The United States Supreme Court will soon decide if they will overturn Roe versus Wade, the landmark 1973 Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States. Because of the current make-up of the Court, it is likely Roe versus Wade will be overturned. Yet, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, by a more than 2-1 margin, US citizens favor keeping abortion legal. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/16/post-abc-poll-abortion-supreme-court/ These results are consistent with other polls measuring overwhelming support for legal abortion.
So, how can a law that only has the support of 30 percent of US citizens get rammed down our throats? This shouldn’t happen in a democracy where citizens theoretically dictate policies. But, here we are, with a radicalized right wing fringe controlling the Supreme Court.
What went wrong?
In a true democracy, every citizen’s vote is equal. For a number of reasons, this doesn’t happen in the US. We can only say that we have, “kind of a democracy”.
The US Supreme Court is where to start looking at what has gone wrong. Justices are nominated by the president. Unfortunately, voters don’t elect the president, the Electoral College does that. Since the 1992 election , Republicans have lost the popular vote in all but one election. However, because of the Electoral College, Republicans have held the presidency for twelve of those years and appointed five of the nine sitting justices.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes. He won the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232 votes. Yet, if Donald Trump had gotten roughly 45,000 more votes in three states, Trump would have been re-elected. In this nightmare scenario, Biden would have gotten a mandate from the voters with over 51 percent of the vote to Trump’s 46 percent and still would have lost. That would have been a disaster on many levels.
Since our nation’s founding, over 160 countries have copied parts of our electoral and legislative system. Not one has copied our Electoral College. The Electoral College gives outsized advantage to low population states and distorts the electoral process. The Electoral College was a last minute Constitutional compromise to appease representatives of slave owning states that were worried more populous states would someday outlaw slavery.
While every citizen’s vote is equal in a true democracy, the Electoral College makes voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada much more valuable. At the same time, the 2.6 million registered Republican voters in New York are inconsequential because of the large Democratic majority there. Likewise, Democrats in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and other Republican dominated states might just as well stay home and not vote in presidential races. Their votes simply won’t matter.
The Electoral College causes a disconnect and apathy between many voters and their democracy. It is at least partially responsible for a right wing Supreme Court that is not even closely representative of the US population. The other reason for the disconnect between the Supreme Court and the US population is the United States Senate.
The dysfunctional Senate
Supreme Court Justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In the case of Republicans, the president nominating Supreme Court justices may have never received a majority of popular votes. Likewise, the Republican senators that approved the justices, certainly don’t represent the majority of voters.
Again, as a result of a compromise with slave owning states while writing the Constitution, each state, regardless of their population, gets to elect two senators.
In 2018, Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump, who lost the 2016 presidential election by over 3 million votes. Republicans controlled the Senate and rammed Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination through the confirmation process while ignoring testimonials about Kavanaugh’s sexual assaults and perjury. Republican senators (who come mostly from small, rural states) did this while representing 42 million less voters than the Democratic minority in the Senate. Between the Electoral College elected president and a Senate majority that doesn’t represent the majority of voters, you start to understand the dysfunction between voters and today’s right wing and out-of-touch Supreme Court.
More Senate dysfunction
After Texas passed a law basically making all abortions illegal and in anticipation of a draconian Supreme Court ruling, the US House of Representatives did just what they should do, they passed a bill that would guarantee women’s right to legal abortion. This was an exercise in futility.
The House bill then went to the Senate where it died. Senate rules require a bill that doesn’t involve spending to get at least 60 votes to stop a filibuster. Consequently, a 41 vote minority of senators can kill any bill they don’t like.
The Senate filibuster is not part of the Constitution. Nor is the all-powerful, unelected Senate Parliamentarian who makes a bill’s life or death decision if it can be filibustered.
Polls show US voters want legal abortions, campaign funding reform, universal health care, real taxation of the rich and some level of gun control. But, none of this happens. There is a reason. In a real democracy, the majority rules. In the US Senate, the minority rules.
Elected officials picking their voters
The House of Representatives is supposed to be “The People’s House”. Not hardly.
Each Congressional representative represents about 700,000 people (based on the latest Census). Seven states have only one representative, meaning their representatives may represent significantly more or less than 700,000 people.
This is all well and good, but both parties practice gerrymandering. This is a process where state legislatures draw congressional districts that give the party in power the ability to make more safe seats for their party. Democracy be damned. This is all about political power.
