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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
The entire idea of section 2 applied this way has always been rather silly, it takes the collectivist view around race that people are better represented as a class based off their skin color rather than their ability to choose based off their own individual beliefs and preferences. There's a lot to complain about with voting, partisan gerrymandering is still messed up both federally and state election wise, the structure of the Senate explicitly having a bunch of low population states over less high population ones, and the electoral college works in a similar way.
But those are problems by changing the very value of a person's representation, by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency. It's not an issue because they fail to make the assumption that black people need some explicit maps drawn out for them "as a class".
The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.
Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.
It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.
The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.
The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.
Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system, so I'm gonna have to doubt this claim. Maybe the size does make a difference, but there's not too much evidence for it that counteracts the examples in other nations.
Completely fictional story, you might as well point to hunger games as proof for why Marx was right as well.
Texas is the second largest state population wise! Texas is literally one of the victims of EC small state bias.
Now maybe if we don't give rurals disproportionate influence and instead only power proportionate to the population they will turn violent, but that says a lot about the rural population IMO.
That's true, but they were not perfect and even knew this pretty well themselves and it's why they have processed like constitutional amendments to begin with. It's especially useful to understand the time period they were working in as well, the electoral college makes more sense in a world where organizing and communicating things took a lot more effort.
Voting for people to serve as your representatives that go to the big meeting and give your state's votes makes way more sense back then. Now we can easily collect everyone's votes and know who people actually want.
What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother. Did you know California has the largest Republican party in the country? Doesn't matter, they don't get a vote in the presidential elections. They are disenfranchised because the EC says so, and that means California Republicans have to rely entirely on other state Republicans. This means any interests and beliefs that California Repiblicans might want that aren't supported by say, Mississippi Republicans goes nowhere. They have no say, no influence, no sway. They have no voice, no one to speak for any interests unique to California Republicans.
The same way how Mississippi Democrats just have to go along with whatever the California Democrats want. It pushes our country towards extremism on both sides because the more statistically likely to be moderate people, the reds in blue states and the blues in red states, literally don't get a say. Republicans are only the reddest of red and Democrats are only the bluest of blues because everyone else has no vote and no influence thanks to the EC. Imagine if a Democrat candidate had to bother to appeal to the more moderate Dems in Texas?
The average democracy is only about 60 years old at this point. The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.
That's more a consequence of FPTP (and in Westminster systems, whipping votes) than anything else. Again, other countries have political parties that manage to pull this kind of voter suppression off just fine.
Separation and/or a more confederated system starts to make more sense here simply because it encourages political competition and innovation in the areas that break off. Otherwise you start to run into certain failure modes of democracy, like "intentionally fail to enforce immigration laws, let the illegals vote, then swing elections that way", or letting the cities merge together politically into one globally homogeneous patchwork rather than retaining solutions tailored to/coupled with that area's unique circumstances (perhaps as a reaction to not being able to get their reforms through).
While this is a valuable myth for Americans, it is false. The Civil War is fairly obviously a total failure of the OG Constitution and the worst outbreak of political violence in the history of the English-speaking world. The Reconstruction amendments were passed by force, not by using the Article V amendment process in the way the framers intended. I think Redemption was also an important de facto amendment of the Constitution (namely de facto repeal of the 15th amendment) achieved by political violence.
It is conventional wisdom on the right (and, in my view, correct) that the New Deal and Civil Rights Era represent irregular changes to the small-c constitution, but they were achieved with broad democratic legitimacy and with very limited political violence, so I don't think they count as a break in continuity. So I would say the US has gone for about 140 years since the last violent regime change, which is still a good run, though no longer outstanding for English-speaking countries.
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