voters in LA and Boseman are approximately equally represented. It sounds weird to say "hey DC doesn't get 2 senators, but CA gets 750k people per congressional rep and Montana gets 500k people per rep." I'm seeing quick facts here of DC with about 60% the population of Montana. It's small, but it's not beyond compare.
RE electoral college: The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is already well on the way. The EC doesn't make sense to me. Using the senate makes sense with states being equal, but land doesn't vote, people do. The idea originally is just to let the more "sophisticated" delegates overrule the populace if necessary, and also make it easier to count votes in the days before the telegraph. The EC should have prevented Trump, it shouldn't have enabled him. It's busted. Since the EC votes are managed by the states as well, we have arrived at a position where only swing states really matter and that means I don't get to see candidates in Indiana because they're going to MI and PA instead and the message is not balanced: it's only for those competitive areas. IMO it's doing more harm than good. I see the intent of balancing out the desires of all the parts of the country, but instead of doing that, it allows gaming the system. See also gerrymandering for this, because that's also busted AF.
Your last paragraph almost deserves its own reply. Rather than write it in full, I'm going to leave this video which does a great job. If you haven't seen it, please watch it in full. The left isn't that good at messaging I agree, but their job is much MUCH harder than the right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A
The perspective that I'm approaching this from is that some people and politicians will use any crack as leverage to break a system. Any changes that are made need to be done in such a robust way that abusing it in an unanticipated way would be extremely challenging. Anything that can be used for positive change can also be misused for regressive, negative change, unless it's managed very, very carefully.
Not necessarily correct. As it stands, we have 5 extremely far-right judges (Thomas, Alito, Goresuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), one that's moderately right-wing (Roberts), and three that are moderates-pretending-to-be-liberal (Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Even if we managed to nuke two conservative justices and capped it at 7, that would still be a 4-3 conservative court, and probably still a far-right court. Term limits would certainly help, but I strongly suspect that SCOTUS would shoot down term limits unless it was a constitutional amendment. Moreover, you could still get cases where a justice vacated their seat early and a president ended up being able to pack the court with justices that matched their ideology, much like Trump did with Kavanaugh, Goresuch, and Barrett.
I don't think that's wise. Breaking it in order to fix it assumes that the majority of the people will want to fix it. As we've seen with the number of people that support outright fascism, I simply don't believe that. I do think that we need some form of ranked-choice so that there's not a duopoly, but I also think that, given where we are now, that needs to start at a local level and work up to a state level before we even consider taking it national.
Not exactly. The house is supposed to represent the people of the state, and that's based on population, with an absolute floor of 1 (technically, each state gets 1 representative, and then the remaining representatives are apportioned by population; practically, each state has at least two representatives). Senators represent the state, and each state gets two, in total. Given that states have a population, that means that senators in low-population states can be representing a much smaller number of people. The idea was to balance states that were far more rural against states that were much more urban, and force compromises.
Rather than intentionally undermining the bicameral system, I think it would be more productive to break the duopoly by creating some form of ranked choice voting at a local and state level (...and I believe that a few states have preemptively banned it because it worries the parties in power so much). The primary reason that the system seems so broken is that you have two parties that, while not truly monolithic, tend to vote that way. E.g., my state--Georgia--is quite pro-gun, but the two Senators--Warnock and Ossoff--will vote against 2A rights because they're Democrats, even though that's not the will of the people in the state as a whole. (My rep, Andrew Clyde, is good on that single issue, and fucking awful on everything else. Which makes sense, since he owns a gun store.) (That also gets into other questions about whether elected representatives are supposed to follow the will of the people, or whether they should do what they feel is best for the people, and these are not the same thing. I tend to lean towards elected officials doing what is best regardless of the will of the people, but that assumes you're electing smart people with integrity.)
Yes, but. The general idea is that you need to balance the states in some way. Ignoring for the moment the two-thirds compromise (because jesus fucking christ...!), the less populous southern states never would have joined with the union in the first place had there not been some way to balance their needs and desires against the needs and desires of the more populated northern states. When the other 37 states joined, that was the basis upon which they joined, including the way that the constitution could be amended. I understand the interstate compact, and it's a clever way to get around amending the constitution, but note that the states that have approved it so far tend to be more left-leaning. It will likely be an uphill battle to get right-leaning states to agree to that, since they would likely see it as a dilution of their votes. (E.g. Texas is unlikely to sign on, because it's the second most populous state and gerrymandered to shit so that Republicans dominate it despite not having a huge statistical advantage over Dems. Texas would want to keep all of their delegates red.)
In my opinion, I'd rather see the constitution amended to change these things, rather than creating work-arounds that can themselves be undone. The compact only works as long as the states don't change their laws to unwind it, and you could very well see a state like California do that if their electoral votes went to someone like Trump or DeSantis.
Oh, absolutely. I don't disagree. I don't have great solutions there aside from one-on-one discussions, and that's much harder to do than mass media.
I think the perspective you're coming from makes a lot of sense, which is why I think that generally speaking it's better to have rules written explicitly and try to minimize interpretation.
RE Justices on the court: Yeah anything and everything has to be a constitutional amendment. It would be smart, for example, to make a ruling saying the SC may not take up cases about the SC, and outline cases in which justices must recuse. My argument about size is only true for random selection from a pool, not to appoint 25 justices; of course that can be an unbalanced court as easily as 9 justices.
RE break it to fix it: I agree the source problem is voting method (and by extension money in politics), but I don't think you can do it from the ground up. Consider even recent laws in FL (HB433) where the state disallows counties and municipalities from requiring water breaks etc to workers in high temperatures. If the rot is already in the state house, they legislate down and prevent it from happening. I think you have to pass clever master-stroke legislation to fix this problem, and there will probably not be many chances to do it. I say do it.
RE representing people: People do not and are not obliged to vote in their own best interests unfortunately. But poll testing can be weaponized. A good start to addressing the problem (besides changing voting method) is to make it easier for people to vote. But making election day a holiday is one of those things Mitch says is a blatant power grab by dems lol. While I'm all for a meritocracy, that is absolutely not what a democratic republic is. Especially not in the US (See MTG since you're a georgian).
RE EC: I don't see you arguing FOR the EC, only justifying why it originally existed. The big picture of the EC is resolved by the senate: all states are represented equally. I don't think you need to equally represent states in every branch of government. Why SHOULDN'T the people choose the executive if the EC isn't going to be independent of the state or party? At present, the EC disenfranchises everyone not in a swing state.
Did you by chance watch the video? It's a goody. Only 18 minutes or so.
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