Make Democracy Great Again
Will democracy reforms proposed by Democrats be enough to save our country, and what else might be done to revive our weakening democracy?
Hello, and welcome to the fifth edition of Waco Can’t Wait, a progressive newsletter focusing on McLennan County, Texas, and Federal politics. I would like to apologize for my brief absence these last couple of weeks. I didn’t realize how much I needed a break from school and politics, and I have been suffering from terrible allergies these last couple of weeks as well. All that said, I am ready for 2022 and all that it will bring.
As promised, here is Waco Can't Wait’s first interview! Last month, I had the chance to speak with Victoria Volker, a queer pastor and Co-Founder of Lady Justice House, an LGBTQ+ centered congregation in Waco. We spoke about her coming into her queer and christian identity, the challenges of starting a new church community, and what role the church can play in supporting LGBTQ+ youth in a state that is increasingly hostile towards their existence.
I also conducted other interviews over the holiday break, and I am excited to release those over the next couple of weeks.!
Moving on, this last week marked the one year anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. In the aftermath of the riot, five police officers died, two from injuries sustained during the surge and three by suicide. About 150 other officers were injured. More than 700 people have been criminally charged in connection with the riot, including over 60 Texans. In the wake of these attacks, Congressional Democrats have proposed the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both would respond to and reverse the waive of voting rights restrictions happening at the state level and prevent another potential constitutional crisis during the next presidential election.
That said, these pieces of legislation would only solidify access to the ballot and protect the outcomes of elections in an electoral system that is inherently flawed. Our existing democratic republic incentivizes partisanship, creates electoral outcomes that are divorced from the popular will of the people, and the people who are finally elected to office are more beholden to their donors than their constituents. I firmly believe that systems shape behaviors. If we want to make effective changes, we need to not only address the symptoms but also the disease.
But before we figure out what that would look like, let’s take a look at the news!
(Last couple of) Week(s) in review
Waco:
Christopher Ray Grider, a McLennan County insurrectionist, is still awaiting trial for his role in the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Grider is the co-owner of Kissing Tree Vineyards, and faces up to 33 and 1/2 years of federal prison time.
Texas:
During the brief cold snap we had last week, Texas saw a 20% drop in natural gas production in the Permian Basin Region. While this was not enough to cause major disruptions in the statewide power grid, it is a flashing warning sign for a winter season that is far from over. The Texas Railroad Commission does plan to adopt new weatherization standards, but those will not be in effect until 2023, and there are major loopholes allowing companies to opt out of the requirements. Experts are saying that we are not prepared for another winter blackout and that lawmakers’ efforts have been insufficient.
On January 6th this week, Ted Cruz went on Fox News to apologize to Tucker Carlson for calling the Capitol Insurrection “a despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system.” Cruz was one of many Congressional Republicans who were trying to stop the certification of electoral college votes on January 6th. Since then, he has tried to distance himself from his role in the Big Lie. More recently, he is saying that the Capitol Insurrection was in fact a terrorist act. If you’re reading this and having trouble making sense of this, that’s because it does not make sense.
After having made those comments, Cruz faced a backlash led by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Watching Cruz eat sh*t on national television while trying to “both-sides” an assault on our democracy may make for compelling television, but it is also representative of the direction the Republican Party is moving. Republicans like Mitt Romney are routinely cheered for doing the bare minimum (acknowledging that Joe Biden won the election), while the rest of the Republican Party is being picked off one-by-one for daring to speak out of turn. So much for the party of free speech!
Elsewhere:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has set an MLK Day deadline to make changes to the Senate Filibuster. Schumer wrote in a letter to his fellow Democratic senators that the filibuster has been “warped and contorted to obstruct and embarrass the will of the majority - something our founding fathers explicitly opposed”. Schumer went as far as to invoke the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who said that Senate rules “must be changed to reflect changed circumstances,” and that “Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past.”
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the natural holdouts, but they’ve both signaled reforms that could include bringing back the talking filibuster, or changing the 60 vote threshold to break a filibuster to a 40 vote threshold to sustain a filibuster. This could lead to debates sustained over the course of days or weeks, where Republicans would have to hold the floor to prevent cloture. The oldest 12 Republicans range from 70 to 88 years old, so I would say the odds are in our favor.
President Biden delivered an absolutely amazing speech on the anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, reflecting on the lives lost, the severity of the attack, and the responsibility that Donald Trump bears for the violence. Though he did not mention him by name, Biden had some choice words for Trump: “He can't accept he lost. Even though that's what 93 United States senators, his own attorney general, his own vice president, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said: he lost.”
Biden went on to say that we are in the midst of a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and that we need to renew our commitment to democracy in the face of those who would try to destroy it. This is part of a larger effort by the Biden Administration to pass voting rights legislation before the 2022 elections.
