Comment by missingcolours

Switzerland mandates (okay not by law but an old custom) the government to be put together by all major parties whatever they are at the latest elections. Right now there are 7 persons from 4 parties and lo, it works finely. The USA and its bipartisan system is not exactly the yardstick for functioning politics and (super)majorities should definitely never become goals. As surprising as it might come, negotiations can and do work.

Various European democracies seem to have done fine, even if it is at times the coalitions become unstable.

Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.

The US Senate is noteworthy for permitting unlimited debate. IIRC, no other legislative body has this trait.

The filibuster was a hack which has since been weaponized. It should be eliminated. If only to rationalize and normalize the Senate.

The anti-majoritarian case for maintaining the filibuster presumes that tyranny of the minority is preferable to the tyranny of the majority. Often dressed up dressed up in doublespeak slogans like "states rights" (John C. Calhoun) and "entrepreneurial freedom" (James M. Buchanan, Peter Thiel).

That can be migated. Just make a pre-negotiation round, were post vote, those parties who are below n% can give there vote share to the parties who make it over the limit, for a negotiated "goals" contract. No vote is lost..

It forces fringe, extremist and "eternal" oppossition parties to compromise and negotiate better terms and it can change elections that are really close.

I'd rather have the Irish electoral system then the American one any day.

> minority rule, in the Senate

If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster.

But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today.

You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon.

Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents.

41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).

The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government.

Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.

Yes, but it also means that the minority is less effective when it gains an electoral majority and takes 'hold of the gavel. That makes it harder for them to, say, change things to further entrench minority rule—which is real problem in several state-level governments.

A supermajority threshold requirement is not minority rule. It's supermajority rule.

Minority rule would be if 40% of the Senate could pass laws at will.

The Senate enables minority rule due to state size as well. Unfortunately we're hostages of the past

It guarantees the federal government had a strong bias towards inaction.

The filibuster decreases the rate of change.

This is why the civil rights act was never passed, and schools in the US are still segregated to this day, because Sen Byrd (D) filibustered

Funnily, my learnings from this are the exact opposite.

The majority of US problems come from the inherent duality of the political system. Every matter gets split among political lines, with one party for, the other against, regardless of merits. What would fix that would be to move to popular votes (real, proportional popular votes, not first past the post disenfranchising the vast majority of the population), which would result in more parties emerging, which would lead to more nuance, actual debates and compromises.

If your proposal is enacted, what changes? Governors, elected by first past the post (checking the stats for 2022, with 40-60% of the vote)[1], or state congresses, which are also elected by first past the post and thanks to gerrymandering are usually highly partisan with near total domination of one party[2], elect the two senators for the state. What's the difference? Same two parties as before, same stupid dividing lines on every single topic, same impossible to achieve supermajority needed to do anything significant.

Oh, and actual political finance limits. Whoever came up with "companies donating millions to politicians is free speech so nothing can be done to limit that" is either a massive idiot or extremely biased towards big money influencing elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_gubernatori...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_state_legis...

In general, our government is dysfunctional and has many points at which we may have a tyranny of the minority. I'd do a few things to resolve it:

- greatly reduce the power of the Senate, effectively limiting it to the ability to veto legislation and judicial appointments with a two-thirds majority (effectively a "state's veto" over a runaway federal government)

- the House of Representatives should be elected based on per-state proportional representation; districts are an antiquated concept from an era where people traveled by ship and horseback, and don't really make sense in an age of telecommunications, air travel, automobiles, etc.

- the President should be elected by a direct majority, as the electoral college has outlived its usefulness and exists only to enable a president to win an election with a majority of votes

"Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy.

The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman.

Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent.

Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time.

You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection.

Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office.

[0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you.

[1] They're not.

what would you say was the lesson of athens? a quick search shows a wide range of opinions on different subjects, many of which are interesting.

The modern ("two-track") system was designed to be less disruptive to the Senate overall because it allows votes to happen on other, non-controversial bills while the filibuster is ongoing.

A party gaining the majority but being unable to functionally govern is awful for democratic legitimacy. Why vote when even if your party wins an election, you don't get your preferred policy implemented, even partially?

And beyond that, it lets party politicians who don't really want to have to take hard votes hide behind the procedural hurdles.

There’s already a de facto supermajority requirement in that you need the senate, which represents states, and the house, which represents people.

Also, it turns out that when the legislature doesn’t act, because it was deliberately hobbled by its designers, you end up with an ultra powerful executive rather than things being left to the states.

It would be better if more Americans recognized the flaws in the design of our system of government instead of quasi-worshipping the Founding Fathers and insisting that any problems are because we are unworthy of their great design.