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House Republicans are jumping off the sinking ship
(thehill.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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This isn't a victory. They will just be replaced with Trumpites.
Trumpite replacement candidates have been losing close congressional seats to Democratic challengers so this may open up some pathways to retaking a majority.
It's a risk though. Many people vote party line. It will depend a lot on what district or state the seat is in.
I'm not saying get complacent, but looking at the all the elections from 2020 on, it's less of a risk & more of a pattern.
Exactly. The ones that are closer to being moderate (there are currently no moderate Republicans in the house) are leaving. They're less crazy in general, so not only are there fewer Republicans to push back against the MAGA crowd, it leaves spots open to be filled by even crazier Republicans.
Yeah, I feel like the sinking ship is a "sane Republican party". We're just going to see more Boebert's, MTG's, and Jim Jordan's in Congress now, which will lead to even more dysfunction and gridlock.
They know that they will be primaried by MAGoos, and will lose.
The fact that there's even a debate to be had about whether it's a victory just shows how fucked up our system of government is—in this case, our electoral processes. Government policies in a democracy should be highly predictable based on what's popular with the voting-age public, but instead, the policy effects of something as minor as some people retiring are so unpredictable we may as well be trying to read the future in chicken entrails.
I think part of that reason is due to the fact that half of Congress has an arbitrarily capped headcount and we're no longer able to represent the popular opinions of the constituency. Last I checked, we should have something like 3x the representatives in the house that we have currently.
We also need to ditch the electoral college. There's no reason to have it any longer. We won a civil war that forced the South to start evolving beyond chattel slavery to prop up their economy, there's no need to continue with that farce.
The numbers I've seen are that if the House wasn't capped it would have around 10,000 members.
I agree with your points but I don't think they go far enough. Approval voting (or RCV) and proportional representation are needed.
Oh for sure, I've advocated for that for several years. Here in multinomah county, Oregon USA, we went with a version of RCV and our next election will be run that way. There's a lot of detractors, and while I personally would have preferred STAR voting, I think almost anything is better than FPTP.
You're right, I was off by a factor of 10 or so on the rep count.
Do you want to take a guess which party is making RCV illegal & already has done so in Florida?
We have computers and Internet and broadband. We could figure out 10,000 representatives.
the whole federal government leans toward rural conservatives. every state gets two senators regardless of population. there's a ceiling and a floor on house reps, so big states are underrepresented and little states are overrepresented. the president is picked by the electoral college, which favors smaller population states. SCotUS is picked by the already biased president and the senate, which has the heaviest bias.
Rats fleeing a sinking ship that will be replaced by bigger, shittier rats.
That is why the system needs to be transformed into a multi-party system. From now on, both parties will become more and more extreme.
I've been voting in elections since the 90s and it's always been this way at least since my dad was voting in the late 60s.
Breaking away from two parties is great talk, but there seems to be a lot of pushback from folks that are, for over reason or another, married to FPTP voting. We aren't ever going to move past the two party system until FPTP is thrown in the trash heap and private monetary political donations are banned outright.
Also, no idea why anyone down voted you.
Guess which party is trying to outlaw other RCV & already has in Florida?
Did you like the chaos of not having a House Speaker as a small faction turned against the majority and held the entire chamber hostage?
If so, then you would love coalition politics because that's a regular occurrence. If you consider the Freedom Caucus as a separate party in coalition with the GOP, then their antics will be familiar to anyone living under a multiparty system.
Multiparty systems don't solve the problem of extremism, they normalize it. In Italy, Israel, and now the House, leaders must appease extremist factions to stay in power.
We need to get away from American politics and look at how coalition governments work elsewhere in the world. Yes, they can be messy, but it forces the parties to sit down and TALK to each other and make some concessions to make it work.
Just like marriage. Both people are no longer single. They are now living together, they have to make concessions and agree on a common set of rules, norms, etc. The same thing happens in a coalition government, the parties make concessions to make it work and agree on a middle way. That cannot happen in a two-party system.
Right. Coalition governments tend to have a few crazies around the fringes. The difference is that they stay at the fringes, because more reasonable heads are collaborating to form a majority. You don't have the current situation where the loons are dictating everything while being made up of about one half of the majority party.
Loons dictating everything while being barely a fraction of majority is exactly what you have in Italy and Israel, which are among the purest examples of multi-party democracy.
Italy's leader is now a literal fascist, and Israel is run by a right-wing nutjob bending the knee to nutjobs who are even more right-wing than he is.
What you're seeing are outliers. Take a look at this list of coalition governments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_coalition_governments
There are plenty of functioning European countries (since we're talking about the US) that have functioning and "normal" coalition governments.
It also depends on the parties that won and the system used to elect these officials. For example, if the most left-wing party came first, but the other two centrist parties came second and third, if the most left-wing party wants to govern, it will have no choice but to make some concessions in order to govern and put policies on the table that all parties will agree to.
Yes, you can add Hungary and Turkey to the list of fascist-enabled coalitions. And more where open fascists are elected to parliament, like the Dutch PVV and the Austrian FPO. These serve to normalize fascism even if they remain outside of the ruling coalition.
Meanwhile, two-party governments have basically no elected representatives from openly fascist parties. If third parties were viable, David Duke would be in Congress.
If you want to look at how coalition governments work elsewhere, you need to look at Italy and Israel. Those are among the purest multi-party systems.
In both countries, it is true that some parties sat down and "made concessions". But in both countries, the parties were the mainstream right and one or more fringe fascist or outright racist parties. As the price of staying in power, the mainstream right "conceded" that open fascists and racists have a legitimate place in a ruling coalition.
In a two-party system, I am at least thankful that extremists tend to paralyze government, not empower it.
The failure of the two party system, unfortunately, is the fact that one party is always the leader. In the case of the US, it's the GOP. The GOP has successfully taken control and shifted the Overton Window in the country further and further to the right since 1945. It will never reset back to an equilibrium with the structure that we have currently. Electing a Democrat only loosens the noose, it doesn't remove it.
Disagree. The GOP candidate won the national popular vote only once in the last eight presidential elections. They have not passed any significant national legislation in that time. Meanwhile Democrats have enacted health care reform, climate investment, and now pro-choice laws.
The GOP can only hold on to power via voter suppression / electoral tricks, and that strategy won't work forever.
I respectfully disagree. I think the GOP will keep marching towards the far right, but that will cause the Democrats to move to the center
There's nothing extreme about the Democratic party. Get some fucking perspective.