The Case For Systemic Democratic Reform
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the one year anniversary of the January 6th attack on the capitol. As I sat down to write for this week's newsletter, I wanted to try my best to say something that hadn’t already been said. You’ve all no doubt seen countless news articles, headlines, and photos this week that remind us of the horrors of that day, the aftermath, and what we can expect for the future of our democracy.
As of right now, the jury is still out on whether we have done anything substantive to prevent this from happening again. Not only have we failed to pass any federal voting rights legislation to counteract legislation at the state level, but we have also failed to fix the electoral count act that set up the showdown on January 6th.
As I write this, Republicans across the country are running for down-ballot election administrator positions like Secretary of State so that in 2024, Trump will have state-level allies to help him change the results in the case of a close election. Trump’s federal super PAC has started setting up state-level political action groups to support candidates who will commit to sending their own slate of electors in the case of another Democratic victory in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, or Arizona.
This window to pass anything continues to narrow as we get closer to 2022, when it is highly likely that Republicans will retake the House and possibly the Senate. Though Chuck Schumer has signaled his willingness to fight for voting rights this month, the racist filibuster stands in his way, along with its ardent defenders: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Though we desperately need voting rights protections that will prevent another January 6th and stop Donald Trump from being elected again, we also need to implement democratic reforms that bring down the partisan temperature, create representative legislative bodies that can pass popular legislation, and invite citizens to be active participants in the political process. We need to do everything we can to prevent Republicans from stealing a future election, but we also need to fundamentally alter the systems that incentivized such a day.
The Problem
In an alternate reality where we pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Democrats will have significantly reduced the likelihood of an election being overturned in the future, of Donald Trump being reelected, and of a minority political party gaining majorities in the House and Senate. That said, we have only changed the rules and not the structures that are actually driving the core issues in American politics.
We have a minority, conservative party that thanks to their strategic geographic distribution and gerrymandering can wield majority power with far less than 50% of the vote. Even when one party does have unified control of government, they are prevented from passing popular legislation because of minoritarian procedural rules like the filibuster that empower a super-minority of elected representatives. Though our Congress used to “work” back in the day, it mostly worked in the interest of the wealthy, the well-connected, and often to the detriment of minorities.
At the district level, our winner-take-all system has left us with few competitive seats that decide control of either chamber, while most seats are decided in extreme partisan primaries that increasingly cater to partisan identities and not genuine ideas. When these people finally get to Congress, we do not see a broad spectrum of representatives, but highly clustered polls that only become more and more polarized around certain issues.
As we continue to polarize and not accomplish much during the course of each administration and successive Congress, the only place where anything is won is in the domain of public opinion and partisan bickering. This culminated in the election of Donald Trump, where his core voting base was less concerned with actually passing substantive legislation and more interested with “sticking it to the libs.” Many of his voters had given up on Democrats or mainstream Republicans a long time ago, not as much because of their being insufficiently conservative, but out of distaste for what little democracy had to show for itself.
At this point, Democrats have demonstrated that we are the only party committed to democracy. Though we should continue to fight first and foremost for voting rights protections, independent redistricting, and new states (like D.C. and Puerto Rico), I think we can go bigger. I would like to introduce three of my favorite democracy reforms that I think would do the best job of bringing in new political voices, elevating the interests of everyday Americans, and healing our partisan divides:
Ranked Choice Voting;
Democracy Dollars; and
Citizen Assemblies or Deliberative Democracy.
Ranked Choice Voting
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is a process where voters rank the candidates by preference on their ballots. RCV ensures that all elections end with a majority vote, eliminates the need to strategically vote, and prevents “spoilers.”
If no candidate wins a majority of the first preference votes, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and that candidate’s second preference votes are reallocated to the remaining candidates. This process continues until one candidate wins an outright majority of the eligible votes.
According to an analysis from FairVote, one of the country’s leading organizations advocating for RCV, there are numerous benefits of RCV, including:
Promoting representative outcomes and majority rule;
Discouraging overly negative campaigning;
Providing more choices for voters;
Saving money when replacing preliminaries or runoffs;
Promoting reflective representation;
Minimizing strategic voting; and
Increasing participation from military and overseas voters.
This kind of reform would bring representation closer to the ideological center, give candidates incentives to court voters from other candidates (or even form strategic partnerships with other candidates)1, and help to eliminate candidates who are unresponsive to their constituents and unrepresentative of over half of their voters.
RCV can be combined with a system like Alaska’s new nonpartisan primary, where all candidates from all parties run in an open primary, and then the top four vote getters advance to the November election. The top four are then subject to a ranked choice ballot contest.
RCV could also be combined with multi-member districts, where a larger geographic area is represented by 3-5 representatives that show the ideological/racial diversity of the district. This would allow Democrats to be elected in places like the Panhandle where Republicans tend to dominate, or Republicans to be elected in urban settings where Democrats tend to dominate. You would also see more third parties pop up, given that they would only need to win a small portion of the electorate to be elected.
