The American political system needs a reset button
As a (relatively) recent immigrant in the US, I started following politics and understanding the ideologies of two key political parties close to the 2016 Presidential elections. Since then, the more I have tried to understand the intricacies of the system, the more I have become convinced that certain rules are outdated. To be clear this isn’t to benefit either of the political parties but instead, it’s to make sure that every single voter has a fair and equal influence on policy in this country.
Here are some of the key areas that need a change:
Equal distribution of Senate seats among states
Currently, each state is allocated 2 Senators for a 6-year term irrespective of the number of people living in the state or the number of people that are eligible to vote or registered voters. Look at California and Texas - the two most populous states in the country with 39 and 29 million residents. Of course, not everyone is actually eligible to vote but even when you look at people registered to vote - California had close to 22M registered voters while Texas was closing in on 17M just before the 2020 Presidential Elections.
Now compare this to the populations (which is much higher than the registered voters) of South Dakota (892K), North Dakota (760K), Wyoming (572K), Vermont (627K), Alaska (735K), Delaware (975K), Montana (1.07M) and Maine (1.3M). In spite of not having a combined population even remotely close to the number of registered voters in some of the bigger states - the people in these states elect the same number of senators as the folks in California, Florida, or Texas. In other words, approximately 7M people in these states elect 16 US senators while the 17M registered voters in Texas get to pick 2. There is no justification for this - absolutely no way one can call this fair.
When the constitution was written, the role of the Senate was quite different from what it is today. And maybe that’s when having equal representation from each state made sense. But in today’s world, when these senators have the ability to appoint or object to nominations to the Supreme Court as well as Cabinet positions - surely the say that a voter has shouldn’t depend on where they live. Therefore, one of the first change needed is to realign senate seats according to populations (similar to the electoral college). With 100 senate seats up for grabs, maybe the solution is giving each state 1 seat and then the other 50 are distributed based on the population of the state. Another option is to keep 2 senate seats for each state and adding a weightage to the vote of each senator based on their population. Either way will result in a far better process as far as the voter is concerned.
Senate filibuster rule & ability of Majority leader to pick what bills to vote on
A filibuster is a legislative tool that allows any senate member to speak on any topic for any duration they would like unless 3/5ths or 60 off the 100 senators agree to bring the debate to a close and move towards a vote. In essence, what this means is that no major legislation can pass unless 60 senators agree and this makes the US Senate quite unproductive, especially in today’s world when the divisions between the parties are quite strong. You might think that a thorough debate on important issues is required, but the truth is that filibuster allows senators to speak on ANY topic for as long as they want and in the last 2 decades this has been used to derail even extremely popular legislation. A top example of the same is the DISCLOSE Act of 2009, which required disclosing the names of big donors to outside groups that pour huge sums anonymously into campaigns. While the 59 Democrats in the Senate supported voting on the issue, the 41 Republican senators decided not to support a vote on this. In summary, this rule simply needs to go, and neither party nor voters will benefit from having this.
The other rule that annoys a lot of people is the ability of the Senate Majority Leader (SML) to decide what bills are brought to the floor of the Senate. Since the SML is supposed to manage the schedule of legislation - he or she has the right to simply refuse or ignore a bill that has been passed in the House without bringing the bill to a debate (if not a vote) in the Senate. There are many topics on which the American people widely agree on and yet no laws have been passed on this. Common-sense gun laws are a prime example of this. Multiple surveys show that a vast majority of Americans agree that more needs to be done on gun violence and in fact, 94% agree on universal gun background checks and yet when legislation around this was passed in the House, the Senate could simply ignore this and not even bring this up for debate.
Voters (and hopefully politicians) on both sides of the aisle would agree that this doesn’t help get traction on many important issues. One suggestion would be to make it mandatory for the Senate to vote on any bills passed with 55% (or 240 votes) of the House’s approval. Coincidently, that’s the number of House members who voted for the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 which is yet to put to a test in the Senate.
