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Notes -
And now for something completely different.
Ever feel like democracy's got you down? Ever read enough of Plato's Republic (or listened to people who claim they have ready Plato's Republic) to realize that Democracy always leads to a Tyranny? Afraid that you might be in a Tyranny right now?
You may be entitled to... course correcting your constitution via the process the founders prepared for us! Seriously, the US has gone a freakishly long time since our last amendment. It seems like the process is broken somewhere. Maybe a lot of somewhere.
But when many people propose a constitutional amendment they run into the trap of trying to enshrine their political cause of the day into the constitution, which is never going to work. What we need are structural adjustments that do not favor either side but rather incentivize more deliberative, rational, non-polarized decision making. And what better way to do it than updating the Senate!.
The Senate was never meant to be Democratic. It was meant to be the mirror to the House of Lords in it's day, just not hereditary. It was meant to check, correct, and slow down the work of the more populist House. The Senate was meant to be filled with the wisest and best of each State who serve the public interest without being beholden to popular opinion.
Originally each U.S. senator was elected directly by the legislature of their home state. This changed because state elections started to become proxies for Senate elections, so we passed the 17th amendment and now they are elected separately (though with how common it is to vote all of one party on a ballot, the effect of this change is minimal.)
This turned the US Senate from the original deliberative body to a highly polarized mess that is just like the US House but less representative. It solved one problem, but failed us in many ways.
What if we returned to the spirit of the 17th, with some tweaks to prevent the State Senate elections from turning into proxies for the US Senate again?
DeCivitate (who was featured in ACX a while ago) has been proposing some Constitutional Amendments that try to address the more structural issues with the government, without falling into the trap of "What can I enshrine in the Constitution that makes my side win forever?"
For the Senate, he has proposed a few possibilities:
First, no matter what, let's reduce the number of US Senators down to qty 1 per State. 100 is too many to have a close group of people deliberating together.
Second, let's change the way Senators are selected. Let's require that a senator needs to be a member of their State Senate (defined as the least numerous branch of the state legislature thereof, being composed of at least ten members, and whose concurrence is necessary for any act of the state legislature to become law. so no gaming that!)
From there, we have a couple options:
Use a FORTRAN algorithm that determines based on past votes who are the most moderate members of the State Senate and then allows the State Senate to pick from them. Plus: almost impossible to game. Minus: Requires putting a specific computer algorithm into the US Constitution, which might be a plus to some people but might also come with its own vulnerabilities.
Have the Senate vote based on a Condorcet method plus a group veto power to help steer a more normal-looking nomination practice into a moderate candidate.
The articles for each algorithm are worth reading, as each shows a strong consideration for all the nuances for each method and a focus on understanding why we got to this point and avoiding the pitfalls that steered us towards where we are now.
The goal is to have Senators who are serious people who solve problems instead of clapping back on social media. The goal is to have a Senate comprised of people representative of the median of each State, opposed to partisans of the majority party in each state. I think people of both major parties plus people of the minor parties would prefer this to what we have going on now. So... Let's have a Constitutional Convention!
I quite like the constitutional convention idea. I think I've even endorsed it here before. And it's notable that the Constitution even allows it, because it feels like this is precisely the sort of situation where conventions are the reasonable thing, since partisan negotiations aren't working and problems are obvious.
Lowering numbers seems good, but I'm reluctant to part with the whole 6-year staggered approach which usually balances presidential elections with off-cycle ones and acts as a further brake on spur of the moment changes. Making them come from the state legislature again seems at first glance to be somewhat reasonable. I think one thing that's under-optimized in the system as it currently is, is personal integrity/judgement. Too much selection on issues alone, and not enough on someone we trust to think about the issues deeply and make a good decision.
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Any proposed amendment will immediately draw commentary from clout-chasing partisan hacks. Any such hacks will draw countersignals from their opposite numbers. I don’t believe any level of rationalist intent can deter this.
I’m not convinced that scaling down the Senate actually helps, either. We already form subcommittees of 15-30 members. They’re fine at getting stuff to a vote; the perverse incentives come after.
