RE: The Official "Damned Trump" Thread
August 3, 2021 at 5:37 pm
(This post was last modified: August 3, 2021 at 5:40 pm by Spongebob.)
(August 3, 2021 at 4:50 pm)onlinebiker Wrote:(August 3, 2021 at 4:40 pm)Angrboda Wrote: And yet she won the popular vote.
Keep bleating that....
It still won' t matter.
(August 3, 2021 at 4:49 pm)Spongebob Wrote: I wasn't sure what his political views were; as a guess I'd say he was an anarchist. He just seems to snarl incoherently at everyone about everything, contributes almost nothing to every conversation he stumbles into. Mostly I just ignore people like that but thought I would examine this one post though it's probably not worth my time. My guess is that he's going to say something like the people who supported Hillary over Bernie got Trump elected, therefore it's somehow the Dems fault. Thus my expectation of twisted logic. If it's anyone's fault that Trump was elected, it's Republican voters, not Democrats. They actually had some very qualified and capable candidates and yet they chose Trump!
My position?
You "two party" people are fucking up the works and you keep the laws that way to ensure your duopoly.
You keep voting for the lizards.
Wow, that was almost semi-intelligent. So, what's your solution? Vote for independents only? Third parties? Don't vote at all? In 2016, the parties other than Dems and Republicans were: Green Party (extreme liberal), Libertarian (extreme anti-government), Constitution Party (supposedly more Constitution-based than the others), and Independents. Of course, 94.3% of voters voted for one of the two main parties, so you are criticizing the vast majority of voters, not just libs as you earlier suggested. And the country has been this way since the very beginning; this is nothing new at all. The first two-party system began under George Washington's nose despite his declarations that parties are bad.
Let us examine what might happen if people voted for other parties in large enough numbers for it to matter. And understand that I don't oppose the idea of power being spread out more. If we had, say, only 50% of congressional seats possessed by the two main parties and the rest possessed by a range of other parties, then our government would function somewhat like that of a parliamentary system. Think GB, Australia, Canada, etc. In all of those other countries, when a new Prime Minister is elected, it is of the party holding the most seats, but because they rarely hold a majority of seats, they always join with members of other parties to form a coalition that's capable of voting in legislation. In most cases they seek out the parties that are closest to their philosophy, so in our case Democrats would seek out Greens and perhaps some Libertarians and Independents. Republicans would seek out Constitutionalists and some Libertarians and Independents. And there might be other parties involved as well. The end result is not that much different than it is now, people of a like mind voting together for legislation they agree on.
But you are on to something substantial and that is candidate competition and there are two things working against competition. One is the way districts are drawn in states. The party with the most power typically gets to set those boundaries and they do so in such a way as to reduce competition, which results in more extreme candidates. So a good start would be to make redistricting non-partisan.
Another problem that has crept upon us is representation ratio. Our system of federal representation is locked at 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, but our population has grown substantially since that ratio was established. So effectively, we all have less representation in DC than our ancestors did 100 years ago, by quite a lot. The US population is 3 times what it was in 1900. Yet our representation has not changed. We essentially have fewer people representing us now.
The idea I like most is that we need more centrists in office and fewer extremists of all stripes. I think we can all agree that both parties have been moving farther from the center for the last several cycles. A good way to do this is to change our election laws such that we have ranked voting (some states are doing this already). So if there are 10 people running for president, you get a vote for your top choice, 2nd choice and 3rd choice instead of just one choice, which many people use as a sort of blocking vote. They vote for the person most likely to beat the person they really hate. If we had ranked voting, we could have had a choice between Trump, Hillary, Bernie, and a few others and I seriously doubt that Trump or Hillary would have been elected. And of course, I strongly believe that voting should be highly encouraged, simple, fast and without hardship. There is only one party that currently endorses this philosophy right now.
And regarding the first comment, yes Hillary did have more votes that Trump overall, a few million more in fact. And no, it didn't technically matter because of the Electoral College but it really does matter because it reflects the fact that Americans as a whole did not want Trump to be President and it was the farthest thing from a "mandate", as he proclaimed. So, yeah, it actually does matter unless you just enjoy being cynical about things.
Why is it so?
~Julius Sumner Miller
~Julius Sumner Miller