Campaign donations & air-time for candidates
The 2020 Election Cycle is by far the most expensive in US history with well over $10 billion spent (some estimates predicted as high as $14B). And while you might say that 2020 with record-high voting and interest is an odd-ball, both 2012 and 2016 elections cost over $6 billion each. Those amounts even without considering the midterm elections. I understand that reaching out to people and making your name and political message known is a challenging task but the fact that money plays such an important role in our elections is not ideal.
What it means is that a rich billionaire can simply get to every household even if his/her ideas are not good or well thought out, while someone without the same funding and solid ideas gets lost in the background. Instead, it would be best to regulate media coverage in a way that the top 5 presidential candidates from each party (that includes Libertarians, Tea Party folks as well as independents) get a specific amount of air time or print space. This will give the American people a chance of listening to all the ideas out there and decide for themselves. Obviously getting the key media stakeholders to agree to such a deal wouldn’t be straight forward but the impact it could create would make the effort worthwhile.
The other problem with the campaign donations is the presence of Super PACs. PACs or Political Action Committees can take contributions from individuals (up to $5000), not from groups, and even donate directly to candidates. While that doesn’t sound too bad, Super PACs are the more tricky aspect in all this. Super PACs can take UNLIMITED money from corporations, unions, individuals, and other groups but cannot donate them directly to a candidate - instead, this money can be used for ad buys, and with very few regulations around this often former staffers set these up and act as if they are ‘independent’ group not in coordination with candidate’s campaign.
This makes it a lot tougher to know where the money came from and the committee is actually taking an honest stance or just doing a candidate’s bidding discreetly. There are some points of view that say corporations should have the right to oppose or push a candidate. Even if that argument is made, there needs to be some regulation around the amounts that can be contributed as well as the ties with specific candidates. Transparency is only going to benefit the process and hopefully, it will make it a little harder for misinformation to reach the people.
Assigning all electoral college votes to the candidate that gets a majority in a state
People from smaller or less populous states argue that folks in the more populous states (California, New York, Florida, and Texas) should not be able to decide the election for all Americans and that’s why the electoral college and not popular vote is the right way to decide the elections. While I understand that sentiment - the truth is even combining those 4 states only gets you to about 30% of the overall votes (as per the 2020 elections) and it’s likely to stay that way for a few decades unless people start migrating suddenly. Additionally, the policies that appeal to people in those 4 states are very different. California and New York are consistently liberal, Texas is dependably conservative and Florida is a swing state having gone democratic twice and republican 4 times in the last 6 elections (although the vote % difference was 5 or less each time). Therefore, even if the population increased in these 4 states and came close to 50%, one set of ideas or principles is extremely tough to decide the fate of US elections.
The first issue with the electoral college is the fact that depending on the dynamics of a particular election, voters in some states have a lot more say than others. In 2020, this applies to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin among others. Polls had predicted that those were the states that it was going to come down to and they were right. That’s why both candidates went to all of those states more than 30 times in 2020, while they barely visited or tried to connect with people in California or Illinois or many other dependably republican or democratic. While changing it to the popular vote won’t necessarily change California into a republican state, every voter will have an equal say.
The other issue with the way most states allocate electoral votes is that they assign all votes even if a candidate gets 50.1% of the vote in the state. This is the reason, an extremely closely contested election (like 2016) looks like an easy sweep from an electoral votes perspective. Think about it - Hillary Clinton got almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but Trump won 304-227. It’s time that states do what Nebraska and Maine already do - assign electoral votes accordingly to the % of votes won by a candidate. This will ensure that Donald Trump gets some credit for winning 6M votes in California while Joe Biden who lost Texas with less than 5% margin gets some of the 38 electoral votes.
While these changes aren’t all the changes needed (think gerrymandering, abolishing the 2 party system), this would certainly be good first steps to ensure that all American people and voters get their say and politicians can’t win just with the backing of sketchy Super PACs.