What about having the president elected by a supermajority of Congress? Tho as far as I understand such systems are only in place in countries with separate prime ministers. What are your thoughts generally on trying a parliamentary system in the US (tho I would say that would be much better with proportional party lists instead of single-member districts)?
Perhaps for a Congressional election of the President, with concurrent majorities of both Houses, with a majority of each House and if two-thirds of the states and two-thirds of the members of each House are present at the vote?
I don't like it as much as *this* proposal, for several reasons:
(1) The separation of powers problem: it gives the House an awful lot of control over the White House. They can't turf him out at will like the Brits can, but they can exact a lot of conditions. Sustained coordination over the long term could allow them to box out the Senate and effectively disable it. (You could perhaps make the argument that this is pretty much what happened to the House of Lords.) It seems that early Americans, at least, found this *really, really* problematic, which is one reason why they lambasted the Congressional Nominating Caucuses until they collapsed. I'm not sure I quite understand what they were *that* flummoxed about, but am willing to accept their wisdom and avoid vesting appointment power over the President in the House.
(2) The different-authorities-should-have-different-electorates problem. The Constitutional Convention talked a lot about how it would be dangerous for multiple branches / houses to be accountable to the same voters at the same times. Their interests would align too much and you wouldn't get enough representation of the country's broad interests. Since we have popular or nearly-popular elections for House, Senate, and President today, the House-elects-the-President proposal doesn't make this problem any worse -- but it would be preferable to make it better.
(3) My other amendments in this series have already proposed making the House much more powerful than it is today -- much larger, much more of a democratic mandate, a vastly weakened presidential veto, and a strengthened origination power -- and, yeah, the House should be primus inter pares in our government... but maybe having them elect the President would be a bit much.
(4) My biggest practical worry is that I fear the House would deadlock. Lots of people in the House are kooks. This has always been true and is becoming more and more true. They are there to grandstand and win re-election. Also, House members are relatively weak next to governors, and much more vulnerable to party discipline. Even compromise with moderate members in *your own* party can cause you to lose a primary these days, much less compromise with the *other* party, as this proposal would require. So they might just not be able to elect a President, which is bad.
(5) In fact, I think the House might *deliberately* deadlock. If the House elects a President (and Vice-President) by a two-thirds or three-fifths super-majority, but it elects a *Speaker* by simple majority, all the majority party has to do is elect a Speaker and force a deadlock for a few weeks. Their Speaker becomes acting president, under the Twentieth Amendment and its enforcement legislation. Deadlock continues for all four years and President Hakeem Jeffries rules with a partisan fist all the while.
Of course, there are good things about the idea as well. It's simple, for one. It's got plenty of precedents, for another. Years ago, when I first started thinking about this article, I seriously considered just saying "let's have the House elect the President" because it's so simple to understand and so easy to point to examples of countries that implemented the system and seem fine. It would still be a big improvement (in my view) on the current mass national elections! None of the weaknesses I just pointed out are fatal, and most are curable! I'd vote for it if I were a delegate to an Article V convention!
I just think the governors idea has more strengths and fewer weaknesses, so that's what I went with.
> I would say that would be much better with proportional party lists instead of single-member districts
Very much this -- or, at least, something quite close to it. This will never directly come up in Some Constitutional Amendments, because allocation of state House districts is an issue for state law and (sometimes) federal statute, but I want all states to adopt the Baden-Wurttemberg mixed-member proportional electoral system. (B-W uses geographic districts with top-up seats allocated proportionally by party -- but does NOT use party lists determined by the state or national parties for the top-up seats. Instead, Baden-Wurttemberg elects the top-performing losing candidates in each district to the top-up seats proportionally by party. It's a very clever system that gives you all the advantages of geographic representation AND local selection of candidates AND proportional party representation). I'm also not averse to multi-member districts.
My third proposed amendment, against gerrymandering, included a carve-out specifically to protect proportional representation experiments by the various states, and my fourth proposal, expanding the House, was designed in part with an eye to give each state enough Congressmen so that they can actually RUN proportional / multi-member experiments. Minnesota has 8 total reps. It simply isn't enough *seats* to have a really effective proportional system representing multiple parties, and any multi-member districts we formed today would have well over 2 million residents each! That would be terrible. But give Minnesota 220 Congressmen instead, and now we've got options. But, in the end, America's a federal republic. The national government needs to make proportional and multi-member representation possible (it isn't right now), but the states get to decide whether and how to implement it.
> What are your thoughts generally on trying a parliamentary system in the US
In general, I'm down on parliamentary systems, because they don't have enough checks, balances, or separations between power centers. They strike me, an outsider, as far too prone to tyranny of the majority. Parliamentary supremacy was a brilliant innovation in 1651, but I think the American Constitution iterated on it in some very healthy ways, and I think everyone else should look to America's Constitution rather than England's.
...so it is ironic that, when America had the chance to set up a bunch of democracies post-World War II, we set them up as parliamentary democracies rather than federal republics. Sigh.
I'm not here to yuck everybody else's yum, though! Some of my Canadian friends really like their parliamentary system, and that's fine! I just don't want to import it here.
But, as you know, I really shouldn't run my mouth off too much about foreign systems I don't know well enough. I embarrass myself.
You could also use the lock everyone up rule on the house if you really wanted to avoid shennanigans, tho I'm unclear on how it would be enforced. When I said Congress I meant both houses, like constitutional amendments.
The ideal parliamentary system would of course have multiple parties with none having a majority and that would force coalitions. (For the parliamentary system I do suppose the House electing and controlling the Prime Minister and government (or in practice with parties the other way around :p.))
Do you think parliamentary democracies can't be federal republics, I would think there would be a few countries that are both, maybe Germany.
Anyway I think there is something to be said for less separation of powers at least on the executive-legislative relations. As an outsider seems to me the separation makes the president really stretch his authority artificially.
Asnlong as I am rambling a bit, what are your thoughts on having a constitutionally independent DoJ (the method of appointment I am unsure of) and also on a US state experimenting with parliamentary forms of government, what where the executive councils like, where they maybe more parliamentary or a whole new third thing?
> When I said Congress I meant both houses, like constitutional amendments.
Ohhh.
I kinda like that. It could work!
> Do you think parliamentary democracies can't be federal republics, I would think there would be a few countries that are both, maybe Germany.
I spoke imprecisely and in a hurry. As Daniel has corrected me below, the phrase I was really looking for here was "presidential republic."
> Anyway I think there is something to be said for less separation of powers at least on the executive-legislative relations. As an outsider seems to me the separation makes the president really stretch his authority artificially.
There's is DEFINITELY something to this. (You're an outsider? I never knew!)
> a US state experimenting with parliamentary forms of government, what where the executive councils like, where they maybe more parliamentary or a whole new third thing?
I am extremely pro-state experimentation with all sorts of government forms / electoral systems / public policies! Hurray for interstate diversity!
> what are your thoughts on having a constitutionally independent DoJ
Uncertain. Possibly what we really need is two DoJ's: one controlled by the party in power and one controlled by the party out of power.
> I tink they could mandate a proportional system, and even draw districts, tho Im unsure whether those could cross state lines, probably not.
The precedents support the idea that Congress could mandate proportionality, and even draw districts. They can't draw across state lines, though, and that's the big limiter. No matter how hard you mandate it, how do you have proportional representation in Wyoming, since it only has a single representative statewide?
I'm going to have to correct you again: the phrase you're looking for is "federal presidential republic", because a lot of Latin American countries are organised as unitary presidential republics, having taken their cue in this regard from the US but not being large enough, or having the history*, to truly require federalism, as are some other countries, like Cyprus. (Of course, Cyprus has its own issues with Northern Cyprus, which has led to the position of Vice President being vacant for decades since Cyprus's Constitution requires that the President be a Greek Cypriot and the Vice President a Turkish Cypriot, and the two communities have split geographically separated by a UN-maintained buffer zone, but that is its formal structure.)
*Keep in mind that a number of modern federal states were formed out of older polities that were independent of each other (the various British colonies that formed the US, Canada and Australia are the most obvious example) and were therefore unwilling to forgo that autonomy fully to create a single central government, and hence entrenched federalism was created, in the US, or used, elsewhere, as a compromise to retain much of that autonomy while still creating a political union with, it was hoped, the benefits of also having a central governing authority to handle matters that each individual polity would be less able to handle on its own. Many Latin American countries that use a presidential system were already a single polity before independence, and hence federalism was not deemed necessary to create the country in the first place.
Also, regarding your remark about the Department of Justice, don't get stuck in the two-party trap when you're advocating democratic reforms that would likely lead to more than two parties; the alternate reform would be for Congress to have its own prosecutorial power beyond impeachment, though I'm sure that has other issues which I haven't thought of.
I acknowledge that the distinction you draw is correct, but I avoided specifying "federal" or "unitary" on purpose, because, in the place where I used the incorrect phrase ("[Postwar,] we set them [the defeated Axis powers] up as parliamentary democracies rather than federal republics") I don't think "federal" is doing any useful work. The most embarrassing point for my argument is that the postwar U.S. failed to set up presidential republics at all, regardless of whether unitary or federal.
Still, I welcome the additional distinction!
>> Also, regarding your remark about the Department of Justice, don't get stuck in the two-party trap when you're advocating democratic reforms that would likely lead to more than two parties
Yes, that's fair. Like you, I haven't thought it through all that well. It's an intriguing notion.
(Maybe what we *really* really need is the restoration of the independent grand jury, so citizens can just go around indicting people when there's good evidence of a crime regardless of the decisions of some ultra-powerful political prosecutor. But I haven't really thought THAT through very well, either.)
Also how much federalism there is in congressional elections seems to me to be up to Congress, I tink they could mandate a proportional system, and even draw districts, tho Im unsure whether those could cross state lines, probably not.
I haven't felt the need to comment before, but I think I need to clarify something here.
The vast majority of countries are (formally) unitary. (I say "formally" because you have countries like Spain which, while technically unitary in that the government can suspend the legislative assemblies of any of the autonomous communities so long as the Senate, which represents the communities, consents, and this may have been done, or at least attempted, in the wake of the attempted Catalan independence referendum some years ago, is functionally very decentralised; the Netherlands is also organised as a decentralised unitary state.)
Entrenched federalism is comparatively rare, and even then some countries are pretty much federal in name only. (Even only looking at the ones that can be reasonably described as liberal democracies, so excluding places like Russia, Austria is practically unitary with the Länder in some ways serving as little more than glorified municipalities.) But federalism is hardly correlated with presidential republics, parliamentary republics, or parliamentary monarchies; there are multiple examples of all three. (So too with unitary states; see most of Latin America for examples of unitary presidential republics.)
The most notable federal presidential republic is, of course, the United States, but Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela all also claim that form of government.
Probably the most notable federal parliamentary monarchies are found in Commonwealth countries that were formed from the union of separate British colonies (just like the US was!) with Canada from initially three (one of which was the union of two, and it would later absorb other British colonies as well as Rupert's Land) and Australia from six. But Belgium is also a federal parliamentary monarchy (in fact, it has a form of dual federalism whereby there is subnational power not just divided by geography, with the Flemish, Walloon, and Brussels regions, but also by language communities, with the Dutch-speaking community largely in the Flemish region, the French-speaking community largely in the Walloon region, and the small German-speaking community in part of the Walloon region, with the federal government, the regions and the communities each having different areas of authority), so this structure is not exclusive to countries that were formerly British colonies. Malaysia is another example of this structure, though it too is part of the Commonwealth, albeit a monarchy within the Commonwealth rather than a republic or a Commonwealth realm.
