On Tuesday 33 senators (12 newly elected), 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, were sworn in by Vice President Biden, giving Republicans a 54-46 advantage in the Senate. Combined with their expanded majority in the house of 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats--one seat is vacant following the resignation of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., who pleaded guilty to a felony tax evasion charge--they now have complete control of Congress.
Writing for Vox, Dylan Matthews pointed out that in the Senate those 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections.
According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, "the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes."
Matthews is quick to point out that this kind of result is not proprietary to Republicans, as the Democrats had a disproportionate advantage after the 2008 and 2012 elections. He correctly suggests that the problem in fact is that with two senate seats each, small states have asymmetrical representation compared to large states. He then promptly goes out on a limb by unequivocally proposing the Senate be abolished.
Known as "The Great Compromise" the equal allocation of two upper chamber seats per state was devised by the founding fathers to persuade the small states to sign on to the new constitution.
In the "Great Compromise," [aka the Connecticut Compromise] every state was given equal representation, previously known as the New Jersey Plan, in one house of Congress, and proportional representation, known before as the Virginia Plan, in the other. In the Senate, every state would have two seats. In the House of Representatives, the number of seats would depend on population. Because it was considered more responsive to majority sentiment, the House of Representatives was given the power to originate all legislation dealing with the federal budget and revenues/taxation, per the Origination Clause.
No matter how constitutional, unchecked this kind of news does undermine the GOP claim to a mandate. The Washington Post's The Fix blogger, Philip Bump, recently
excoriated on Twitter for his apparent belief that Michigan was run by the Democrats, and sounding more like a suck up to conservatives than a former writer for The Wire, was eager to dissemble these numbers. His
Washington Post headline read:
Senate Democrats Got 20 Million more votes than Senate Republicans. Which Means Basically Nothing.
Bump is correct that Vox includes votes for the two independent senators. Touché, even though both vote with the Democrats. However the rest of his rebuttal is really just so much hocus pocus number manipulation.
Here's one way of looking at them: Democratic senators got 20 million more votes than the Republicans. (Vox conflates those independent senators with the Democrats, which is a bit of a cheat but doesn't really matter since those senators are in the tiny states of Maine and Vermont.)
Here's another: Democrats won 57.2 percent of the vote in their races; Republicans won 56.5 percent. (The independents won a hefty 61.7 percent, but we're skipping them.)
That is big of him to exclude the independents while at the same time mentioning them, but the percentage of victory by each candidate in their respective states is completely irrelevant to the point. WaPo also astutely observes that 2014 was a low turnout election and that a lot of small states were in play, but this doesn't really help make the case for a why the Senate vote tally means "nothing."
Whether or not the Founding Fathers meant for the small states to gain this much power, it is clear they believed protecting the minority states from the tyranny of the majority states was the best way to move forward to our new nation. So abolishing the Senate is not going to happen, and changing the rules of how the Senate is chosen is almost as unlikely. 2016 may flip the Senate back toward the Democrats anyway. The more serious problem lies with the election of members to the lower chamber. In 2014 Republicans only won about 52 percent of votes in House races, but they are ending up with 57 percent of seats.
The reason is bracing to believers in accountable and representative government. The House is shockingly skewed toward the Republican Party. It’s always hard to oust incumbents—some 96 percent just won re-election—but now it extends to control of the chamber. In 2012, Republicans won a lopsided majority of seats despite securing only 48 percent of the vote, about the same vote share as Democrats this year. To keep the House in 2014, Republican needed only 45 percent of votes. Putting it another way: control of the House comes from winning 218 races or more. The 218th biggest Republican margin was fully 14 percentage points.
Looking forward, it’s even worse for Democrats. FairVote’s Monopoly Politics projection model was, as usual, highly accurate in this election—of 368 projections made a year ago, only two were wrong. We’ve already released our projections for 2016—that’s two years away, folks—and picked sure winners in 373 districts, leaving only 14 percent of the House even potentially in play. To win a majority of 218 House seats, we project that Democratic candidates would need to win ten million more votes than Republicans.
http://www.thenation.com/...
In a representative democracy, where by design the House of Representatives is supposed to do just that, proportionally represent the electorate, how is this possible?
"So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party . . . the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote."
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
Back in the 60's, after Goldwater's landslide loss to Johnson, the Republicans realized they could not win nationally by playing fair. They began their calculated ploy to compete with Nixon's Southern Strategy, picked up momentum with Reagan's war on the poor and working class, were given a huge boost by the Supreme Court their decisions in Bush vs. Gore, Citizens' United and their gutting of the voting rights act. The final piece of the puzzle in fell into place with the 2010 statehouse election and the gerrymandered redistricting that followed.
National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.
//www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111#ixzz3OB1R8QdN
Is this what the Founding Fathers intended when they gave the responsibility for drawing congressional districts to the state legislatures? I doubt it although American officeholders practiced Gerrymandering from the beginning.
Patrick Henry, who opposed the new Constitution, tried to draw district lines to deny a seat in the first Congress to James Madison, the Constitution's primary author. Henry ensured that Madison's district was drawn to include counties politically opposed to Madison. The attempt failed, and Madison was elected -- but the American gerrymander had begun.
The Gerry-Mander
Ironically, the man who inspired the term "gerrymander" served under Madison, the practice's first American target. Just a few months before Elbridge Gerry became Madison's vice president, as the Democratic-Republican governor of Massachusetts, Gerry signed a redistricting plan that was thought to ensure his party's domination of the Massachusetts state senate. An editorial artist added wings, claws, and the head of a particularly fierce-looking salamander creature to the outline of one particularly notable district grouping towns in the northeast of the state; the beast was dubbed the "Gerry-mander" in the press, and the practice of changing the district lines to affect political power has kept the name ever since. http://redistricting.lls.edu/...
Modern legislatures practice Gerrymandering to cherry pick voters, to eliminate incumbents, or eliminate challengers; to dilute minority voters and split up communities. The practice of Gerrymandering sows the seeds of distrust and retribution and both parties have used it to destroy goodwill. Is this what the Founding Fathers intended? Even though some practiced Gerrymandering, I wonder if they would have altered the wording of the Constitution had they known the results.
It seems clear a change must be made in the redistricting process because neither party has shown the inclination to rise above partisanship or job protection to take the true spirit of representative government or the citizens of the U.S. into the equation. In early October, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case that may decide who draws the congressional districts in Arizona, which could have implications beyond the Grand Canyon State. It boils down to whether districts must be drawn by the state legislatures or if an independent commission can be appointed by the state to perform the function.
A lower federal court sided with the commission, ruling that the U.S. Constitution says that the state government, with any branch or commission determined by the state, shall have the authority to redraw the district lines, a power not entirely held by the state’s legislature. http://www.annenbergclassroom.org/...
It would seem to this diarist that an independent commission would be the way to go.
What do you think?
Are independent or bipartisan commissions that draw the districts constitutional? Or did the framers intend state legislatures to have that power? Would the Founding Fathers be okay with the way districts are drawn today? How do you think the Supreme Court will decide the Arizona case? Which is the bigger problem, equal allocation of Senate seats or Congressional redistricting?