A Modest Proposal For A New Constitution
In my previous piece, I discussed the problems stemming from the fact that the United States Constitution is very hard to change, how this stifles the ability of people to enact progressive reform. However, what is criticism if you can’t offer a solution? In this follow-up I will outline what possible changes could be made to the American system of government if people were so mobilized to do so.
The first thing to start with is without a doubt the elimination of the Electoral College. I already outlined some of the reasons for doing so in my previous article, but to recap- the Electoral College is one of the most stark remaining relics of a slaveholding system, and it is incredibly anti-democratic. Two Presidential elections in the past twenty years where the popular vote winner lost the Electoral vote demonstrate this- you can try to spin it as much as you want, but it won’t change this simple fact. For anything else to go forward, we need to have direct elections for the country’s highest office.
Getting a little more radical, the structure of Congress should be changed. Debates have been had in this country over the removal of the filibuster, though generally this takes the shape of the party in the Senate majority wanting to reduce or eliminate the filibuster, and the party in the minority wanting to keep it. However, this is an example of small-scale thinking when we need to think on a bigger scale. The Senate itself should be abolished. The Senate has served as a barrier to progressive change for its entire history- obstructing civil rights laws for decades as well as workers’ rights legislation and, most recently, eliminating the public option from the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
However, this does not mean we can be content to merely abolish the Senate and leave the House of Representatives as is. To start with, the House’s size should be greatly expanded. The cap of 435 representatives, first imposed in the 1920s, is greatly out of date and only serves to disempower urban (and by extension minority) districts. It is simply absurd that the United Kingdom, a country a fraction of our size and a sixth of our population, has 650 Parliamentary constituencies, almost two hundred more than our House of Representatives. The US should have at least that many, if not far more.
Not only should the size of the House of Representatives be vastly increased, but the way that representatives are elected should be changed, instead of the first past the post, geographical district system we currently have. This leads to situations such as in 2012, where the Democrats received more of the nationwide votes for House seats, but because of the system (and the gerrymandering it encourages), the Republicans held onto a majority in the chamber. We should have a mix of representation based on geographical districts (drawn up by independent commissions and not the state legislatures) and also a form of at-large national proportional representation. There are a couple of different examples for how this system could work. One is how it is done in Germany. Germany has representation by geographical districts in its parliament, the Bundestag, just as the US House does. However, district representatives only account for part of the Bundestag seats. They also elect representatives from an at-large federal list- if a party gets over a certain percentage of the nationwide popular vote, it gets allotted a certain number of seats from a national list selected by party members. The higher above the threshold it gets, the more seats. This allows for a much more democratic reflection of what voters’ preferences are, as well as giving them an opportunity to see a much greater diversity of views represented in the legislature.
As with making it easier to change the constitution, these changes are much more radical than currently seems possible in the present day American political landscape. However, is that more or less realistic than expecting the current system to not continue to deteriorate the state of our country and democracy? The first step in achieving change is to properly envision and describe what that change should be. After all, this country has a long tradition of ideas that once seemed unrealistic, radical and dangerous become mainstream, why should this be any different?