And then there are a number of federal parliamentary republics, the main difference from a parliamentary monarchy being in the mode of selection of the head of state, and the main difference (whether unitary or federal) from a presidential republic being that the head of state has comparatively little political power. (I know James knows some of my reasons for considering republicanism in this sense inferior to monarchy, so I will spare the explanation; suffice it to say that I am, with certain caveats, a staunch monarchist.) Austria and Germany both have this structure (in fact, in Germany federalism is entrenched in the Basic Law and cannot be amended, since one of the tricks the Nazis used to consolidate power in the Weimar Republic was to dissolve each state's government into the central government at Berlin as soon as they won control; so too East Germany was unitary as a Soviet puppet state. Justice Antonin Scalia once noted that in his view, strong federalism with clearly delineated areas of responsibility was a greater bulwark of freedom than any bill of rights could ever be), as does India. In fact, never mind WWII when the US got to write Japan's new constitution (unitary parliamentary monarchy) and probably had a good deal of input in West Germany and Austria; much more recently, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, that country ultimately ended up with, wouldn't you know it, the structure of a federal parliamentary republic.
And then there's whatever the heck Switzerland has going on, where as I understand it, the Federal Assembly meets in joint session (the 200-member National Council and 46-member Council of States) and elects the seven-member Federal Council, by convention with two members from each of the three largest parties in the Federal Assembly and one member from the fourth-largest. (Switzerland likes to claim to have the oldest continuous government in the world, as to my knowledge since its current Constitution came into force following its own revolution in 1848, each successive Federal Council has always had, to my knowledge, at least one member in common with the previous Council, making this a real-world variant of the Ship of Theseus.) The Council collectively exercises the position of head of state (one member, rotating on a yearly basis, is designated as President but this is essentially only relevant for those situations where it's necessary to have a single person in the role of head of state rather than the legal collective). Meanwhile, Swiss federalism is very decentralised, with, in at least some areas of responsibility, the cantons enjoying legislative supremacy over the federal government, in that cantonal law supersedes federal law. It should also be noted that the Federal Assembly cannot dismiss the Federal Council despite electing it. (A similar system is used in Suriname, where the President is elected by the legislature but cannot be ordinarily removed by that body.)
All that is to say, be more careful with how you distinguish different structures of governance! To the extent that you consider the US responsible for writing the constitutions of (West) Germany, Austria and Iraq, those countries are federal republics--they're just federal parliamentary republics rather than federal presidential (or even semi-presidential*) republics. (Japan, which as noted is a unitary parliamentary monarchy, is a special case because the US had geopolitical considerations like making it a strong ally in the Western Pacific that may have informed the decision not to get rid of the Emperor, though the position has no power under the current constitution of Japan.)
*France (specifically the current Fifth Republic) and Finland are probably the most notable examples of semi-presidential republics, though both are unitary. Russia is formally federal and semi-presidential but of course democracy in Russia is a joke and the country is in effect a dictatorship under Vladimir Putin.
Daniel! I wish I could say that I was deliberately imprecise as a calculated gambit to draw you out of PMs into the comments section, but, alas, that would be a lie! Thank you for the worthy clarifications.
You have some good points here, but if the President keeps as much power as he does now, I'm still concerned that gubernatorial elections would become (at least to some degree) proxies for Presidential elections. However, if you couple this with reducing Presidential power, I think this could alleviate my concerns.
Removing the popular mandate would (as you say) go a ways, and your previous amendment neutering the veto would continue that, but I think it would also be important to reform judicial nominations (if not judicial power as a whole) and rein in the President's enforcement discretion.
Also, for a wording concern that plays into my "proxy" fears: your amendment currently reposes this power in whoever (if anyone) holds the title "governor." But what if some state retitles its executive as something else (maybe "chairman") and creates another office titled "governor" with no duties except this? Athens did a similar thing when they became a republic, and kept a magistrate around with the title "king" for religious rituals. I think it would be better to just say "executive authority" and depend on Congress or the Electoral Convention to identify the correct one.
The central problem in our system right now (in my view) is that Congress is leaking power, which the President and the Courts are both sucking right up. I think gelding the veto was the first (and probably the largest) blow to the presidency, but this helps. It's not enough yet, but it's moving in the right direction. Of course, restoring non-delegation in a way that is politically neutral is a tough hill to climb, but probably a necessary one at some point. I will continue to hammer the President where it makes sense to me to do so, and I am counting on the idea that helping Congress put itself back in order will naturally drain some of that power back toward Congress, too.
I considered the retitling problem at some point but forgot to actually deal with it in the text. I think I'd better just go ahead and fix it! Drafting error! That's why we get many sets of eyes on these things, I suppose!
A strong suggestion, and I'm especially impressed with how you consider downstream problems such as governors becoming proxies. I'd support this. My one amendment would be that the vote should require slightly more than a simple majority of population represented. Maybe not 2/3, but say 60%. Maybe in a country not already beset with our level of polarization, a simple majority would do, but as it stands, the forced moderation needs to be quite high.
The current system gives small states a weighted advantage relative to the popular vote. Your proposed system overall gives small states even more power relative to larger ones, since the win conditions include a system in which Wyoming is equal to California, rather than merely weighted. But this is fine if the population-based vote requires a supermajority.
Here's a problem that comes to mind with this model: personal presence in the room and individual interests. Even if the large-state governors have weighted votes, a majority of Americans have fewer voices in the room, which affects how debate plays out. Moreover, we need to anticipate that back-scratching and personal favors will play a role in these deliberations. Because there are fewer individuals representing more of the people, the interests of the bulk of the population are more susceptible to individual corruption.
The most obvious solution to this issue brings us right back to states sending electors. But we know how the electoral college turned out the first time. Have you had thoughts about the above issue?
> Maybe not 2/3, but say 60%. Maybe in a country not already beset with our level of polarization, a simple majority would do, but as it stands, the forced moderation needs to be quite high.
That's quite plausibly a good idea. Every time we make the required majority bigger, we increase the likely moderation of the President, but we risk of deadlock, too, so it's very much a judgment call how far we should push it. But it does seem like there may very well still be some slack to push it a bit further than I've suggested.
I didn't include this in the post, and maybe I should append it as a comment or something, but I did actually work out the balance of power for each of the past several cycles. It may be useful to know this while thinking about where the thresholds ought to be:
2024:
Population: Democrats (55%)
States: Republicans (53%)
2020:
Population: Democrats (55%)
States: Republicans (51%)
2016:
Population: Republicans (61%)
States: Republicans (61%)
2012:
Population: Republicans (55%)
States: Republicans (57%)
2008:
Population: Democrats (54%)
States: Democrats (57%)
The thing I really don't like about going to 55% or 60% is that it keeps Democrats from getting a "Democrats-only" pick in 2008. I don't know how clearly you remember 2008, but Democrats were so strong in 2008 it felt like the Republican Party might be about to go on life support for the next generation, like during the New Deal. Under my proposal (a simple double-majority), Democrats would have been able to pick the president without Republican support. They would've needed Mike Beebe (D-AR) and Phil Bredesen (D-TN) onboard, but they could have done it. If we raised the threshold, then Democrats would have had to seek Republican support even at the absolute apex of their political and cultural power -- which, hey, good news for me, but it just seems unfair.
On the other hand! If we raised the threshold to 60%, Republicans would also be denied the solo pick from *their* giant political and cultural moment in 2010. (They still get a pick in 2016, albeit barely and only with Phil Scott's help.) So maybe that's fair, and also doesn't give anyone too big of a partisan advantage. I'm warming to the idea.
One question: are you saying that only the required population majority should be raised to 60% but leaving the state majority at 50%, or both the required population and the required state majorities should be raised to 60%? I think you're suggesting the first, but doesn't that unfairly advantage the political party that has an easier time picking up small states? I'm not sure I'm correctly following your argument about weighting.
> Even if the large-state governors have weighted votes, a majority of Americans have fewer voices in the room, which affects how debate plays out. Moreover, we need to anticipate that back-scratching and personal favors will play a role in these deliberations. Because there are fewer individuals representing more of the people, the interests of the bulk of the population are more susceptible to individual corruption.
This is true, but is counterbalanced by the fact that the governors with more heavily-weighted votes have much more negotiating power. They don't have to hold together multi-state coalitions with slightly different interests and backbones. The small states have to scratch one another's backs to hold together. The large states can simply sit back, fold their arms, and make *demands*. On balance, I think it's a close call, but I'd rather be represented by a large-state governor than a small one at the convention -- and I'd rather my party had 3 large-state governors than 10 small-state governors.
That said: absolutely, yes, I expect that an *awful lot* of cabinet secretaries would end up being former large-state governors who made a deal under this system. Although that's arguably a good thing for their states' populations, too; powerful national political figures usually have a soft spot for their home states, and are able to make it known.
On the other hand:
> The most obvious solution to this issue brings us right back to states sending electors. But we know how the electoral college turned out the first time. Have you had thoughts about the above issue?
I did really think hard about doing this. We could skip the whole business with the governors and just have a slightly-revised Electoral College meet. You'd lose a lot of advantages and it makes several things more complicated, but it solves the representation problem rather neatly, avoids the proxy election issue, and it's a lot closer to the current system (thus less weird). The thing that ultimately tipped me toward using the governors anyway was the size of the revised college. To make the representation problem go away, you would have to adopt something quite close to the Wyoming Rule, which means the College's minimum size would be 550-600 electors. I am not averse to large democratic assemblies (c.f. my proposed 11,000-member House!) but there are some things that really do seem better suited to a small group of 50 or so -- and these specific 50 seem better able to defend against party pressures. So I went ahead with the governors and the double-majority rule.
But if you stripped the governors out of my proposal and went with presidential electors, one for every half-million residents of a state, and found some way to select people who would be somewhat shielded from party pressure... it'd still be a very good proposal. Maybe even better than this one, if the details were handled cleverly.
Okay, that's enough rambling! Thank you for your thoughts! I hope mine in reply were, at least, interesting.
Those numbers on the balance of power are very informative! They shore up the idea that the population requirement can and should be all the way at 2/3.
The system needs to force compromise, and not just in terms of one or two party defectors shifting to the majority party, which votes as a bloc. It's absolutely wild and broken that, in the search for a new Speaker of the House, we didn't have conservative Democrats and Republicans come together to choose a moderate Republican, which would allow them to ignore the far-right Republicans who were breaking the process. It seems almost unthinkable for us, but in a functioning democracy, this is what *has* to happen.
Using governors gets us closer to this already, since most governors are not at the far end of their party. You've already outlined some reasons that governors are a better choice than the House. Setting a high requirement for population representation means that it's almost never possible to get a president without substantial support from more than one party. Yes, this means that neither Democrats nor Republicans get to pick without the other party's input unless they have such overwhelming nationwide support that the other party must clearly rethink its strategies entirely. (Electoral defeats are *supposed* to prompt reformulation by the losing party. As we're seeing, that's not working anymore.)
Requiring a simple majority of states provides a different guarantee, that large states can't simply call the shots and that single regions can't rule the country. Requiring that majority is already a heavier weight than the electoral college. Setting it any higher starts to give fewer people pretty overwhelming authority.
Another way of looking at it is that, in the current political landscape, Republicans are likely to keep having a majority of states for a long time, because of the way that their policies appeal more to less populated areas. Democrats will always be forced to negotiate. There need to be stable conditions forcing negotiation on both sides, particularly when the popular vote (distinct from representation by population) remains pretty close. The high population threshold helps guarantee that, even if the current alignment of voting blocs changes (which it eventually must).
What do you think of the feasibility of this proposal? Republicans seem to like the electoral college because it benefits them, and Democrats are all aboard the popular vote train. Your goal was to propose amendments that would have some prayer of passing. Do you see conservatives supporting this idea?
