Boring Things Can Make a Big Difference
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
There are a myriad number of ways in which Washington is wired for conservative rule come Democratic or Republican Administrations. Some of them are accidents of the Constitution, and yet others are the product of intentional ratchet effects by big business and their allies. They are mostly boring process issues, but they make all the difference in the world in preventing anything resembling real democratic change from taking place, particularly in the modern world of intensive lobbying and extremely expensive political campaigns.
Among these hurdles to progress are the filibuster; the ability of corporations to spend unlimited money on politics; the lack of proportional representation in the Senate, the need for legislation to pass through a series of corruptible committees before it can ever see the President’s desk; inadequate representation at the local level in Washington; elections held on Tuesdays to decrease turnout; the revolving door between legislator and lobbyist careers on Capitol Hill; and there’s much more where that came from. This is partly the subject of Hacker and Pierson’s excellent book Winner Take All Politics, which does a great job outlining these problems. Many of these barriers will have to come down before we get real change in Washington.
Impossible? Hardly. One of those barriers is the Electoral College system, which gives outsize influence to small and medium-sized “battleground” states. That barrier came much closer to coming down recently when California governor Jerry Brown signed the National Popular Vote Act:
More than a decade after George W. Bush beat Al Gore for president despite winning fewer votes nationwide, California has given a movement to overturn the nation’s Electoral College system perhaps its greatest lift yet.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation this morning committing California to an interstate compact to award electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide.
The agreement would become effective only if states possessing a majority of the nation’s 538 Electoral College votes agree. Eight other states and the District of Columbia have signed on, committing 74 electoral votes. The bill Brown signed today adds California’s 55.
Proponents say the agreement would make California more relevant in presidential elections.
“For too long, presidential candidates have ignored California and our issues while pandering exclusively to the battleground states,” the bill’s author, Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said in a written statement. “A national popular vote will force candidates to actually campaign in California and talk about our issues.”
Assembly Bill 459 passed through the Legislature with little Republican support. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed previous versions of the bill, in 2006 and 2008.
Schwarzenegger said the plan was “counter to the tradition of our great nation, which honors state rights.” He also said he could not endorse awarding California’s electoral votes to a presidential candidate a majority of Californians may not support.
That brings the number of electoral votes committed to the national popular vote to 132. That’s almost half the 270 necessary to trigger a total change in the way Presidential elections are run. Most people who read about the national popular vote will immediately think of the Bush-Gore election in 2000 which would have gone the other way, or the potential for John Kerry to have beaten George Bush with a few more votes in Ohio despite losing the popular vote.
But far more important is that fact that at present, the concerns of urban voters in blue states are all but ignored at the presidential level, even as nonsensical policies like massive ethanol subsidies rule the day due to outsize influence of far less populated states. Conservatives find this situation quite pleasant, of course: Presidential elections are forced to appeal to largely white surburban demographics, while bases of progressive support are all but ignored as the votes of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are rendered irrelevant in blue states, and urban areas such as Atlanta and Nashville in red states are rendered similarly useless.
If Democratic presidential candidates could win election by massively boosting turnout in these areas, it would make them much more accountable to the progressive base and to the core economic needs of the people who actually constitute the American tax base, rather than the narcissistic parasites who falsely consider themselves to be the overtaxed.
And that, ultimately, would have a greater impact on our politics and on public policy than all the screaming on progressive blogs over the last eight years combined.
Head over to the National Popular Vote website and see how you can get involved in the effort to help make real change happen.