Structural Politics in the USA #01: Enumeration of Core Flaws
Before diving into theories of structural political change, we should thoroughly list flaws in American representative democracy as presently practiced.
The following are thirteen core flaws in US government stemming from the present political structure of the country.
At the level of the Presidency:
American voters cannot vote directly for the President.
While the idea of popular elections is somewhat controversial, a key thing to note is, in other countries where the President wields non-ceremonial power (France, Chile, Mexico, etc.), Presidents tend to be popularly elected. In the United States, Presidents play an active role in the legislative process, routinely exercising formal legislative authority through vetoes and informal legislative authority through Executive Orders. As an active, rather than ceremonial, player in legislative politics, the lack of direct popular control over the office is a key issue. This is particularly exacerbated by (2).
The Electoral College, through which the President of the United States is elected, is wildly disproportionate and has its votes assigned in a “winner-takes-all” fashion.
As part of the compromise created by the United States’ founders, votes for President are distributed across states in a roughly proportional method, but with a floor of 2 EC votes per state. This results in a system where voters in some states are worth more than others. Additionally, given that all but two states have winner take-all election schemes, the votes of voters who do not align with the simple majority of voters in a given “Red State” or “Blue State” are functionally worthless. Note that this also means that swing-states dominate elections coverage. Lastly, consider (3) …
As presently designed, any presidential election in which any candidate did not get a majority of the 538 electoral college votes (+ 270), the election is decided in the House of Representatives - worse still, by the 50 state delegations rather than individual representatives.
Simply, in a case where there was serious competition from a third-party candidate, the election would be taken out of the hands of the public and instead decided amongst politicians on a basis which, like the Senate, overrepresents politicians from less populous states. Note that this process has not happened in about two centuries, but - because it is possible even in a two candidate race for candidates to both receive 269 votes - it remains a possibility.
At the level of the US Senate:
US Senators, via the threat of filibuster, can prevent a vote on any bill voted up from the House.
A unique and accidental product of efforts to maintain the Senate as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” has created a situation in which individual Senators, supported by less than a quarter of the total Senate, can stall just about all legislation coming up from the House. While legislation can still be passed through a process known as budget reconciliation, this process can only be used a set number of times a year and has a restricted set of use cases (as defined somewhat loosely by the Senate Parliamentarian).
The critical job of determining which bills make the legislative agenda is linked to the explicitly partisan “Majority Leader” position.
Almost self-explanatory. Unlike in Canada and the United Kingdom where those given these functions (as “Speaker”) are explicitly meant to renounce their party affiliation, here the power to set the agenda and determine which bills even get debated is explicitly given to a party functionary.
American voters registered as voters for the largest party/coalition in the Senate cannot elect and have never elected the floor leader of the largest party/coalition in the Senate.
Absent any ground rules for how parties are meant to function, powerful positions - which are routinely regarded as “de facto” equivalents to positions like “Leader of the Opposition” - are treated as purely a matter of political bureaucracy, to be decided by an electorate comprised exclusively of elected officials. Here, only Senators of each party may vote for their leadership. Note that this is somewhat typical but given (8) and the power demonstrated in (4) and (5) (making the Senate Majority Leader an equal member of what we could call an accidental legislative triumvirate, along with the House Speaker and the President), this is a major issue.
At the level of the US House of Representatives:
The critical job of introducing bills to the House floor (the Speaker) is treated as an explicitly partisan position.
(Just as in 5) Almost self-explanatory. Unlike in Canada and the United Kingdom, where those given these functions (as “Speaker”) are explicitly meant to renounce their party affiliation, here the power to set the agenda and determine which bills even get debated is explicitly given to a party functionary. Note also that, in other systems where the Speaker (or President) of the lower chamber is an explicit partisan, power is often distributed among deputy speakers (Sweden, Japan) or Vice Presidents (Spain, Norway, ) or, more importantly, there is a popularly elected (among party members) Prime Minister who is the explicit wielder of partisan power.
American voters registered as voters for the largest party/coalition in the House cannot elect and have never elected the floor leader of the largest party/coalition in the House.
(Just as in 6) Absent any ground rules for how parties are meant to function, powerful positions - which are routinely regarded as “de facto” equivalents to positions like “Leader of the Opposition” - are treated as purely a matter of political bureaucracy, to be decided by an electorate comprised exclusively of elected officials. Here, only Representatives of each party may vote for their leadership. This is worse, in that the US has no formal equivalent to Prime Minister and the fact that the Speaker, the most powerful member of the lower chamber, cannot and has never been popularly elected, despite their central role in national politics, boggles the mind.
At the level of the US Supreme Court:
Interpretation of the Constitution is carried out by appointees with life-time terms.
At first glance, including this seems odd. Mainly because, in the United States, the idea of lifetime terms is justified with the notion that it will prevent the Justices of the Court from being subject to political whims. But consider three things:
A. In several other countries (New Zealand, Japan, Finland, Spain, etc.) there is a mandatory retirement at age 70.
B. In several other countries, judicial independence is maintained instead by one-time, nonrenewable terms of 18 years.
C. As many Americans are noticing now, the interpretation of the Constitution is an inherently political action.
Additional, given the present deadlock on major, controversial issues in Congress, due in part to (4), (5) and (7), major social issues - same-sex marriage, abortion, immigration, etc. - are being decided at the Supreme Court level. Worse still, given the rightful indignation that many feel regarding how two of the last three justices were appointed (as well as the open role of the conservative Federalist Society in their selection), the courts are increasingly losing credibility in the political mainstream. An institution for which the central goal has been to provide a veil of non-partisanship, is more partisan than it has ever been, in part because of a Congress which impedes substantial legislative solutions to open social questions.