I would like to quibble with the idea that the national conventions generally gave us good Presidents. Sure, yes, we got TR, Truman, Lincoln, and Eisenhower, but we also got Pierce, Buchanan, Wilson, and Harding.
But if Teapot Dome had happened under Clinton or Trump, would it have even *registered* amid the firestorm of other scandals? The Nan Britton affair, while repulsive and rightly a tarnish on Harding's record, seems downright *wholesome* by comparison to Lewinsky, Broadrick, and Stormy Daniels (IMHO).
Pierce and Buchanan were, of course, godawful presidents. But they inhabited uniquely difficult historical circumstances. It's easy to imagine presidents who would have done better under those circumstances, because you named several (and Lincoln did, in fact, do better!). But does an 1850s version of Bush or Obama do a better job handling the Crisis of the 1850s than Pierce and Buchanan? Much less clear to me. Plausible, but not obvious.
I'm certainly not saying the national conventions always gave us good presidents, or even that they every convention-system president was *less bad* than every primary-system president. Nor do I think the national conventions were the best system, or I'd have endorsed going back to them instead of this whole gubernatorial thing! But I *do* think that, looking out across the whole sweep of things, you'll find that the *average* product of the convention system was better at certain important presidential qualities than the *average* product of the primary system.
There's enough subjectivity in presidential judgment that it's impossible to prove this, though, so your quibble is certainly a fair quibble to have!
There are two problems with the “gubernatorial electoral college (GEC)” as presented.
The first is that two states (as you noted), Vermont and New Hampshire have 2 year gubernatorial terms; and that 3 other states (Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi) elect their governors the year prior to the Presidential election. All these state governors would be shut out of the GEC. (Perhaps you would grandfather those states in as exceptions).
But the much more fundamental problem is this: Once voters have a direct election power they will not give it up, and punish elected officials who try to do so. So the GEC will never fly (even though it’s an interesting proposal).
And in any case the real problem is how the candidates for President and Vice-President are nominated. Currently, there are no Constitutional mechanisms governing that process at all. Maybe there should be a provision for the governors to caucus and make those nominations, with no other candidates being eligible for electoral votes? Or maybe some national system of ballot access should be imposed, allowing multiple candidates equal access to the general election ballot (which would then have to be some form of ranked choice voting, along with banning the parties limiting who could run). In any case, some proposal along those lines is at least slightly less unlikely. But voters electing the President even mediated by an electoral vote system is here to stay.
> The first is that two states (as you noted), Vermont and New Hampshire have 2 year gubernatorial terms; and that 3 other states (Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi) elect their governors the year prior to the Presidential election. All these state governors would be shut out of the GEC. (Perhaps you would grandfather those states in as exceptions).
Not so! All these states were problems at various stages, but none ended up a problem in the final draft. Let's assume the GEC was ratified in 2020 and we're about to have our first GEC election. The schedule works out like this:
New presidential term: January 2025
GEC meets: December 2024
Elector designated: June 2023
Whoever happens to be governor in June 2023 designates himself as the elector, plus four alternates. In Vermont, that's Phil Scott, who was elected in 2022 to serve a term from January 2023 - January 2025. Let's suppose that Phil Scott runs for re-election in 2024 and loses in November 2024 to Democrat Caleb Elder.
In December 2024, Congress opens up the Congressional Record to call the designated electors for each state to convention. They look in the Record. Who is Vermont's designated elector? Gov. Phil Scott. Scott is still governor, even though he is now a lame duck. They send him a call to convention. No scheduling problem!
Now, let's do Louisiana. Who was governor in June 2023, the time for recording the designated elector? John Bel Edwards, elected 2019 to serve a term from January 2020 - January 2024. He was term-limited out of office in January 2024 and is no longer governor. (Jeff Landry now is.) In December 2024, Congress looks up Louisiana's designated elector. Who is it? John Bel Edwards! The name is right there in the book! He is not dead, disabled, disqualified, convicted, or impeached. So Congress sends ex-governor Edwards a call to convention. He reports for duty and does the business of his state.
It is a little bit *odd* for a state to send an ex-governor, but there's no actual problem. If Louisiana would prefer not to do this, they have every right to move their gubernatorial election to a different year -- but my proposal has no problem with them a state sending a lame duck or even a former governor.
"Once voters have a direct election power they will not give it up, and punish elected officials who try to do so."
Then we're dead!
I'm not being glib there. Democracy needs to be moderated by institutions, or it *will* destroy itself, often fairly quickly. John Adams was right about this much: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Now, Plato thought that you were right. He thought that the People in a democracy would simply never accept any kind of limitation placed on their willfulness or the franchise. For just that reason, Plato *also* thought that democracies were short-lived, unstable governments.
I don't think that Plato was right about the first part. I think that the reason the People today won't accept any limitations on democracy is because nobody has seriously tried to make the argument for limits in over a hundred years. The Progressive Era swept all its opposition before it. It's time to start making that argument. Because the argument is both correct and appealing (I think most people don't *really* enjoy these miserable presidential elections that we have), I am confident that it will eventually win people over -- if we make the argument, forthrightly... and if we point out that the alternative is Biden-Trumping ourselves to extinction.
If I am wrong, then I think we are probably screwed no matter what we do. After all, if the People won't accept having the election process "taken away" from them, they certainly won't stand for having the nomination process "taken away" as you suggest. If they would stand for it, it might work, but, if they would stand for it, you might as well go all the way to the GEC.
I don't see how expanding ballot access would help anything at all. You can put my 2020 presidential candidate (Brian T. Carrol) on every ballot in the land, you can even put a Condorcet winner voting system in place... but you've still got a mass national paroxysm driven finally by demagoguery and money. It's not going to pick very good presidents.
No worries, James, I have no issue with disagreement! But I have thought more about this.
Admittedly, I was spitballing on how to choose the nominees. I tend to believe that part of the problem is that the two major parties have a duopoly on elections, and third parties need to be allowed to have a realistic shot, which is the same for virtually every other democratic nation (even in Canada and the UK which have single-member legislative constituencies as does the US). But let's put that aside.
I don't know of anyone, other than yourself, who is calling for the election of President and Vice-President to be taken out of the hands of "We the People," as it has been for almost all our history of Constitutional government. (If anything, the National Voter Compact shows that that sentiment leans toward eliminating even the nominal involvement of the electoral College). So your GEC proposal is a non-starter.
But there is widespread dissatisfaction with the candidates put forward by the 2 major political parties. That means there is a potential willingness to consider alternatives, which IMO almost certainly means a defined Constitutional process that will remove nominations from the political parties, which are no longer performing a meaningful mediating function as they did for decades. That needn't be taking away all of the input of "We the people". It would have to mean that "We the People" would not have the last word in the nomination process, but would simply provide input to some kind of mediating process, whatever that might be, while retaining a choice between nominees in a general election. And we know the parties can no longer be trusted with that nominating process.
I don't think we're screwed. I think we haven't looked enough at alternatives.
It seems to me that the problem with your analysis is that to justify any replacement for the current system, you need to demonstrate a basis to believe it will lead to better results.
Just about every form of government tends to result in the “selection” of poor leaders. So the question is whether your method would produce or would it have produced more capable leadership. Would we get more Washingtons, Lincoln’s, Roosevelts, or peacetime Eisenhowers.
Governors may be a good source for experienced administrators, but sometimes the greatest administrators had little experience as administrators but instead had the exact leadership skills needed for the time, such as Oppenheimer.
I believe we’ve done better than any other nation selecting our heads of state. That’s pretty darn good proof.
Do you think we've done better than any other nation selecting our heads of state *since the selection process became entirely democratic*, though? Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Eisenhower were picked by party bosses in smoke-filled rooms. Washington was picked by an actually deliberative electoral college without dispute. But we rebelled! We barred the electors from deliberating and expelled the party bosses! Now we have Biden-Trump.
This process was well underway by 1980 (although it progressed faster for Democrats than Republicans). So do you think we have our head-of-state selection has been top-shelf *specifically* for the period 1980-2024? I do not. Reagan / Bush I / Clinton / Bush II / Obama / Trump / Biden is, to me, a pretty embarrassing run (with one exception). That is what makes me think we should look for a new system (or really, an old system from the Founding Fathers, remixed so it works).
Now, restoring the party bosses is anothers option that would probably improve things! We might get some more Roosevelts and Lincolns out of that! However, if we're going to fix it, I say we fix it right and cut out the party middlemen. That led me to governors instead of bosses.
Just my two cents, of course! Thanks for reading, as always.
Why so complicated? Why not just eliminate the Electoral College and have the president chosen by majority vote? Any other system is subject to the law of unintended consequences. We just need competent leaders. You are looking for a means of selecting philosopher kings.
It seems to me that your amendment reflects our founders mistrust that it was too dangerous to allow average Americans to select their leaders. Given their views of blacks and women hard to defend today.
Unlike your suggestion, we can determine what the outcome of the last 10 elections would have been.
So my counter proposal is this.
(1) Make all primaries open
(2) Eliminate winner take all primaries
(3) Eliminate conventions
(4) Elect the Pres and Vice Pres by majority vote.
This is a proposal most Americans would understand and support.
And I do absolutely agree with the Founders' profound and *well-placed* mistrust of mob role. They revolutionized the world by creating a system where democracy could sustain itself without a nuclear meltdown -- because they knew history well enough not to let democracy run *unfettered*. Democracy is a bit like capitalism in that way: it's the greatest system in the world, but it breaks down if you don't stop it from running wild (with antitrust law and labor regulations in capitalism's case; with republican institutions and checks and balances in democracy's case).
So, unfortunately, I do not think your proposal would usher in a new golden age for presidential selection. I think it would make the same mistake we have made over and over again since the Seventeenth Amendment: trying to solve problems introduced by an excess of democracy by adding even more democracy, which only makes the problems worse.
I agree that your proposal would be very popular with the electorate of today! But I think that's because the electorate of today consistently underestimates the dangers of "power to the people."
(I also share Phil H's question about plurality winners. If we *did* adopt a national popular vote, would we use first-past-the-post like today, a Condorcet system that elects the consensus choice, or something scattershot like Instant Runoff?)
So, in other words, elect each party's nominees by nationwide popular vote (how would the Vice Presidential nominee be selected here? Runner-up in the party nominating contests?) and then from those select the President and Vice President by nationwide popular vote?
The biggest problem with this system (which, in my view, is the main problem with presidential systems generally, and to some extent with republics generally) is that the head of state, who is supposed to represent the entire country, is now a partisan official without even the tiniest, thinnest veneer of separation from true democratic legitimacy, which leaves that part of the country which isn't part of that person's party feeling completely unrepresented. (Remember the Bush-era "respect the President" vs "respect the office of the Presidency" arguments?) Not only that, but the President has significant de jure and de facto authority to meddle in politics as head of government, and by creating actual direct election you only amplify that authority.
And now I'm getting into the argument for the superiority of constitutional monarchism that I said I wouldn't get into. Suffice it to say that giving the head of state no democratic legitimacy whatever, along with making the head of government's position incredibly precarious and tenuous, produces, in my view, substantially better governance overall. (And if I really wanted to rant I'd go off about how the influence of the US convention system upon the selection of party leaders has corrupted parliamentary democracy vastly for the worse, and so suffice it to say here that I've had some agreement with James's central "less democracy is sometimes good" thesis for a long time.)
Top-two runoff systems look tempting, since they ensure that whoever runs was voted for by a majority of voters, but they suffer from a major problem: they exclude "everyone's second choice" candidates.
Consider an election with four candidates, A, B, C and D. Candidate A is the first choice of 35% of the electorate, B of 30%, C of 25% and D of 10%.
However, supporters of A utterly despise B and C, but are ambivalent toward D; similarly supporters of B despise A and C but are ambivalent toward D and supporters of C despise A and B but are ambivalent toward D. Supporters of D, meanwhile, are not especially great fans of A, B or C.