Returning to some form of indirect election is more plausible. If you can’t win a direct election as a moderate, maybe you can win it by getting along with your entire legislature. But isn’t this just as vulnerable to partisanship? If the Speaker of the House elections are any benchmark, asking a bunch of partisans to give you a leader doesn’t get a moderate.
It’s the change to voting rules that does all the work. As I understand it, that doesn’t require an amendment. The Senate can just adopt a different voting schema. I think that’s much more plausible than trying to get national support for a permanent structural change.
But then, I’m rather biased towards Literally Anything But FPTP. So if this gets more states to do STV, approval, anything, I’m in.
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We could certainly use more rational decision making in politics. We could certainly use less partisanship and more concern for the general welfare. I don't think your proposal gets us there.
First, we could look to the Federal Bureaucracy to see what happens to an arm of the government with stability against the forces of the whims of each election. Is the bureaucracy non-partisan? De jure yes, but de facto no. It has been basically captured and loyal to a specific party for decades. (And to the extent that's changed over the past year, it's only been by replacement with people loyal to the other party.) Does the bureaucracy make rational decisions? Lol, no.
Second, I don't think it helps to select for moderates. Smart people are more likely to have extreme beliefs and if, like me, you believe that our government is sliding backwards down a rut, what we need are "wild" ideas to get us out.
For what it's worth, I propose proportional representation using the "single transferrable vote" system. More diversity of beliefs and less toxic partisanship (like incentive to sabotage another party) in a multi-party system.
I think you will like his proposal for the House: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/expand-the-house-you-cowards
The Senate is not the House. The House should be extreme Democracy in action. The Senate is the cooling rods. You need both or you get Tyranny.
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There will not be a Constitutional convention, because the Constitution is dead.
The Constitution relied on common knowledge that obeying procedure was the best way available to generate and wield coherent power.
Manipulating procedural outcomes is, in fact, a superior method of generating and wielding coherent power, and we have created common knowledge that this is the case.
Because the Constitution relied on a form of common knowledge that no longer exists, not only is it dead, but the principles that generated it are dead. It is not just that the Constitution is no longer serving its intended function, but that the very idea that it could potentially serve that function is now understood to be ridiculous.
Or to put it another way, the Constitution required a particular set of beliefs to function. Those beliefs were fundamentally mistaken about core elements of human nature, the fact that they were mistaken has become common knowledge, and so now it is impossible for reasonable people to actually hold them.
I would like freedom of speech. There is no reasonable argument available that freedom of speech is a thing that can happen. The First Amendment has failed to provide meaningful protection for free speech in my lifetime, and the way it has failed to do so demonstrates that rewording the amendment would not help.
I would like my right to keep and bear arms to not be infringed. there is no reasonable argument available that rewording the second amendment would prevent the infringements that have been the norm my entire life.
The power to secure either my right to speech or my right to arms observably does not flow from the Constitution in any way other than the most trivial and incidental. I have watched presidential candidates publicly laugh at the idea that such protections could possibly exist. They were correct to do so, because such protections are a fiction.
You would be better off founding your political reforms off the divine right of kings. It would be a more fruitful soil than this appeal to the divinity of ink and paper.
:sadface:
Too true it hurts.
A few more months and this experiment will turn 250 years old. In terms of the age of nations, pretty young. Divine right of kinds definitely seems to have more longevity. I think the world has at least enjoyed some of the fruits of this experiment. Common law has had slightly more hold in this country than in others. Self defense is at least a legally defensible concept in the US, rather than an admission of guilt as it is in Europe.
What can be destroyed by the Truth should be... or perhaps there remains some room for mercy. Hope is not a sin.
In any case, knowing that peaches do not come from a can does not require one to love peaches less. Maybe a clearer understanding of where the good things the American Experiment generated actually come from will allow more us to produce more of them.
I think many of the good things came from hope and misunderstandings. I'm atheist and I realize exactly how many of our founding fathers were christian in their beliefs and behavior (approximately 100%). I don't know why it is necessary to believe in a Christian god to value human life, but it seems to be an objective truth of reality for most people.