At the level of national primary and main elections:
American voters cannot elect, via the primary system, the leader of their party to stand for legislative elections.
Rooted in (7), Americans of either party have no way to directly influence the leadership of their party in Congress. In just about every system where there is a formal Prime Minister role, that individual was elected first as a party leader by their party’s registered voters. While the official line in both textbooks and national media is to treat the President of the United States as the leader of a given party, it is clear that the President cannot exert the same level of influence as a full-time member of Congress. Additionally, as noted in (1) and (2), after selection through what can be a particularly biased primary system, the President is elected through a decidedly non-popular process.
American voters registered to a party cannot elect or otherwise formally influence the appointment of party functionaries.
This is somewhat typical among political parties internationally and, as private corporations, the DNC and RNC have no legal responsibility to allow elections of their internal membership. However, I would argue that in a system where millions of Americans (for deep-seated social or economic reasons) have a single party that they can rationally opt to vote for, it is uniquely offensive that regular, registered party members have no way to vote for the officers which manage national campaigns and go about getting candidates elected. Or, rather, to vote out those officers who fail to deliver (like, say, raising tens of millions of dollars to lose a race by double-digits …).
American voters, in at least 45 states, must elect their Representatives and their Senators through a first-past-the-post method.
This is critical. Given the hegemonic positions that both parties maintain on their “sides” of the political spectrum, any candidate who seeks to run (in what would otherwise be a two candidate race) is likely to split the vote and “spoil” the outcome of the candidate who they most align with. The tendency for a single-ballot, first-past-the-post election systems with single-member districts to lead to a two-party system is made evident in Duverger’s Law. Indeed, in Canada and in the United Kingdom, there are two dominant parties (Liberals and Conservatives, Labour and Conservatives, respectively) as well as first-past-the-post voting systems (though there are a few third party politicians represented in both systems). In countries like Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, etc. where proportional, round-based, or transferable-vote election systems are used, they have elected third parties and, in some cases, highly plural party systems (in excess of four major parties in most cases). A voting system which makes it difficult for new parties to get elected alongside an incredibly hegemonic two-party system (going into its 168th year) makes a major shake-up nearly impossible.
Also, before you get your hopes up about a minor shake-up, to quote my first ramblings, “historically, a candidate, running not as an independent but as a formal member of a third party, has not won a national House or Senate election to be a representative of a mainland United States jurisdiction since the 1920s (Socialist Party of America) and 1940s (Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota), respectively.” The hope of a third party occupying enough seats to force a compromise seems moot (with every socialist and libertarian in Congress aligning explicitly with the parties that you think they would, holding no separate base of their own).
Limitations on early voting, voter registration and the lack of a national holiday for voting force millions of eligible American voters to struggle to get to the polls.
Almost self-explanatory. And, given all the limits on who people can vote for, one should not be surprised that voter turnout in the US is comparatively low among industrialized nations. Indeed, in the “most important election of [their] lifetimes”, still about 1/3rd of eligible voters still did not vote.
Summary:
In the United States, there is a system in which voters can effectively vote for representatives of one of just two parties but have no means for electing the officers of those parties, the national leadership of those parties, or any of the three officials which guide the process of enacting bills into law. And this system limits the ability of public accountability for interrupting a system where, because there’s only one other party, opposition politicians can only benefit from using one of the two chambers to obstruct political progress and make the President of a different color look incompetent.
Perhaps worst of all, the main method of changing most these systems (with the exclusion of the voting system, which is managed at the state-level), from House and Senate procedures to the federal Constitution, depends on the assent of those elected officials who presently benefit from the present system.
Post-Script
Per my most recent piece in this series, I planned to discuss methods for enacting political reform on a major scale. Put simply, research on the topic is still ongoing - in part because this kind of review does mean engaging with the history of major, revolutionary, and often destructive political change per American and World History.
That is not to say that my account will endorse those methods of political change but history shows that systemic problems, left unaddressed, can bubble over into disaster. Therefore, an understanding of the dynamics of political change - specifically, what problems are in fact solvable through mutually beneficial institutional reform (or, if you like, “big structural change”) - is key to shaping those social forces in the days ahead.
To further demonstrate my point, consider that dire topics (civil war, revolution, collapse) do regularly make American news. But, this news often tends toward sensationalist narratives, animated by scheming Democrats and conspiracy-crazed Republicans hell-bent on destroying the country. That’s not to say, speaking as a progressive to the left of the both parties, that major Republican politicians aren’t more extreme than their Democratic counterparts. But, if we think of “Radical Democrats” not as rabid socialists (per typical right-wing media), but instead as those most devoted to the Democratic Party (Sanders not included) and most opposed to the Republicans, the post-Trump era calls of “treason” from the mainstream “neoliberal Democrats” (from overreaching Russian collusion conspiracies to accusations of fascism or worse) have begun to approach the level of Fox News vitriol.
Discussions of major political change as dreamt up via self-righteous social media bubbles, particularly in a country that lacks a comparable event in living memory, have little chance of amounting to anything of promise. If anything, visions of sweeping, unilateral political reform, informed by culture war hysteria, are the kind of myopic products of partisan discourse that fuel division. But, if we opt instead to take seriously the implications of an American political system which consistently and increasingly fails to meet public needs, it is my hope that we can take seriously the study and application of solutions.
Indeed, for what it’s worth, I intend for this series to be my contribution to that effort.
Next: The long-term implications of the issues posed, the limits of the American systems of Constitutional reform, and a taxonomy of political change.