Looking at these facts, which candidate will make the electorate as a whole least unhappy? I submit that it is candidate D.
However, in a runoff system (whether that be a second-round top-two system or an instant-runoff system; I will consider only the first since it is the example you gave), C and D are both eliminated and the voters must choose between A and B. If A then wins, the position is then filled by someone who is hated by at least 55% of the electorate; if B wins (which is eminently possible, since they'd need only 60% of C and D voters to decide that they're less bad than A; in both cases I assume that everyone who voted in the first round votes in the second round) then the position is filled by someone who is hated by at least 60% of the electorate. In either case, the winning candidate is someone whom a majority of those they represent would rather not be in office.
Meanwhile, everyone agrees that they would've been fine if D were the candidate elected, but the electoral system chosen means that if everyone casts an honest vote in line with their own personal preferences for the candidates, D cannot possibly win.
There are methods that can see D win, and handily; Coombs' method is one such, and probably also Borda and Condorcet. (Likely also approval voting, if everyone approves of their top two candidates.) These systems, of course, do have their own issues. The popularity of runoff voting, be it a two-round system or an instant runoff with ranked ballots, stems largely, I think, from its ease of understanding compared to other electoral systems.
(Some of those other systems are, incidentally, in use in other contexts! Many sports leagues and associations, for instance, use Borda to select end-of-season awards, and the Associated Press and Coaches' polls for college sports in the United States also use Borda, or at least a partial form of it, since voters in those polls do not rank all teams.)
Actually, I feel I should note further that this same example shows why single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies doesn't break down the way we see instant runoff break down in single-member constituencies, even though STV is the multi-member version of IRV.
Consider the example above, and for simplicity let's say that these four candidates are running in a three-member constituency. Under any quota for STV, we would see candidates A, B and C elected, with D not being elected.
Observe the difference between the result in the single-member case to the result in the multi-member case, however: in this case, 90% of the constituents, while they might have two representatives with whom they vehemently disagree, have one representative with whom they strongly agree! D's supporters, who don't care for any of them, are left out in the cold, but they are also only 10% of the population of the constituency; meanwhile for the other 90% they all have someone representing them in the legislature whom they can approach about their concerns and find an ideologically sympathetic ear. Arguably being represented by all of candidates A, B and C is a better reflection of the residents of the area even than being only represented by D.
Even if this were a two-member constituency, then we would see A be elected (again, under any quota), and whether B or C were elected would depend on how the 10% of voters whose first choice is D compared them; if more than 75% prefer C to B, then C will be elected, and otherwise B will. Even if C is elected over B, however, that still gives 60% of the population of the area a representative in the legislature with whom they strongly agree.
The lesson of this, probably, is that the real problem is that we're voting for only a single person to fill an office (which is more easily remedied in a parliamentary system where you don't have separately-elected chief executives) and that properly representing the true ideological breadth of society rather than shoehorning everyone into a few factions in which almost nobody fits at all comfortably requires moving to an electoral system that sees election contests elect multiple people at once (and in a way that actually provides for ideological diversity, so not just a multi-member generalisation of first-past-the-post). So bring back Pennsylvania's old system, only elect the members of the executive council in multi-member constituencies. Or let's move to open-list proportional representation. Just get out of the constraints of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Gibbard's Theorem, and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem.
An acquaintance of mine from Australia observed that they much prefer the election system for the federal Senate, which uses a partially open party-list proportional system with preferential ballots, to that for the federal House of Representatives, which uses instant runoff voting in single-member constituencies.
I'll also add, on a mostly unrelated note, that Duverger's Law admits one important exception: regional parties. This isn't an especially important factor in US politics as things stand, since any area populous enough from which a regional-interest party could have a substantial national effect is at this point solidly in favour of one of the major parties (California for the Democratic Party and Texas for the Republican Party, and those are probably the only two that could really have enough influence) but you can get a situation where one region, even if it's not that large, is sufficiently distinct from the rest of the country that a regional party can thrive there. In Canada we have the Bloc Québécois, of course, but the UK has this even more, with the most notable being the Scottish National Party in Scotland, but there is also Plaid Cymru in Wales, while all of Northern Ireland's parties are specific to that country. What happened in the US is that the necessity of electing a single chief executive from the breadth of the entire country meant that regional parties became far less viable, since any such party that seriously threatened to dominate a state's Congressional delegation would at the same time, due to how the Presidential election system developed, substantially diminish that state's influence over the choice of President. (Just look at Robert LaFollette's candidacy in 1924, or Strom Thurmond's in 1948, or George Wallace's in 1968, and that's to say nothing of well-supported candidates like John Anderson, Ross Perot, or even Ralph Nader who received no electoral votes.) So that served to push out even that exception to Duverger's Law from taking root in the US system. (Observe also how the Nonpartisan League merged with the Democratic Party in North Dakota in 1956, or how in Minnesota the Farmer-Labor Party emerged in 1918 from the union of the Nonpartisan League and Duluth Union Labor Party, and later in 1944 merged with the Democratic Party in the state to form the modern Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party; in both cases I suspect that the demands of the national electoral system served to push those mergers in both states, and it's a wonder that this hasn't also happened with the Progressive Party in Vermont. New York also has many active minor parties but they remain viable due to that state's continued use of fusion voting, which in many other places was banned; one Minnesota Republican reportedly said, "We don't propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don't intend to fight all creation." Meanwhile in the South it was banned in an effort to prevent a joining of economic interests between Black voters and poor whites, the same confluence of interest that Dr. King would later attempt to rally with the Poor People's Campaign shortly before his assassination, and thus keep Jim Crow laws in force.)
I've spend far too much time ruminating on this topic since it was posted. But I think I have a solution.
Rather than add complexity to the process of electing a President, radically changing to a "Governors Electoral College" or trying to take over the party nomination process, I have a simple solution:
Add a qualification so that a President (and of necessity, Vice-President) must be a current or former state governor.
That's it. Change nothing else. Not the Electoral College. Not the nomination process.
I agree with everything James says about governors. And if they are eminently qualified to elect a President, they are also eminently qualified to serve as President.
Of course, we have had some good non-governor Presidents (including our 2 best, Washington and Lincoln). And former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was no prize. But in general, governors make better Presidents, having proven both that they can function as executives and can function as politicians. This requirement would exclude wannabe celebrities (like a certain NYC real estate mogul) from running vanity campaigns and hoping lightning strikes. It would also dissuade all the senators who think they can be President, from running Presidential campaigns every four years instead of being Senators.
And it would exclude both that mogul who got lucky, and that do-nothing Senator turned Vice-President, from running.
You would, of course, have more ambitious people seeking to be governor rather than run for Congress. But that's a Good Thing. State governors have to satisfy a broad range of interests in their state. They have to build coalitions. They have to negotiate to get what they want. htey have to act, not grandstand on social media. All good things. And neither current contender has done any of those things.
It is true that governors lack experience in at least one, possibly two areas: foreign relations and possibly the military (depending on whether they had served or not). But I don't see those as insuperable obstacles. Many governors have experience courting international companies to do business or setup factories in their state.
This proposal seems tempting, but it suffers from a major flaw: it assumes that the current constitutional structure will otherwise remain fixed.
As was noted in James's article, Pennsylvania until 1790 vested executive authority in a council composed initially of twelve (eventually twenty) members, rather than a single individual. That alone would pose a challenge for your proposal; the council did have a President but that person's authority relative to other members of the council was extremely limited from what I can see. (Reading through the 1776 state Constitution, the President, or in his absence the Vice-President, was necessary for a quorum, and was commander in chief of the military forces of Pennsylvania, though could not command in person without the approval of the council, and otherwise the President may have performed a few administrative duties that did not involve actual decision-making independent of the council.) So if a state were to adopt such a governmental structure today, who would be eligible to be President having been "governor"? As noted, this is why federal laws refer to a state's executive authority, rather than the governor.
We could take this a step further, of course. The parliamentary form of government is vastly more common the world over than the presidential form for a variety of reasons. (To quote Tony Benn: "Our ancient pageantry is but a cloak covering the most flexible and adaptable system of Government ever devised by man. It has been copied all over the world just because it is such a supreme instrument of peaceful change.") Nothing legally bars a state from adopting it as its form of government. While a monarchial form is barred by the Guarantee Clause, the Republic of Ireland comes very close to this form while still being republican in nature. The President of Ireland is, to my knowledge, about as close to a constitutional monarch as any elected head of state gets in the world. Most notably, the President cannot veto laws duly passed by the Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann (or deemed by the Dáil Éireann to have been passed by the Seanad Éireann should the upper house not itself pass the bill within a certain time after passage by the lower house), though the President can reserve the bill for consideration of its constitutionality by the Supreme Court, and must veto the bill if it is determined to be unconstitutional. Most other powers of the President are exercised only on the advice of the government or the Taoiseach; the pardon power is constrained by legislation.
And, of course, there would be nothing preventing a state from restraining the power of its chief executive even further than this! In Belgium, for instance, the King of the Belgians can be declared unfit to serve as monarch by the government, in which case the government assumes the duties of the King until such time as the government declares the King fit to reign again*. In Luxembourg, meanwhile, the Grand Duke's signature is not necessary to bring a law into effect, but only to promulgate the law**. There is no reason why a state could not adopt a parliamentary system and constrain its de jure chief executive to this extent.
It is certainly quite reasonable to think that anyone seeking to be chief executive of the nation should previously have had experience as chief executive of a major subnational polity, but I do not see how it could be reasonably instituted without unduly constraining the forms of government which could be adopted by the states. The American ideal is, after all, that the states are the "laboratories of democracy" and federal structures should not substantially inhibit the states' ability to experiment with how best to govern themselves in a democratic, republican fashion.
*This happened in 1990. The Belgian Parliament passed a law legalising abortion. King Baudouin made it clear that he could not in good conscience sign the bill since he was personally opposed to abortion under any circumstance, but he also knew that he could not refuse because to do so would spark a constitutional crisis. So he requested that the government declare him unfit to rule in order that the government could instead sign the bill into law, which they did--apparently every single member of the government signed it--and then restored him to his office the following day. (In 2005 Juan Carlos of Spain was asked whether he would sign that country's bill legalising same-sex marriage despite his likely being personally opposed to it. Spain has no similar procedure, but the King said, "Soy el Rey de España y no el de Bélgica," referring to this incident, and later did indeed sign the bill after it had been passed by the Cortes Generales, avoiding a constitutional crisis.)
**This was a change made in 2009, or shortly before. The Chamber of Deputies was planning to pass a bill to legalise euthanasia under certain circumstances, but Grand Duke Henri made it clear that he could not in good conscience sign the bill so long as his signature indicated assent, which refusal would have sparked a constitutional crisis. The constitution was therefore changed so that the Grand Duke's signature was only necessary to promulgate the law and did not imply that the Grand Duke approved of the law, and euthanasia has been legal in Luxembourg under certain conditions since April 2009.
(I present these footnotes purely as factual matters of constitutional governance and make no comment on the merits of the laws at issue.)
Would Conventions like those in the 19th century re-emerge to nominate and filter out candidates to sort of help out this Gubernatorial Electoral Convention decide on someone, while the GEC still retains the theoretical ability to elect anyone they collectively agree upon? Perhaps party power would strengthen with this GEC?
What about having the president elected by a supermajority of Congress? Tho as far as I understand such systems are only in place in countries with separate prime ministers. What are your thoughts generally on trying a parliamentary system in the US (tho I would say that would be much better with proportional party lists instead of single-member districts)?
Perhaps for a Congressional election of the President, with concurrent majorities of both Houses, with a majority of each House and if two-thirds of the states and two-thirds of the members of each House are present at the vote?