Democracy Dollars
In addition to this structural reform that would give people more choices and invite new voices into the political process, we need to change how we finance elections so that these new candidates will have the resources they need to compete against the current two-party system. Our current campaign finance system is most commonly seen as problematic because of the incentive to go after contributions from large corporations, well-financed interest groups, and the wealthy. These groups are not representative of the median or average voter, and their outsized influence on election outcomes gives them outsized power in what policies are passed.
In response to this, Democrats and Progressives have created and nurtured a small-dollar donor infrastructure that has been able to match, and in many cases exceed, the contributions raised by Republicans or more corporate Democrats. Republicans have also begun to shift towards a small dollar fundraising model to combat this newfound strength in Democratic fundraising. That said, this new fundraising model is not immune to the same problem as before: candidates will always be beholden and highly responsive to those who fund their campaigns.
But why would this be a problem in a system where politicians are increasingly taking donations from individuals who are small dollar contributors? Well, the people who are making contributions to partisan political campaigns these days are highly engaged, highly partisan citizens who are far to the left and right of the general population.
Though this is slightly less problematic than the alternative, it still isn’t good that candidates can be more beholden to a hyper partisan constituency that spans the country than they are their own constituents.
To solve this, I believe that the United States needs to get closer to something like public financing of elections, specifically through a program some are calling “Democracy Dollars.” The idea is simple: every American would be given a $100 voucher for federal and state/local elections, respectively, to give to their candidate(s) of choice. The candidates would then redeem these vouchers for money to use on their campaign.
As opposed to other public financing systems that give campaigns equal amounts of money after meeting certain threshold requirements, this method of financing creates incentives for candidates to go talk to all of their potential constituents for financial backing, instead of just the most partisan ones. They will have to listen to and seek the counsel of every voter, knowing that every single one of them has $100 burning a hole in their pocket.
Seattle, Washington has implemented a similar $25 voucher system and saw small-dollar donations surge from 8,200 in 2015 to 25,000 in 2017. Contributors tended to be younger and more diverse than traditional donors. This would be a great way to bring younger, more diverse first-time candidates into the political process, especially if they know they can compete with more wealthy, well-connected candidates.
Citizen Assemblies or Deliberative Democracy
Finally, I think our democracy could benefit from placing more policy making decisions directly into the hands of regular citizens rather than placing that power in the hands of a self-selected minority of elected representatives that do not look like their constituents. I am talking about something like a Deliberative or Lottocratic Democracy. In this kind of scheme, a representative group of voters would be randomly selected from the general population, and they would come together to deliberate on pressing political issues. At the end of this deliberative process, they would either provide recommendations to the national legislature, or their solutions would go directly to the people for a vote.
Our U.S. Congress and state legislatures do not look like America. They are whiter, more highly educated2, more male, and wealthier than the general population, and it shows in the policies that are passed. Deliberative bodies made up of people that actually look like America would be better suited to share and deliberate on their own opinions, policy preferences, and life experiences, and we would obtain better policy outcomes as a result.
There have already been experiments like this in other Western Democracies. Iceland commissioned a citizen commission to make recommendations for its new constitution, and Ireland commissioned a randomly selected Citizens’ Assembly that led to the legalization of abortion. These assemblies can make the preferences of American citizens clear in a way that goes deeper than conventional public polling and can lead to actual solutions to contentious issues.
Furthermore, they would bring together people from all walks of life to deliberate on the most hotly contested issues. This would demonstrate our government’s commitment to peaceful deliberation and the idea that we can accomplish so much more when we shed our partisan identifiers and work towards a solution in a collaborative manner.
In Conclusion
I do not want to distract from the fact that we need immediate solutions to save our democracy. It is an interesting intellectual exercise to think about what could be, but the time to act is now. We must do what we can right now to prevent the immediate demise of our democracy, and there is legislation that would stave off such an outcome for the foreseeable future.
That said, I think it is in the best interest of Democrats and the United States of America to think bolder and consider ways that we might combat the rising tide of authoritarianism domestically. We need to demonstrate that democracy can deliver and that giving more power to the people is not a bad thing. If we do not create a democracy that is functional, representative, and collaborative, then we will continue to have men who insist that they alone are the ones that can be trusted to deliver for the people.
During the NYC Mayoral Democratic Primary, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia formed an alliance to encourage their supporters to choose the other as their second choices. In the event that one of them got knocked off, they would ideally see most of those supporters go to the ally, and vice versa. Though this angered other primary opponents, it is a form of positive campaigning that encourages the candidates to form majority coalitions that represent the will of the voters.
I want to be clear that it is not necessarily problematic that elected representatives are more college educated than their constituents. I only mention this to make the point that elected representatives have higher levels of education than the general population, and that those differences can lead to important variations in wealth, life experience, and perspective. Furthermore, I do not believe that you need a college degree to represent the policy preferences and lived experiences of your constituents. I think we could greatly benefit from more working class and union voices in the halls of Congress and our state legislatures.