I’ve been dwelling upon how shitty things are with the government and its inability to do things 60-70% of Americans want.
This is a form of government that has the nerve to call itself a representative democracy, and yet, it’s not just a rare instance of denying the vast majority of people the legislation they desire, between the filibuster and the very makeup of the Senate, the unelected kings of the Supreme Court, and the general shittyness of American politics, this is the norm.
So here are a few things that I think would help unfuck this system:
Make DC a state. More people live in DC than in Wyoming. If Wyoming is a state, DC should be able to be one.
Get rid of the filibuster, or at least make them have to actively filibuster. No more of this “I object” and now the Senate won’t vote or even debate on something without a two thirds majority vote bullshit. Speaking of nerve, the Senate, which won’t debate things without said two thirds majority vote, has the god damned gall to call itself “the world’s most deliberative body.” Fuck that.
Make the Senate tied to population. Someone in Wyoming shouldn’t get seventy times more representation than someone in California just because they live in a smaller state. If you want to make a system where people get more representation based upon some factor, at least have that factor make sense. Maybe give younger people more votes. Or people with more education. I could see pitfalls to these ideas, but at least there’s a reason for them. Or better yet just give everyone one vote and have them represented proportionally to their region’s population.
Make the term for senators four years and make the term for representatives four years, and have these elections the same year as the presidential election. No more off year, let’s see who slides through when people aren’t paying attention crap. If we need a midterm election for fixing mistakes, how about a midterm election where if two thirds of the population votes no confidence, a new General Election is immediately held.
No more lifetime appointments. Four years is probably too short for Supreme Court Justices, but do they need more than a ten year term? I don’t think so. Get new blood on there constantly to keep them from getting too comfortable with each other and the institution. We have too many people that care more about the institutions of this country than they do about the people of this country.
Look I get it. When the Constitution was written it was a remarkably forward thinking document, and despite their hypocrisy in many cases, the Founding Fathers were remarkable for their time. But reverence of them and that document along with base traditionalism is preventing us from doing better and there are problems that will kill us all or lead to outright authoritarianism if they aren’t addressed and they won’t be addressed as long as we have a system that always leads to either doing nothing or making it worse.