I would like that better than the current system!
I don't like it as much as *this* proposal, for several reasons:
(1) The separation of powers problem: it gives the House an awful lot of control over the White House. They can't turf him out at will like the Brits can, but they can exact a lot of conditions. Sustained coordination over the long term could allow them to box out the Senate and effectively disable it. (You could perhaps make the argument that this is pretty much what happened to the House of Lords.) It seems that early Americans, at least, found this *really, really* problematic, which is one reason why they lambasted the Congressional Nominating Caucuses until they collapsed. I'm not sure I quite understand what they were *that* flummoxed about, but am willing to accept their wisdom and avoid vesting appointment power over the President in the House.
(2) The different-authorities-should-have-different-electorates problem. The Constitutional Convention talked a lot about how it would be dangerous for multiple branches / houses to be accountable to the same voters at the same times. Their interests would align too much and you wouldn't get enough representation of the country's broad interests. Since we have popular or nearly-popular elections for House, Senate, and President today, the House-elects-the-President proposal doesn't make this problem any worse -- but it would be preferable to make it better.
(3) My other amendments in this series have already proposed making the House much more powerful than it is today -- much larger, much more of a democratic mandate, a vastly weakened presidential veto, and a strengthened origination power -- and, yeah, the House should be primus inter pares in our government... but maybe having them elect the President would be a bit much.
(4) My biggest practical worry is that I fear the House would deadlock. Lots of people in the House are kooks. This has always been true and is becoming more and more true. They are there to grandstand and win re-election. Also, House members are relatively weak next to governors, and much more vulnerable to party discipline. Even compromise with moderate members in *your own* party can cause you to lose a primary these days, much less compromise with the *other* party, as this proposal would require. So they might just not be able to elect a President, which is bad.
(5) In fact, I think the House might *deliberately* deadlock. If the House elects a President (and Vice-President) by a two-thirds or three-fifths super-majority, but it elects a *Speaker* by simple majority, all the majority party has to do is elect a Speaker and force a deadlock for a few weeks. Their Speaker becomes acting president, under the Twentieth Amendment and its enforcement legislation. Deadlock continues for all four years and President Hakeem Jeffries rules with a partisan fist all the while.
Of course, there are good things about the idea as well. It's simple, for one. It's got plenty of precedents, for another. Years ago, when I first started thinking about this article, I seriously considered just saying "let's have the House elect the President" because it's so simple to understand and so easy to point to examples of countries that implemented the system and seem fine. It would still be a big improvement (in my view) on the current mass national elections! None of the weaknesses I just pointed out are fatal, and most are curable! I'd vote for it if I were a delegate to an Article V convention!
I just think the governors idea has more strengths and fewer weaknesses, so that's what I went with.
> I would say that would be much better with proportional party lists instead of single-member districts
Very much this -- or, at least, something quite close to it. This will never directly come up in Some Constitutional Amendments, because allocation of state House districts is an issue for state law and (sometimes) federal statute, but I want all states to adopt the Baden-Wurttemberg mixed-member proportional electoral system. (B-W uses geographic districts with top-up seats allocated proportionally by party -- but does NOT use party lists determined by the state or national parties for the top-up seats. Instead, Baden-Wurttemberg elects the top-performing losing candidates in each district to the top-up seats proportionally by party. It's a very clever system that gives you all the advantages of geographic representation AND local selection of candidates AND proportional party representation). I'm also not averse to multi-member districts.
My third proposed amendment, against gerrymandering, included a carve-out specifically to protect proportional representation experiments by the various states, and my fourth proposal, expanding the House, was designed in part with an eye to give each state enough Congressmen so that they can actually RUN proportional / multi-member experiments. Minnesota has 8 total reps. It simply isn't enough *seats* to have a really effective proportional system representing multiple parties, and any multi-member districts we formed today would have well over 2 million residents each! That would be terrible. But give Minnesota 220 Congressmen instead, and now we've got options. But, in the end, America's a federal republic. The national government needs to make proportional and multi-member representation possible (it isn't right now), but the states get to decide whether and how to implement it.
> What are your thoughts generally on trying a parliamentary system in the US
In general, I'm down on parliamentary systems, because they don't have enough checks, balances, or separations between power centers. They strike me, an outsider, as far too prone to tyranny of the majority. Parliamentary supremacy was a brilliant innovation in 1651, but I think the American Constitution iterated on it in some very healthy ways, and I think everyone else should look to America's Constitution rather than England's.
...so it is ironic that, when America had the chance to set up a bunch of democracies post-World War II, we set them up as parliamentary democracies rather than federal republics. Sigh.
I'm not here to yuck everybody else's yum, though! Some of my Canadian friends really like their parliamentary system, and that's fine! I just don't want to import it here.
But, as you know, I really shouldn't run my mouth off too much about foreign systems I don't know well enough. I embarrass myself.
You could also use the lock everyone up rule on the house if you really wanted to avoid shennanigans, tho I'm unclear on how it would be enforced. When I said Congress I meant both houses, like constitutional amendments.
The ideal parliamentary system would of course have multiple parties with none having a majority and that would force coalitions. (For the parliamentary system I do suppose the House electing and controlling the Prime Minister and government (or in practice with parties the other way around :p.))
Do you think parliamentary democracies can't be federal republics, I would think there would be a few countries that are both, maybe Germany.
Anyway I think there is something to be said for less separation of powers at least on the executive-legislative relations. As an outsider seems to me the separation makes the president really stretch his authority artificially.
Asnlong as I am rambling a bit, what are your thoughts on having a constitutionally independent DoJ (the method of appointment I am unsure of) and also on a US state experimenting with parliamentary forms of government, what where the executive councils like, where they maybe more parliamentary or a whole new third thing?
> When I said Congress I meant both houses, like constitutional amendments.
Ohhh.
I kinda like that. It could work!
> Do you think parliamentary democracies can't be federal republics, I would think there would be a few countries that are both, maybe Germany.
I spoke imprecisely and in a hurry. As Daniel has corrected me below, the phrase I was really looking for here was "presidential republic."
> Anyway I think there is something to be said for less separation of powers at least on the executive-legislative relations. As an outsider seems to me the separation makes the president really stretch his authority artificially.
There's is DEFINITELY something to this. (You're an outsider? I never knew!)
> a US state experimenting with parliamentary forms of government, what where the executive councils like, where they maybe more parliamentary or a whole new third thing?
I am extremely pro-state experimentation with all sorts of government forms / electoral systems / public policies! Hurray for interstate diversity!
> what are your thoughts on having a constitutionally independent DoJ
Uncertain. Possibly what we really need is two DoJ's: one controlled by the party in power and one controlled by the party out of power.
> I tink they could mandate a proportional system, and even draw districts, tho Im unsure whether those could cross state lines, probably not.
The precedents support the idea that Congress could mandate proportionality, and even draw districts. They can't draw across state lines, though, and that's the big limiter. No matter how hard you mandate it, how do you have proportional representation in Wyoming, since it only has a single representative statewide?
I'm going to have to correct you again: the phrase you're looking for is "federal presidential republic", because a lot of Latin American countries are organised as unitary presidential republics, having taken their cue in this regard from the US but not being large enough, or having the history*, to truly require federalism, as are some other countries, like Cyprus. (Of course, Cyprus has its own issues with Northern Cyprus, which has led to the position of Vice President being vacant for decades since Cyprus's Constitution requires that the President be a Greek Cypriot and the Vice President a Turkish Cypriot, and the two communities have split geographically separated by a UN-maintained buffer zone, but that is its formal structure.)
*Keep in mind that a number of modern federal states were formed out of older polities that were independent of each other (the various British colonies that formed the US, Canada and Australia are the most obvious example) and were therefore unwilling to forgo that autonomy fully to create a single central government, and hence entrenched federalism was created, in the US, or used, elsewhere, as a compromise to retain much of that autonomy while still creating a political union with, it was hoped, the benefits of also having a central governing authority to handle matters that each individual polity would be less able to handle on its own. Many Latin American countries that use a presidential system were already a single polity before independence, and hence federalism was not deemed necessary to create the country in the first place.
Also, regarding your remark about the Department of Justice, don't get stuck in the two-party trap when you're advocating democratic reforms that would likely lead to more than two parties; the alternate reform would be for Congress to have its own prosecutorial power beyond impeachment, though I'm sure that has other issues which I haven't thought of.
I acknowledge that the distinction you draw is correct, but I avoided specifying "federal" or "unitary" on purpose, because, in the place where I used the incorrect phrase ("[Postwar,] we set them [the defeated Axis powers] up as parliamentary democracies rather than federal republics") I don't think "federal" is doing any useful work. The most embarrassing point for my argument is that the postwar U.S. failed to set up presidential republics at all, regardless of whether unitary or federal.
Still, I welcome the additional distinction!
>> Also, regarding your remark about the Department of Justice, don't get stuck in the two-party trap when you're advocating democratic reforms that would likely lead to more than two parties
Yes, that's fair. Like you, I haven't thought it through all that well. It's an intriguing notion.
(Maybe what we *really* really need is the restoration of the independent grand jury, so citizens can just go around indicting people when there's good evidence of a crime regardless of the decisions of some ultra-powerful political prosecutor. But I haven't really thought THAT through very well, either.)
Also how much federalism there is in congressional elections seems to me to be up to Congress, I tink they could mandate a proportional system, and even draw districts, tho Im unsure whether those could cross state lines, probably not.
I haven't felt the need to comment before, but I think I need to clarify something here.
The vast majority of countries are (formally) unitary. (I say "formally" because you have countries like Spain which, while technically unitary in that the government can suspend the legislative assemblies of any of the autonomous communities so long as the Senate, which represents the communities, consents, and this may have been done, or at least attempted, in the wake of the attempted Catalan independence referendum some years ago, is functionally very decentralised; the Netherlands is also organised as a decentralised unitary state.)
Entrenched federalism is comparatively rare, and even then some countries are pretty much federal in name only. (Even only looking at the ones that can be reasonably described as liberal democracies, so excluding places like Russia, Austria is practically unitary with the Länder in some ways serving as little more than glorified municipalities.) But federalism is hardly correlated with presidential republics, parliamentary republics, or parliamentary monarchies; there are multiple examples of all three. (So too with unitary states; see most of Latin America for examples of unitary presidential republics.)
The most notable federal presidential republic is, of course, the United States, but Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela all also claim that form of government.
Probably the most notable federal parliamentary monarchies are found in Commonwealth countries that were formed from the union of separate British colonies (just like the US was!) with Canada from initially three (one of which was the union of two, and it would later absorb other British colonies as well as Rupert's Land) and Australia from six. But Belgium is also a federal parliamentary monarchy (in fact, it has a form of dual federalism whereby there is subnational power not just divided by geography, with the Flemish, Walloon, and Brussels regions, but also by language communities, with the Dutch-speaking community largely in the Flemish region, the French-speaking community largely in the Walloon region, and the small German-speaking community in part of the Walloon region, with the federal government, the regions and the communities each having different areas of authority), so this structure is not exclusive to countries that were formerly British colonies. Malaysia is another example of this structure, though it too is part of the Commonwealth, albeit a monarchy within the Commonwealth rather than a republic or a Commonwealth realm.
