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Does packing the court. Getting rid of the electoral system. Ending the filibuster. seem authoritarian to anybody?
9 Answers
- Anonymous7 months ago
No. If anything it's the opposite. These schemes are all majoritarian in nature. Getting rid of the Electoral College is the most easily understood majoritarian decision. If we got rid of the Electoral College and went to a simple popular vote majority of the American voters would control things. As is, we have a country which is ruled by a President Who 54% of Americans voted against last time. We seen a disastrous that is with. Same sort of argument applies to George W bush. His presidency was also a disaster and he was someone who the majority of Americans rejected. Bottom line is that the presidency should go to the person who most Americans, or at least plurality, think should be president. Shouldn't go to someone who wins by a happenstance of the Electoral College.
Removing the filibuster is also a majoritarian step. The Senate is already in anti-majoritarian body since every state gets a equal number of Senators regardless of how many people live there. So, for example, Wyoming has the same number of Senators as California even though California has 70 times the population of Wyoming. But the institution is made even less majoritarian, and more dysfunctional, by the filibuster. It's important to understand that the filibuster as it now exists was never intended by the founding fathers and is largely an accident of the last couple decades. The filibuster essentially procedural hold which allows any Senator to stop a piece of legislation. In order to overcome the filibuster we need 60 votes from the Senate. Given the political realities this is unlikely happen in most cases. The founding fathers actually considered whether to require a supermajority in the legislature to pass pieces of legislation but rejected that idea because it would allow legislative minorities to control the agenda. The filibuster originally emerge by accident. When the Senate was formulating its rules early on it decided not to have a time limit on how long people can speak. The logic here was that all of the members of the Senate were gentleman and they would all know when it was appropriate for them to stop speaking. Eventually was realized that if one refused to yield the floor they could hold up Senate business. But this initially required people to actually speak. So they had to actually risk their own health by getting up and talking. But in the last few decades that's changed. They got rid of the requirement that people talk and they made some other reforms. These made it so that there was no real cost to engaging in a filibuster. Because of this filibuster has become routine. Now, virtually any piece of legislation is going to get filibustered just as a matter of course. When the filibuster had some cost to it used to be only really deployed when people were met with a particularly objectionable piece of legislation. Now it's used all the time and it's really gummed up the works. Democrats under Obama became especially frustrated with filibuster. For example, in 2010 they had I believe 59 seats in the Senate and still weren't able to pass legislation. This is pretty ridiculous. So getting rid of filibuster, or preferably changing it so as to make it more rare, would restore the majoritarian nature to Congress. If one party controls the Senate then they should be allowed to get some of their agenda through.
Court-packing is more controversial but also ultimately serve some majoritarian purpose. There's a number of problems with the Supreme Court, some of them structure on some of them with how Republicans have conducted themselves over the last four years. Structural problems with the court include the fact that justices serve for life. Initially this wasn't a huge concern because people didn't live that long. But now, justices are routinely living into their 80s, and even Beyond. This means that in a pointy like Brett Kavanaugh or Neil Gorsuch can be expected to serve for decades. This allows the Dead Hand of the past to exert continued control over the changing future, often against electoral wishes. Many Savvy Republicans intrinsically recognize this fact. They understand that elections are going against them and likely will continue to go against them. The prospects of a conservative majority in the elected branches of the government is going to become increasingly remote as the United States becomes more diverse and more dominated by younger Generations which generally reject many of the beliefs of the Republican Party. So the way that they are still trying to have influence is by filling as many court seats as possible. By appointing lifetime judges to the courts they can continue to have influence, and perhaps even control, over Society even as their electoral majority dwindle. This, of course, is a problem. While there's something to be said for the ability of a numerical minority do put some restraints on the unchecked will of the majority it should not be a case that the will of the majority can be thwarted by unelected judges who sir without any sort of democratic recourse. this problem has become more acute in the last few years has Republicans have stepped up the aggressive power grab on the issue of judges. In 2016 Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon on the court died. President Barack Obama, democrat, bus had a chance to appoint a new Justice one who would chase the court from having a 5-2 for conservative majority to a 524 liberal majority. Conservatives were, from a policy standpoint, obviously upset about this and they invented the new doctrine which said that a president should not be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court Justice in an election year. Too many people this was obviously nonsense aimed at preventing Barack Obama from getting a nomination on court but Republicans insisted that they were being honest and that this was an important principle which should be followed. Republicans successfully kept Obama from appointing his nominee Merrick Garland to the court. They didn't even allow Garland to have a hearing. Instead, they allowed Donald Trump, who the majority of Americans voted against, to appoint the successor to Scalia. now, Republicans have completely reverse themselves. With Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal line of the Supreme Court, having died just two months before an election, they insist that it is perfectly fine for a president to appoint a Supreme Court Justice in an election year. It's very clear that what they are engaged in is in anti-majoritarian power grab. There's an argument, in a fairly strong one, that allowing this to go forward would be detrimental to the court and to democracy. This is especially true if, as expected, Joe Biden When's the presidential race and or the Democrats gain a senate majority. There's just really no legitimate way to argue that in such an instance Donald Trump's nominee should be allowed on the court for a lifetime appointment. Americans would have rejected at the polls, perhaps by a very strong margin, the very sort of politics which is exemplified by Trump and his nominee. If publicans went forward with this nomination anyway and added her to the Supreme Court then Democrats would have a very strong case that they should be allowed to redress this imbalance by adding more justices to the court. doing so would restore the majoritarian nature of US government by preventing a minority elected president such as Trump from having an incredible influence on the Supreme Court for decades
- Anonymous7 months ago
Who is advocating for those things?
- horstLv 47 months ago
Getting rid of the electoral college makes more sense than being allowed to ignore the will of the people. And no, and adding more justices to the court is not "authoritarian". It's allowed as per the US Constitution. If you can't tell Trump is behaving like a dictator now you need to wake the hell up.
- ?Lv 77 months ago
Yes, we live in scary times when many have lost their sense of how valuable the constitution really is.
- Anonymous7 months ago
Yes BUT President Trump is literally Hitler AND a Dictator even though Hitler was a Dictator.
Lisa A, maybe stop embarrassing yourself with your sad ignorance of the fact that America is a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy.
Hor, Democrats are burning down cities and attacking people for having different opinions BUT Republicans are the bad guys. You ignorant bigot.
- Anonymous7 months ago
It's more than just authoritarian, it's deplorable!
- W.T. DoorLv 77 months ago
The Democrat Party wants to destroy the USA so they can replace it with a dictatorship.
- Anonymous7 months ago
It's a liberals wet dream.