Fewer and fewer House seats are competitive. Most elections are decided before a challenger is picked. The gerrymandered districts mean elected officials don’t have to worry about general elections, they only need to pander to their party’s fringe voters so they aren’t challenged in primaries. Since their seats are safe, lobbyists and special interests will bestow humungous campaign donations on them, further insulating them from voters. The Washington Post article below lays out the process of gerrymandering very well. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/23/gerrymandering-redistricting-competitive-house-districts/
Voting restrictions
For years, Republicans have been passing laws to make voting more difficult in their respective states. These efforts reached a crescendo after the 2020 election.
Many Republicans blamed the huge turnout of Black voters in 2020 for Donald Trump’s loss in swing states and for losing two Senate seats in Georgia. Republicans are hopeless racists and they assumed that Black voters turned out in such droves because pandemic rules made voting easier last year. Hence, using Republican logic, if voting is made more difficult, lazy Black voters will stay home. Of course, more difficult voting rules won’t impact the turnout of hard-working White Republicans.
This strategy may backfire on Republicans. I don’t believe Black people voted in 2020 because it was so easy. Black people voted in 2020 in such high numbers for the same reason White Republicans voted in record numbers – Donald Trump was the most racist president since at least 1869.
Regardless of all this, making voting more difficult is a bad thing for a democracy. While Republicans claim they are preventing massive election fraud, the only massive election fraud is in Republicans’ imaginations.
How to get a more perfect democracy?
In a democracy, voters can’t be expected to become experts on all things related to governing and they can’t personally vote on every issue that comes up. Instead, we hire full time representatives to do the research and vote for our interests. Obviously, with the presidents and senators that gave us today’s Supreme Court, this hasn’t worked out that way.
It would be nice at this point to come-up with some creative solutions to bring us closer to where all of our votes are equal and the majority ruled. There is a nice area in the Comments section below this article if anyone has suggestions. I admit, I don’t.
Getting rid of the Electoral College requires a Constitutional Amendment. The amendment must pass both houses of Congress with a two-thirds majority and then three-fourths of the state legislatures must approve.
This simply isn’t going to happen. Republicans are a party in free-fall. Having lost the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections, the Electoral College is the only thing that makes them relevant. Worse, Republican’s last three presidencies have ended in recessions, each one worse than the one before. They can’t brag about their accomplishments, they can only complain about what Democrats accomplish. To top it off, Donald Trump just completed the most disastrous presidency in US history. https://www.frugalron.com/the-trump-disaster/
The best way to eliminate the Senate filibuster is to create a Senate precedent. This would require a simple Senate majority. This sounds relatively simple, but it isn’t. Many Democrats worry about what would have happened if Donald Trump didn’t have to contend with Senate filibusters when he had House and Senate majorities in his first two years in office. I think this fear is overrated. A long-time goal of the right wing of the Republican Party was to eliminate Obamacare. Trump couldn’t even get that done when all he needed was a simple majority in both the House and Senate.
As far as ending gerrymandering, there isn’t much hope of that unless some Republican appointed Supreme Court justices die while Democrats control the presidency and Senate. Republicans have a stranglehold on too many state legislatures to let gerrymandering go away. The overriding goal of the Republican Party is to maintain White, male, heterosexual privilege in the US. They know they can’t do that on a level playing field.
The best hope for ending the disproportionate influence of radical right wing Republicans over the long term is still turning out to vote. The biggest threats to Republicans are higher educated and more diverse voters. Both of those things are happening.
While states like Iowa and Ohio in the upper Midwest become more racist, we see the opposite happening in the fast growing southwest US. California used to be solidly Republican. Now it is solidly Democratic. Nevada is voting more Democrat in every election and New Mexico is considered Democratic now. Arizona flipped to Democrats in the last presidential election, which was part of a long term trend.
If you like playing Dominos, Texas is the next to fall. Barack Obama lost Texas by almost 16 percentage points in 2012. Hilary Clinton lost Texas in 2016 by 9 points and in 2020, Biden narrowed the Democratic loss to 5.6 percentage points. Texas’s population continues to get younger, better educated and more diverse. If the voting trends in Texas continue and turn Democrat like the rest of the Southwest, that is the death knell for the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage.
There is little hope our current version of democracy will ever make every one of our votes equal. The best hope is that if clear thinking people make sure to vote, we can make our elected representatives and the Supreme Court at least more reflective of our population in the long term.