And then there are a number of federal parliamentary republics, the main difference from a parliamentary monarchy being in the mode of selection of the head of state, and the main difference (whether unitary or federal) from a presidential republic being that the head of state has comparatively little political power. (I know James knows some of my reasons for considering republicanism in this sense inferior to monarchy, so I will spare the explanation; suffice it to say that I am, with certain caveats, a staunch monarchist.) Austria and Germany both have this structure (in fact, in Germany federalism is entrenched in the Basic Law and cannot be amended, since one of the tricks the Nazis used to consolidate power in the Weimar Republic was to dissolve each state's government into the central government at Berlin as soon as they won control; so too East Germany was unitary as a Soviet puppet state. Justice Antonin Scalia once noted that in his view, strong federalism with clearly delineated areas of responsibility was a greater bulwark of freedom than any bill of rights could ever be), as does India. In fact, never mind WWII when the US got to write Japan's new constitution (unitary parliamentary monarchy) and probably had a good deal of input in West Germany and Austria; much more recently, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, that country ultimately ended up with, wouldn't you know it, the structure of a federal parliamentary republic.
And then there's whatever the heck Switzerland has going on, where as I understand it, the Federal Assembly meets in joint session (the 200-member National Council and 46-member Council of States) and elects the seven-member Federal Council, by convention with two members from each of the three largest parties in the Federal Assembly and one member from the fourth-largest. (Switzerland likes to claim to have the oldest continuous government in the world, as to my knowledge since its current Constitution came into force following its own revolution in 1848, each successive Federal Council has always had, to my knowledge, at least one member in common with the previous Council, making this a real-world variant of the Ship of Theseus.) The Council collectively exercises the position of head of state (one member, rotating on a yearly basis, is designated as President but this is essentially only relevant for those situations where it's necessary to have a single person in the role of head of state rather than the legal collective). Meanwhile, Swiss federalism is very decentralised, with, in at least some areas of responsibility, the cantons enjoying legislative supremacy over the federal government, in that cantonal law supersedes federal law. It should also be noted that the Federal Assembly cannot dismiss the Federal Council despite electing it. (A similar system is used in Suriname, where the President is elected by the legislature but cannot be ordinarily removed by that body.)
All that is to say, be more careful with how you distinguish different structures of governance! To the extent that you consider the US responsible for writing the constitutions of (West) Germany, Austria and Iraq, those countries are federal republics--they're just federal parliamentary republics rather than federal presidential (or even semi-presidential*) republics. (Japan, which as noted is a unitary parliamentary monarchy, is a special case because the US had geopolitical considerations like making it a strong ally in the Western Pacific that may have informed the decision not to get rid of the Emperor, though the position has no power under the current constitution of Japan.)
*France (specifically the current Fifth Republic) and Finland are probably the most notable examples of semi-presidential republics, though both are unitary. Russia is formally federal and semi-presidential but of course democracy in Russia is a joke and the country is in effect a dictatorship under Vladimir Putin.
Daniel! I wish I could say that I was deliberately imprecise as a calculated gambit to draw you out of PMs into the comments section, but, alas, that would be a lie! Thank you for the worthy clarifications.
You have some good points here, but if the President keeps as much power as he does now, I'm still concerned that gubernatorial elections would become (at least to some degree) proxies for Presidential elections. However, if you couple this with reducing Presidential power, I think this could alleviate my concerns.
Removing the popular mandate would (as you say) go a ways, and your previous amendment neutering the veto would continue that, but I think it would also be important to reform judicial nominations (if not judicial power as a whole) and rein in the President's enforcement discretion.
Also, for a wording concern that plays into my "proxy" fears: your amendment currently reposes this power in whoever (if anyone) holds the title "governor." But what if some state retitles its executive as something else (maybe "chairman") and creates another office titled "governor" with no duties except this? Athens did a similar thing when they became a republic, and kept a magistrate around with the title "king" for religious rituals. I think it would be better to just say "executive authority" and depend on Congress or the Electoral Convention to identify the correct one.
I think you're right on both counts.
The central problem in our system right now (in my view) is that Congress is leaking power, which the President and the Courts are both sucking right up. I think gelding the veto was the first (and probably the largest) blow to the presidency, but this helps. It's not enough yet, but it's moving in the right direction. Of course, restoring non-delegation in a way that is politically neutral is a tough hill to climb, but probably a necessary one at some point. I will continue to hammer the President where it makes sense to me to do so, and I am counting on the idea that helping Congress put itself back in order will naturally drain some of that power back toward Congress, too.
I considered the retitling problem at some point but forgot to actually deal with it in the text. I think I'd better just go ahead and fix it! Drafting error! That's why we get many sets of eyes on these things, I suppose!
A strong suggestion, and I'm especially impressed with how you consider downstream problems such as governors becoming proxies. I'd support this. My one amendment would be that the vote should require slightly more than a simple majority of population represented. Maybe not 2/3, but say 60%. Maybe in a country not already beset with our level of polarization, a simple majority would do, but as it stands, the forced moderation needs to be quite high.
The current system gives small states a weighted advantage relative to the popular vote. Your proposed system overall gives small states even more power relative to larger ones, since the win conditions include a system in which Wyoming is equal to California, rather than merely weighted. But this is fine if the population-based vote requires a supermajority.
Here's a problem that comes to mind with this model: personal presence in the room and individual interests. Even if the large-state governors have weighted votes, a majority of Americans have fewer voices in the room, which affects how debate plays out. Moreover, we need to anticipate that back-scratching and personal favors will play a role in these deliberations. Because there are fewer individuals representing more of the people, the interests of the bulk of the population are more susceptible to individual corruption.
The most obvious solution to this issue brings us right back to states sending electors. But we know how the electoral college turned out the first time. Have you had thoughts about the above issue?
Yay!
> Maybe not 2/3, but say 60%. Maybe in a country not already beset with our level of polarization, a simple majority would do, but as it stands, the forced moderation needs to be quite high.
That's quite plausibly a good idea. Every time we make the required majority bigger, we increase the likely moderation of the President, but we risk of deadlock, too, so it's very much a judgment call how far we should push it. But it does seem like there may very well still be some slack to push it a bit further than I've suggested.
I didn't include this in the post, and maybe I should append it as a comment or something, but I did actually work out the balance of power for each of the past several cycles. It may be useful to know this while thinking about where the thresholds ought to be:
2024:
Population: Democrats (55%)
States: Republicans (53%)
2020:
Population: Democrats (55%)
States: Republicans (51%)
2016:
Population: Republicans (61%)
States: Republicans (61%)
2012:
Population: Republicans (55%)
States: Republicans (57%)
2008:
Population: Democrats (54%)
States: Democrats (57%)
The thing I really don't like about going to 55% or 60% is that it keeps Democrats from getting a "Democrats-only" pick in 2008. I don't know how clearly you remember 2008, but Democrats were so strong in 2008 it felt like the Republican Party might be about to go on life support for the next generation, like during the New Deal. Under my proposal (a simple double-majority), Democrats would have been able to pick the president without Republican support. They would've needed Mike Beebe (D-AR) and Phil Bredesen (D-TN) onboard, but they could have done it. If we raised the threshold, then Democrats would have had to seek Republican support even at the absolute apex of their political and cultural power -- which, hey, good news for me, but it just seems unfair.
On the other hand! If we raised the threshold to 60%, Republicans would also be denied the solo pick from *their* giant political and cultural moment in 2010. (They still get a pick in 2016, albeit barely and only with Phil Scott's help.) So maybe that's fair, and also doesn't give anyone too big of a partisan advantage. I'm warming to the idea.
One question: are you saying that only the required population majority should be raised to 60% but leaving the state majority at 50%, or both the required population and the required state majorities should be raised to 60%? I think you're suggesting the first, but doesn't that unfairly advantage the political party that has an easier time picking up small states? I'm not sure I'm correctly following your argument about weighting.
> Even if the large-state governors have weighted votes, a majority of Americans have fewer voices in the room, which affects how debate plays out. Moreover, we need to anticipate that back-scratching and personal favors will play a role in these deliberations. Because there are fewer individuals representing more of the people, the interests of the bulk of the population are more susceptible to individual corruption.
This is true, but is counterbalanced by the fact that the governors with more heavily-weighted votes have much more negotiating power. They don't have to hold together multi-state coalitions with slightly different interests and backbones. The small states have to scratch one another's backs to hold together. The large states can simply sit back, fold their arms, and make *demands*. On balance, I think it's a close call, but I'd rather be represented by a large-state governor than a small one at the convention -- and I'd rather my party had 3 large-state governors than 10 small-state governors.
That said: absolutely, yes, I expect that an *awful lot* of cabinet secretaries would end up being former large-state governors who made a deal under this system. Although that's arguably a good thing for their states' populations, too; powerful national political figures usually have a soft spot for their home states, and are able to make it known.
On the other hand:
> The most obvious solution to this issue brings us right back to states sending electors. But we know how the electoral college turned out the first time. Have you had thoughts about the above issue?
I did really think hard about doing this. We could skip the whole business with the governors and just have a slightly-revised Electoral College meet. You'd lose a lot of advantages and it makes several things more complicated, but it solves the representation problem rather neatly, avoids the proxy election issue, and it's a lot closer to the current system (thus less weird). The thing that ultimately tipped me toward using the governors anyway was the size of the revised college. To make the representation problem go away, you would have to adopt something quite close to the Wyoming Rule, which means the College's minimum size would be 550-600 electors. I am not averse to large democratic assemblies (c.f. my proposed 11,000-member House!) but there are some things that really do seem better suited to a small group of 50 or so -- and these specific 50 seem better able to defend against party pressures. So I went ahead with the governors and the double-majority rule.
But if you stripped the governors out of my proposal and went with presidential electors, one for every half-million residents of a state, and found some way to select people who would be somewhat shielded from party pressure... it'd still be a very good proposal. Maybe even better than this one, if the details were handled cleverly.
Okay, that's enough rambling! Thank you for your thoughts! I hope mine in reply were, at least, interesting.
Those numbers on the balance of power are very informative! They shore up the idea that the population requirement can and should be all the way at 2/3.
The system needs to force compromise, and not just in terms of one or two party defectors shifting to the majority party, which votes as a bloc. It's absolutely wild and broken that, in the search for a new Speaker of the House, we didn't have conservative Democrats and Republicans come together to choose a moderate Republican, which would allow them to ignore the far-right Republicans who were breaking the process. It seems almost unthinkable for us, but in a functioning democracy, this is what *has* to happen.
Using governors gets us closer to this already, since most governors are not at the far end of their party. You've already outlined some reasons that governors are a better choice than the House. Setting a high requirement for population representation means that it's almost never possible to get a president without substantial support from more than one party. Yes, this means that neither Democrats nor Republicans get to pick without the other party's input unless they have such overwhelming nationwide support that the other party must clearly rethink its strategies entirely. (Electoral defeats are *supposed* to prompt reformulation by the losing party. As we're seeing, that's not working anymore.)
Requiring a simple majority of states provides a different guarantee, that large states can't simply call the shots and that single regions can't rule the country. Requiring that majority is already a heavier weight than the electoral college. Setting it any higher starts to give fewer people pretty overwhelming authority.
Another way of looking at it is that, in the current political landscape, Republicans are likely to keep having a majority of states for a long time, because of the way that their policies appeal more to less populated areas. Democrats will always be forced to negotiate. There need to be stable conditions forcing negotiation on both sides, particularly when the popular vote (distinct from representation by population) remains pretty close. The high population threshold helps guarantee that, even if the current alignment of voting blocs changes (which it eventually must).
What do you think of the feasibility of this proposal? Republicans seem to like the electoral college because it benefits them, and Democrats are all aboard the popular vote train. Your goal was to propose amendments that would have some prayer of passing. Do you see conservatives supporting this idea?
I would like to quibble with the idea that the national conventions generally gave us good Presidents. Sure, yes, we got TR, Truman, Lincoln, and Eisenhower, but we also got Pierce, Buchanan, Wilson, and Harding.
Yeah, Wilson was pretty bad.