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I can't help but notice his proposal would, under current state legislature distribution, enshrine his preferred political party's dominance in the Senate. Even more than it already is! There are currently 30 states whose upper chambers (or only chamber, in Nebraska's case) are majority Republican. This has been true for the last ~decade if you go back through the data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. "I just happen to come up with a scheme where my preferred party has a 3/5 majority in perpetuity, but that's not why I chose it I swear!"
Not if you split up the states!
I say that only semi-jokingly. But I'd love for an incentive to exist that splits up states into smaller entities. America is just getting too large to govern effectively.
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Well, for one, he does not prefer the Republicans to the Democrats and has not for a while now.
He is trying to make less polarized candidates, not candidates of a specific brand. Surely 30 Republican-leaning centrist and 20 Democrat-leaning centrist Senators would be better than what we have now?
Can you link me to his other writings? Because this is a quote from the article you linked:
He goes on to say the Senate is meant to counter that temperament but this hardly looks like the writing of someone who does not prefer Republicans!
I am not at all sure of that. I see little evidence that "moderates" in the Senate have done much to stand up to what I perceive to be Trump's abuses of power. Why would I want them to be more powerful, given that perception?
He calls Trump "Mr. Trump" and calls him the "de-facto president" because he believes Trump is illegitimate. On another post he writes, "When all is said and done, I’ll have spent 12 years in the political wilderness… " indicating he doesn't see himself aligned to the Republicans for 12 years now.
I appreciate the links. I think they convince me the author is a Never-Trump style Republican.
This is true, with the important caveat that the Republican party he supported 13+ years ago is gone and dead. He's not a Democrat, but it is unlikely the Republicans will ever field candidates he likes either.
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Of course it isn't better than what we have now to people who prefer democrats. Why else would Gillitrut post what he did?
What we have every election under the current status quo is 45 hardcore Republicans, 45 hardcore Democrats, and 10 people who more often than not are anti-democrat but not necessarily pro-Republican (but vote for Republican causes more often than not.) Republicans have a major bias in the Senate anyways. Would it not be better for those Republicans to be moderate and willing to pass laws from a Democratic House?
Because another proposal he has would blow up the house to 1000+ people who are also more representative of the people at large and much less gerymandering.
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This proposal runs into the immediate problem that the constitution says that the state’s representation in the senate is the only part not subject to amendment.
He goes to pretty significant lengths to come up with a scheme that manages the facts that they each currently have two and that there is a rotating six-year cycle of elections, ultimately for the purpose of being able to say that at one single moment, every State would have their number of Senators cut from two to one at the same time. Will this suffice for preserving "equal Suffrage"? As with many things Constitutional, it might just depend on how people feel about it.
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I've only looked at his introductory post, so hopefully he addresses my point later, but the introductory post would seem to be the natural place to discuss why we don't have more amendment, and he does some discussion of that question, but with what I feel is only one of the multiple answers:
"...you need about 85%+ public support to ratify a constitutional amendment. It’s pointless because, if you could ever get that much public support for your divisive policy question, you’d no longer need a constitutional amendment, because you’d have won the argument and all the relevant laws already."
This is true for many object-level laws, but there are loads of exceptions. An Amendment allows you to credibly precommit to not change laws later, which makes it attractive for a number of tasks:
And pretty much every one of his proposals falls into category 3 here, doesn't it? He's not suggesting a "Write the Roe v Wade penumbras into the umbra" amendment, or a "define personhood as starting with conception" amendment; all his stuff is procedural at a high enough level that you can't do it without an Amendment.
So ... why don't we do any of those Amendments, either, anymore? I'd say it's a combination of our increasing political polarization with the realization that, so long as we're trapped by Duverger's Law into a two-party system, every meta-level change is also a potential change in the equilbrium point of that system, a zero-sum game. Either more easily overridden vetos will mostly help the Democrats, in which case you're not going to get a supermajority because you can't persuade enough of the Republican-leaning half of the country to agree, or they will mostly help the Republicans, in which case you're not going to get a supermajority because you can't persuade enough of the Democratic-leaning half of the country to agree. Perhaps at some point we'll have enough people sick of both parties that that will be a voting block worth catering to? But until then this is all a sadly academic discussion.
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