Our Constitution Guarantees America Will Never Be a True Democracy

  Never has it been clearer than it is today that America can never be a true democracy, because the U.S.  Constitution prevents that.

It starts with the U.S. Senate, which gives two votes to every state regardless of population. Public policy scholars Michael Ettlinger and Jordan Hensley figure that in the current Senate, “41 Republican senators representing as few as 75 million people can block most legislation from even coming to a vote — thwarting the will of a group of Democratic and Republican senators representing as many as 270 million Americans.”

The Constitution did not arise from a consensus of like-minded founding fathers. Rather it was a compromise between the highly populated northern states, which wanted a democratically represented Senate, and the lesser populated southern states, which wanted equal power in the Senate. We are stuck with that situation because amending the Constitution itself takes a 2/3rds vote in both houses of Congress then ratification by three quarters of the states — something entirely unlikely for such a change.

    We’re lucky that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims in 1964 that the 14th Amendment’s principle of equal protection required state legislatures to be based on one person-one vote. Prior to then, for example, Los Angeles County’s 6 million residents had the same representation in the California Senate as did the 400 people of Alpine County. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion which has led to the practice of reapportioning both chambers of state legislatures based on population. Unfortunately, the Court could not make the same ruling for the U.S. Senate, in which Wyoming has the same representation as the states of California and New York.

This anti-democratic distribution of political power wasn’t so bad when men and women of goodwill were elected to the U.S. Senate, but today we have such conscious and conscientious ill-will  practiced primarily by the right wing representatives of the less populated states against the interests of the bigger states, that it’s totally disheartening.

Is this how the “American Experiment” ends? Is this how democracy dies in our country?  It’s hard to see any solution to what is essentially a structural flaw in our governance.

Meanwhile, back at the state level, gerrymandering has made it possible by ill-intentioned, power-hungry Republicans to solidify their control of state legislatures, such that in Texas, for example, the majority of the population can vote for Democratic candidates, but the majority of candidates elected in the same election are Republicans.

Michael Scherer of the Washington Post calculated that the Michigan legislature has a Republican majority although Democrats have won a majority of the popular vote there for a decade. In North Carolina in 2018, Democrats won 51% of the popular vote but got only 45% of the seats.

Not satisfied with the domination they created through gerrymandering, Republican-dominated legislatures in Georgia, Texas, and Florida, and other states with majority Democratic populations have worked aggressively to restrict voting rights. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states have enacted more than 30 new laws to suppress votes among heavily Democratic populations. They get away with it for one reason — because they can, pure and simple. In those states which have fraudulently created Republican control of their legislatures, the legislatures themselves manage the decennial reapportionment, guaranteeing continued gerrymandering and continued anti-democratic government.

It has been said that “the arc of history bends toward justice,” but it clearly bends against democratic rule. Sad but true.

 

Is America Strong Enough to Withstand the Authoritarian Direction of the GOP?

The most influential person on the right is no longer Donald Trump, it is Tucker Carlson, who last week took his viewers to Hungary, where he portrayed the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orban as his picture of what the United States should be like in the future.

Really? Are his followers, who were groomed by Donald Trump to despise the free press and immigrants, going to fall in line behind a platform based on authoritarian rule?  It’s a frightening prospect.

Lovers of democracy in America should be alarmed at the breadth of the Republican attack on our system. Here are the major components, which should hearten the enemies of America:

1) Treat voting as a privilege, not as a right, just like under Jim Crow. Make it as hard as possible for the poor and powerless to vote, since they can be expected to vote for Democrats.

2) Destroy faith in the electoral process by claiming, despite lack of evidence, that any victory by a Democrat must be due to election fraud.

3) Through gerrymandering, enable Republicans to control legislatures (and congressional  seats) even when the majority of votes statewide were Democratic.

4) Use that control of state legislatures to pass laws restricting ballot access and, best of all, a law allowing that Republican legislature to take the administration of elections away from counties, the most populous of which lean Democratic.

5) Pass laws in those states allowing the legislature to rule a presidential election fraudulent, without evidence, and send its own slate of electors to the Electoral College. (With such a law, Donald Trump could have won in 2020.)

6) Destroy confidence in the mainstream media by labeling anything contrary to the conservative agenda or about Republican corruption “fake news.”  Do this primarily by creating your own news media and channels that allow followers to believe they are fully informed when they’re not.

7) Subtly, or not so subtly, embolden white supremacists to mobilize against minorities and progressives. They can be counted on to use death threats and actual violence to intimidate non-believers. It helps to have free access to mass casualty assault rifles, so oppose all gun control laws.

These and other strategies, amplified by social media, can do immense damage to our democratic system. The question is can we survive the assault?

We can take some comfort from the fact that the majority of Americans have not been infected by the GOP virus. However, given the above strategies, it is going to take more than a simple majority opposing those strategies to prevail.  If we can keep the “Trumpers” to about 40% of the population, we might squeak through.

Our system does have its own checks and balances, the biggest of which is the U.S. Supreme Court. One would hope that despite its rightward movement with three Trump-appointed justices creating a 6-3 conservative majority that the justices would not return us to the days of old when the court came down on the side of white supremacy and voter suppression — although it did show signs of going in that direction with a July 1 decision upholding two Arizona voter suppression laws. As the New York Times put it, the Court ruled that “states don’t have to wait for fraud to occur before enacting laws to prevent it.”

Our last and strongest protection is freedom of the press. Authoritarian regimes like Orban’s, so admired by Tucker Carlson, benefit from shutting down media with which they disagree. We hear it around the world, including in Hong Kong, that opposition to the regime is considered traitorous and can be silenced.

If we see that line crossed by our Supreme Court (which would have to adjudicate it), then we are truly facing the ending of the American experiment.

Let’s not allow that to happen. As I said, it will take a super majority, not a simple majority to prevail and begin the process of reversing democracy’s decline.

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    These columns are archived at TalkingTurkey.online. This week’s column is made possible by reader Ray Leon who donated $1,000 to my GoFundMe campaign. Find that campaign at FundTalkingTurkey.com.