But if Teapot Dome had happened under Clinton or Trump, would it have even *registered* amid the firestorm of other scandals? The Nan Britton affair, while repulsive and rightly a tarnish on Harding's record, seems downright *wholesome* by comparison to Lewinsky, Broadrick, and Stormy Daniels (IMHO).
Pierce and Buchanan were, of course, godawful presidents. But they inhabited uniquely difficult historical circumstances. It's easy to imagine presidents who would have done better under those circumstances, because you named several (and Lincoln did, in fact, do better!). But does an 1850s version of Bush or Obama do a better job handling the Crisis of the 1850s than Pierce and Buchanan? Much less clear to me. Plausible, but not obvious.
I'm certainly not saying the national conventions always gave us good presidents, or even that they every convention-system president was *less bad* than every primary-system president. Nor do I think the national conventions were the best system, or I'd have endorsed going back to them instead of this whole gubernatorial thing! But I *do* think that, looking out across the whole sweep of things, you'll find that the *average* product of the convention system was better at certain important presidential qualities than the *average* product of the primary system.
There's enough subjectivity in presidential judgment that it's impossible to prove this, though, so your quibble is certainly a fair quibble to have!
Just started reading and already hit footnote #2 just absolute gold! Especially the “good people” hyperlink… GOLD I say!
There are two problems with the “gubernatorial electoral college (GEC)” as presented.
The first is that two states (as you noted), Vermont and New Hampshire have 2 year gubernatorial terms; and that 3 other states (Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi) elect their governors the year prior to the Presidential election. All these state governors would be shut out of the GEC. (Perhaps you would grandfather those states in as exceptions).
But the much more fundamental problem is this: Once voters have a direct election power they will not give it up, and punish elected officials who try to do so. So the GEC will never fly (even though it’s an interesting proposal).
And in any case the real problem is how the candidates for President and Vice-President are nominated. Currently, there are no Constitutional mechanisms governing that process at all. Maybe there should be a provision for the governors to caucus and make those nominations, with no other candidates being eligible for electoral votes? Or maybe some national system of ballot access should be imposed, allowing multiple candidates equal access to the general election ballot (which would then have to be some form of ranked choice voting, along with banning the parties limiting who could run). In any case, some proposal along those lines is at least slightly less unlikely. But voters electing the President even mediated by an electoral vote system is here to stay.
> The first is that two states (as you noted), Vermont and New Hampshire have 2 year gubernatorial terms; and that 3 other states (Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi) elect their governors the year prior to the Presidential election. All these state governors would be shut out of the GEC. (Perhaps you would grandfather those states in as exceptions).
Not so! All these states were problems at various stages, but none ended up a problem in the final draft. Let's assume the GEC was ratified in 2020 and we're about to have our first GEC election. The schedule works out like this:
New presidential term: January 2025
GEC meets: December 2024
Elector designated: June 2023
Whoever happens to be governor in June 2023 designates himself as the elector, plus four alternates. In Vermont, that's Phil Scott, who was elected in 2022 to serve a term from January 2023 - January 2025. Let's suppose that Phil Scott runs for re-election in 2024 and loses in November 2024 to Democrat Caleb Elder.
In December 2024, Congress opens up the Congressional Record to call the designated electors for each state to convention. They look in the Record. Who is Vermont's designated elector? Gov. Phil Scott. Scott is still governor, even though he is now a lame duck. They send him a call to convention. No scheduling problem!
Now, let's do Louisiana. Who was governor in June 2023, the time for recording the designated elector? John Bel Edwards, elected 2019 to serve a term from January 2020 - January 2024. He was term-limited out of office in January 2024 and is no longer governor. (Jeff Landry now is.) In December 2024, Congress looks up Louisiana's designated elector. Who is it? John Bel Edwards! The name is right there in the book! He is not dead, disabled, disqualified, convicted, or impeached. So Congress sends ex-governor Edwards a call to convention. He reports for duty and does the business of his state.
It is a little bit *odd* for a state to send an ex-governor, but there's no actual problem. If Louisiana would prefer not to do this, they have every right to move their gubernatorial election to a different year -- but my proposal has no problem with them a state sending a lame duck or even a former governor.
"Once voters have a direct election power they will not give it up, and punish elected officials who try to do so."
Then we're dead!
I'm not being glib there. Democracy needs to be moderated by institutions, or it *will* destroy itself, often fairly quickly. John Adams was right about this much: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Now, Plato thought that you were right. He thought that the People in a democracy would simply never accept any kind of limitation placed on their willfulness or the franchise. For just that reason, Plato *also* thought that democracies were short-lived, unstable governments.
I don't think that Plato was right about the first part. I think that the reason the People today won't accept any limitations on democracy is because nobody has seriously tried to make the argument for limits in over a hundred years. The Progressive Era swept all its opposition before it. It's time to start making that argument. Because the argument is both correct and appealing (I think most people don't *really* enjoy these miserable presidential elections that we have), I am confident that it will eventually win people over -- if we make the argument, forthrightly... and if we point out that the alternative is Biden-Trumping ourselves to extinction.
If I am wrong, then I think we are probably screwed no matter what we do. After all, if the People won't accept having the election process "taken away" from them, they certainly won't stand for having the nomination process "taken away" as you suggest. If they would stand for it, it might work, but, if they would stand for it, you might as well go all the way to the GEC.
I don't see how expanding ballot access would help anything at all. You can put my 2020 presidential candidate (Brian T. Carrol) on every ballot in the land, you can even put a Condorcet winner voting system in place... but you've still got a mass national paroxysm driven finally by demagoguery and money. It's not going to pick very good presidents.
Sorry to sharply disagree with you on this'un!
No worries, James, I have no issue with disagreement! But I have thought more about this.
Admittedly, I was spitballing on how to choose the nominees. I tend to believe that part of the problem is that the two major parties have a duopoly on elections, and third parties need to be allowed to have a realistic shot, which is the same for virtually every other democratic nation (even in Canada and the UK which have single-member legislative constituencies as does the US). But let's put that aside.
I don't know of anyone, other than yourself, who is calling for the election of President and Vice-President to be taken out of the hands of "We the People," as it has been for almost all our history of Constitutional government. (If anything, the National Voter Compact shows that that sentiment leans toward eliminating even the nominal involvement of the electoral College). So your GEC proposal is a non-starter.
But there is widespread dissatisfaction with the candidates put forward by the 2 major political parties. That means there is a potential willingness to consider alternatives, which IMO almost certainly means a defined Constitutional process that will remove nominations from the political parties, which are no longer performing a meaningful mediating function as they did for decades. That needn't be taking away all of the input of "We the people". It would have to mean that "We the People" would not have the last word in the nomination process, but would simply provide input to some kind of mediating process, whatever that might be, while retaining a choice between nominees in a general election. And we know the parties can no longer be trusted with that nominating process.
I don't think we're screwed. I think we haven't looked enough at alternatives.
It seems to me that the problem with your analysis is that to justify any replacement for the current system, you need to demonstrate a basis to believe it will lead to better results.
Just about every form of government tends to result in the “selection” of poor leaders. So the question is whether your method would produce or would it have produced more capable leadership. Would we get more Washingtons, Lincoln’s, Roosevelts, or peacetime Eisenhowers.
Governors may be a good source for experienced administrators, but sometimes the greatest administrators had little experience as administrators but instead had the exact leadership skills needed for the time, such as Oppenheimer.
I believe we’ve done better than any other nation selecting our heads of state. That’s pretty darn good proof.
Do you think we've done better than any other nation selecting our heads of state *since the selection process became entirely democratic*, though? Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Eisenhower were picked by party bosses in smoke-filled rooms. Washington was picked by an actually deliberative electoral college without dispute. But we rebelled! We barred the electors from deliberating and expelled the party bosses! Now we have Biden-Trump.
This process was well underway by 1980 (although it progressed faster for Democrats than Republicans). So do you think we have our head-of-state selection has been top-shelf *specifically* for the period 1980-2024? I do not. Reagan / Bush I / Clinton / Bush II / Obama / Trump / Biden is, to me, a pretty embarrassing run (with one exception). That is what makes me think we should look for a new system (or really, an old system from the Founding Fathers, remixed so it works).
Now, restoring the party bosses is anothers option that would probably improve things! We might get some more Roosevelts and Lincolns out of that! However, if we're going to fix it, I say we fix it right and cut out the party middlemen. That led me to governors instead of bosses.
Just my two cents, of course! Thanks for reading, as always.
Why so complicated? Why not just eliminate the Electoral College and have the president chosen by majority vote? Any other system is subject to the law of unintended consequences. We just need competent leaders. You are looking for a means of selecting philosopher kings.
It seems to me that your amendment reflects our founders mistrust that it was too dangerous to allow average Americans to select their leaders. Given their views of blacks and women hard to defend today.
Unlike your suggestion, we can determine what the outcome of the last 10 elections would have been.
So my counter proposal is this.
(1) Make all primaries open
(2) Eliminate winner take all primaries
(3) Eliminate conventions
(4) Elect the Pres and Vice Pres by majority vote.
This is a proposal most Americans would understand and support.
POWER TO THE PROPLE!
(Old guy—old slogan)😎
What do you propose when no candidate gets a popular vote majority, as has happened 4 times in the last 50 years?
I gave five reasons in Part I why I think the national popular vote is a bad proposal: https://decivitate.substack.com/i/141794902/sorry-al-smith-the-cure-for-the-evils-of-democracy-is-less-democracy
And I do absolutely agree with the Founders' profound and *well-placed* mistrust of mob role. They revolutionized the world by creating a system where democracy could sustain itself without a nuclear meltdown -- because they knew history well enough not to let democracy run *unfettered*. Democracy is a bit like capitalism in that way: it's the greatest system in the world, but it breaks down if you don't stop it from running wild (with antitrust law and labor regulations in capitalism's case; with republican institutions and checks and balances in democracy's case).
So, unfortunately, I do not think your proposal would usher in a new golden age for presidential selection. I think it would make the same mistake we have made over and over again since the Seventeenth Amendment: trying to solve problems introduced by an excess of democracy by adding even more democracy, which only makes the problems worse.
I agree that your proposal would be very popular with the electorate of today! But I think that's because the electorate of today consistently underestimates the dangers of "power to the people."
(I also share Phil H's question about plurality winners. If we *did* adopt a national popular vote, would we use first-past-the-post like today, a Condorcet system that elects the consensus choice, or something scattershot like Instant Runoff?)
Ok. I read part 1. You convinced me.
So, in other words, elect each party's nominees by nationwide popular vote (how would the Vice Presidential nominee be selected here? Runner-up in the party nominating contests?) and then from those select the President and Vice President by nationwide popular vote?
The biggest problem with this system (which, in my view, is the main problem with presidential systems generally, and to some extent with republics generally) is that the head of state, who is supposed to represent the entire country, is now a partisan official without even the tiniest, thinnest veneer of separation from true democratic legitimacy, which leaves that part of the country which isn't part of that person's party feeling completely unrepresented. (Remember the Bush-era "respect the President" vs "respect the office of the Presidency" arguments?) Not only that, but the President has significant de jure and de facto authority to meddle in politics as head of government, and by creating actual direct election you only amplify that authority.
And now I'm getting into the argument for the superiority of constitutional monarchism that I said I wouldn't get into. Suffice it to say that giving the head of state no democratic legitimacy whatever, along with making the head of government's position incredibly precarious and tenuous, produces, in my view, substantially better governance overall. (And if I really wanted to rant I'd go off about how the influence of the US convention system upon the selection of party leaders has corrupted parliamentary democracy vastly for the worse, and so suffice it to say here that I've had some agreement with James's central "less democracy is sometimes good" thesis for a long time.)
Runoff between top two candidates.
Top-two runoff systems look tempting, since they ensure that whoever runs was voted for by a majority of voters, but they suffer from a major problem: they exclude "everyone's second choice" candidates.
Consider an election with four candidates, A, B, C and D. Candidate A is the first choice of 35% of the electorate, B of 30%, C of 25% and D of 10%.
However, supporters of A utterly despise B and C, but are ambivalent toward D; similarly supporters of B despise A and C but are ambivalent toward D and supporters of C despise A and B but are ambivalent toward D. Supporters of D, meanwhile, are not especially great fans of A, B or C.
Looking at these facts, which candidate will make the electorate as a whole least unhappy? I submit that it is candidate D.
However, in a runoff system (whether that be a second-round top-two system or an instant-runoff system; I will consider only the first since it is the example you gave), C and D are both eliminated and the voters must choose between A and B. If A then wins, the position is then filled by someone who is hated by at least 55% of the electorate; if B wins (which is eminently possible, since they'd need only 60% of C and D voters to decide that they're less bad than A; in both cases I assume that everyone who voted in the first round votes in the second round) then the position is filled by someone who is hated by at least 60% of the electorate. In either case, the winning candidate is someone whom a majority of those they represent would rather not be in office.
Meanwhile, everyone agrees that they would've been fine if D were the candidate elected, but the electoral system chosen means that if everyone casts an honest vote in line with their own personal preferences for the candidates, D cannot possibly win.
There are methods that can see D win, and handily; Coombs' method is one such, and probably also Borda and Condorcet. (Likely also approval voting, if everyone approves of their top two candidates.) These systems, of course, do have their own issues. The popularity of runoff voting, be it a two-round system or an instant runoff with ranked ballots, stems largely, I think, from its ease of understanding compared to other electoral systems.
(Some of those other systems are, incidentally, in use in other contexts! Many sports leagues and associations, for instance, use Borda to select end-of-season awards, and the Associated Press and Coaches' polls for college sports in the United States also use Borda, or at least a partial form of it, since voters in those polls do not rank all teams.)
Actually, I feel I should note further that this same example shows why single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies doesn't break down the way we see instant runoff break down in single-member constituencies, even though STV is the multi-member version of IRV.
Consider the example above, and for simplicity let's say that these four candidates are running in a three-member constituency. Under any quota for STV, we would see candidates A, B and C elected, with D not being elected.
Observe the difference between the result in the single-member case to the result in the multi-member case, however: in this case, 90% of the constituents, while they might have two representatives with whom they vehemently disagree, have one representative with whom they strongly agree! D's supporters, who don't care for any of them, are left out in the cold, but they are also only 10% of the population of the constituency; meanwhile for the other 90% they all have someone representing them in the legislature whom they can approach about their concerns and find an ideologically sympathetic ear. Arguably being represented by all of candidates A, B and C is a better reflection of the residents of the area even than being only represented by D.
Even if this were a two-member constituency, then we would see A be elected (again, under any quota), and whether B or C were elected would depend on how the 10% of voters whose first choice is D compared them; if more than 75% prefer C to B, then C will be elected, and otherwise B will. Even if C is elected over B, however, that still gives 60% of the population of the area a representative in the legislature with whom they strongly agree.
The lesson of this, probably, is that the real problem is that we're voting for only a single person to fill an office (which is more easily remedied in a parliamentary system where you don't have separately-elected chief executives) and that properly representing the true ideological breadth of society rather than shoehorning everyone into a few factions in which almost nobody fits at all comfortably requires moving to an electoral system that sees election contests elect multiple people at once (and in a way that actually provides for ideological diversity, so not just a multi-member generalisation of first-past-the-post). So bring back Pennsylvania's old system, only elect the members of the executive council in multi-member constituencies. Or let's move to open-list proportional representation. Just get out of the constraints of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Gibbard's Theorem, and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem.
An acquaintance of mine from Australia observed that they much prefer the election system for the federal Senate, which uses a partially open party-list proportional system with preferential ballots, to that for the federal House of Representatives, which uses instant runoff voting in single-member constituencies.
I'll also add, on a mostly unrelated note, that Duverger's Law admits one important exception: regional parties. This isn't an especially important factor in US politics as things stand, since any area populous enough from which a regional-interest party could have a substantial national effect is at this point solidly in favour of one of the major parties (California for the Democratic Party and Texas for the Republican Party, and those are probably the only two that could really have enough influence) but you can get a situation where one region, even if it's not that large, is sufficiently distinct from the rest of the country that a regional party can thrive there. In Canada we have the Bloc Québécois, of course, but the UK has this even more, with the most notable being the Scottish National Party in Scotland, but there is also Plaid Cymru in Wales, while all of Northern Ireland's parties are specific to that country. What happened in the US is that the necessity of electing a single chief executive from the breadth of the entire country meant that regional parties became far less viable, since any such party that seriously threatened to dominate a state's Congressional delegation would at the same time, due to how the Presidential election system developed, substantially diminish that state's influence over the choice of President. (Just look at Robert LaFollette's candidacy in 1924, or Strom Thurmond's in 1948, or George Wallace's in 1968, and that's to say nothing of well-supported candidates like John Anderson, Ross Perot, or even Ralph Nader who received no electoral votes.) So that served to push out even that exception to Duverger's Law from taking root in the US system. (Observe also how the Nonpartisan League merged with the Democratic Party in North Dakota in 1956, or how in Minnesota the Farmer-Labor Party emerged in 1918 from the union of the Nonpartisan League and Duluth Union Labor Party, and later in 1944 merged with the Democratic Party in the state to form the modern Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party; in both cases I suspect that the demands of the national electoral system served to push those mergers in both states, and it's a wonder that this hasn't also happened with the Progressive Party in Vermont. New York also has many active minor parties but they remain viable due to that state's continued use of fusion voting, which in many other places was banned; one Minnesota Republican reportedly said, "We don't propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don't intend to fight all creation." Meanwhile in the South it was banned in an effort to prevent a joining of economic interests between Black voters and poor whites, the same confluence of interest that Dr. King would later attempt to rally with the Poor People's Campaign shortly before his assassination, and thus keep Jim Crow laws in force.)
I've spend far too much time ruminating on this topic since it was posted. But I think I have a solution.
Rather than add complexity to the process of electing a President, radically changing to a "Governors Electoral College" or trying to take over the party nomination process, I have a simple solution:
Add a qualification so that a President (and of necessity, Vice-President) must be a current or former state governor.
That's it. Change nothing else. Not the Electoral College. Not the nomination process.
I agree with everything James says about governors. And if they are eminently qualified to elect a President, they are also eminently qualified to serve as President.
Of course, we have had some good non-governor Presidents (including our 2 best, Washington and Lincoln). And former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was no prize. But in general, governors make better Presidents, having proven both that they can function as executives and can function as politicians. This requirement would exclude wannabe celebrities (like a certain NYC real estate mogul) from running vanity campaigns and hoping lightning strikes. It would also dissuade all the senators who think they can be President, from running Presidential campaigns every four years instead of being Senators.
And it would exclude both that mogul who got lucky, and that do-nothing Senator turned Vice-President, from running.
You would, of course, have more ambitious people seeking to be governor rather than run for Congress. But that's a Good Thing. State governors have to satisfy a broad range of interests in their state. They have to build coalitions. They have to negotiate to get what they want. htey have to act, not grandstand on social media. All good things. And neither current contender has done any of those things.
It is true that governors lack experience in at least one, possibly two areas: foreign relations and possibly the military (depending on whether they had served or not). But I don't see those as insuperable obstacles. Many governors have experience courting international companies to do business or setup factories in their state.
What do you think, James?
This proposal seems tempting, but it suffers from a major flaw: it assumes that the current constitutional structure will otherwise remain fixed.
As was noted in James's article, Pennsylvania until 1790 vested executive authority in a council composed initially of twelve (eventually twenty) members, rather than a single individual. That alone would pose a challenge for your proposal; the council did have a President but that person's authority relative to other members of the council was extremely limited from what I can see. (Reading through the 1776 state Constitution, the President, or in his absence the Vice-President, was necessary for a quorum, and was commander in chief of the military forces of Pennsylvania, though could not command in person without the approval of the council, and otherwise the President may have performed a few administrative duties that did not involve actual decision-making independent of the council.) So if a state were to adopt such a governmental structure today, who would be eligible to be President having been "governor"? As noted, this is why federal laws refer to a state's executive authority, rather than the governor.
We could take this a step further, of course. The parliamentary form of government is vastly more common the world over than the presidential form for a variety of reasons. (To quote Tony Benn: "Our ancient pageantry is but a cloak covering the most flexible and adaptable system of Government ever devised by man. It has been copied all over the world just because it is such a supreme instrument of peaceful change.") Nothing legally bars a state from adopting it as its form of government. While a monarchial form is barred by the Guarantee Clause, the Republic of Ireland comes very close to this form while still being republican in nature. The President of Ireland is, to my knowledge, about as close to a constitutional monarch as any elected head of state gets in the world. Most notably, the President cannot veto laws duly passed by the Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann (or deemed by the Dáil Éireann to have been passed by the Seanad Éireann should the upper house not itself pass the bill within a certain time after passage by the lower house), though the President can reserve the bill for consideration of its constitutionality by the Supreme Court, and must veto the bill if it is determined to be unconstitutional. Most other powers of the President are exercised only on the advice of the government or the Taoiseach; the pardon power is constrained by legislation.
And, of course, there would be nothing preventing a state from restraining the power of its chief executive even further than this! In Belgium, for instance, the King of the Belgians can be declared unfit to serve as monarch by the government, in which case the government assumes the duties of the King until such time as the government declares the King fit to reign again*. In Luxembourg, meanwhile, the Grand Duke's signature is not necessary to bring a law into effect, but only to promulgate the law**. There is no reason why a state could not adopt a parliamentary system and constrain its de jure chief executive to this extent.
It is certainly quite reasonable to think that anyone seeking to be chief executive of the nation should previously have had experience as chief executive of a major subnational polity, but I do not see how it could be reasonably instituted without unduly constraining the forms of government which could be adopted by the states. The American ideal is, after all, that the states are the "laboratories of democracy" and federal structures should not substantially inhibit the states' ability to experiment with how best to govern themselves in a democratic, republican fashion.
*This happened in 1990. The Belgian Parliament passed a law legalising abortion. King Baudouin made it clear that he could not in good conscience sign the bill since he was personally opposed to abortion under any circumstance, but he also knew that he could not refuse because to do so would spark a constitutional crisis. So he requested that the government declare him unfit to rule in order that the government could instead sign the bill into law, which they did--apparently every single member of the government signed it--and then restored him to his office the following day. (In 2005 Juan Carlos of Spain was asked whether he would sign that country's bill legalising same-sex marriage despite his likely being personally opposed to it. Spain has no similar procedure, but the King said, "Soy el Rey de España y no el de Bélgica," referring to this incident, and later did indeed sign the bill after it had been passed by the Cortes Generales, avoiding a constitutional crisis.)
**This was a change made in 2009, or shortly before. The Chamber of Deputies was planning to pass a bill to legalise euthanasia under certain circumstances, but Grand Duke Henri made it clear that he could not in good conscience sign the bill so long as his signature indicated assent, which refusal would have sparked a constitutional crisis. The constitution was therefore changed so that the Grand Duke's signature was only necessary to promulgate the law and did not imply that the Grand Duke approved of the law, and euthanasia has been legal in Luxembourg under certain conditions since April 2009.
(I present these footnotes purely as factual matters of constitutional governance and make no comment on the merits of the laws at issue.)
Would Conventions like those in the 19th century re-emerge to nominate and filter out candidates to sort of help out this Gubernatorial Electoral Convention decide on someone, while the GEC still retains the theoretical ability to elect anyone they collectively agree upon? Perhaps party power would strengthen with this GEC?