Why have we as a people allowed our past three administrations to continue to rule by fiat? Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas, but this kind of action must come from the legislature.
The legislature has already long since punted regulation of most things to the executive. The Code of Federal Regulations is a lot larger and lengthier than the United States Code. That includes environmental regulations: the EPA is an executive agency.
If your response is that the above is a bad idea, I agree; I think the legislature should be prevented (by Constitutional amendment, if necessary) from punting regulation to the executive. Anything that has the force of law--and regulations issued by executive agencies do--should have to go through the Constitutional process to create a law. But that's not how things are currently done.
Because your system of government is so fundamentally broken it barely even qualifies as a democracy anymore?
All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with 1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers.
There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has the political will to do it.
Gerrymandering isn't really a thing IMO (see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop). It ends up hurting each party in reality.
I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.
It deserves to be neglected, it is an extremely foolish idea. It literally can only hurt the Democrats advocating for it in the solid blue states that are signatories.
This is illegal. The constitution mandates that each state must offer its residents representative democracy. If a state apportions electors based on the results of another state that is basing their election on the votes of residents of another state, which means the voters of the state in question are being disenfranchised.
According to the wiki article above that doesn't seem to be the case:
> The Constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of electors.
I would really suggest reading the Constitution. It's like 5 pages long, and really not difficult. It's so simple that really one ought to expect every American to be able to repeat all its clauses, even if they can't remember what goes where.
Nevertheless, Article IV, Section 4:
> The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
If a state is choosing electors based on voters not in the state, then the citizens of the state no longer have a republican form of government. The state cannot simply arbitrarily choose who to force their electors to vote for. The process must be a republican one somehow.
Gerrymandering is definitely manipulation, it is defined and has a wikipedia article that states "gerrymandering is when a party or group manipulates district boundaries"
Sure, but data shows that after gerry mandering, the incumbent party in a district is more likely to lose. Please read the source cited or at least be familiar before arguing in bad faith. I'm open to criticism of the work cited
Well, after redistricting by supposedly partisan committees one would expect the redistricting process to further entrench incumbents because either party would be unwilling to yield established seats. In fact, the opposite happens.
Wouldn’t incumbents losing after partisan gerrymandering suggest that current gerrymandering favors parties so much that they can’t improve the system in ways that benefit them specifically, and that even a partisan committee led redistricting would be more representative of the voters more will than the current districts?
There's a one eyed Congressman in Texas near Houston whose district is shaped like a freaking C because it's the only way to get a Republican elected in the area, but okay.
Which court? The supreme court rules that gerrymandering is 100% AOK by them so long as it isn't done for the express purpose of racial disenfranchisement.
Gerrymandering to warp democracy and give the members of your party more power than members of the other party are OK, according to our current supreme court.
Even the racial disenfranchisement line has been significantly weakened - there have been cases going up with clearly racially biased districts but so long as there is some other property the districts could have been gerrymandered based on (i.e. "Urbaness") then the courts have let it through.
Right now, anything goes (and the fact that gerrymandering with the explicit intention of entrenching a political party isn't illegal is bonkers).
Alternatively district abolishment and proportional distribution of delegates would also pretty much resolve it - even with a mixed geographic and proportional system where some delegates do have specific areas and others are floating delegates that are used to balance out proportions while allowing local districts to chose an advocate specifically for them.
I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their districts.
But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.
If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?
Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?
Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap measure).
This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side)
A pretty common downside is a lack of adherence to historical boundaries and groupings - some neighborhoods that legitimately formed a district and a unified block due to strange geographic features could be broken up.
But actually - there are two classes of algorithms out there: one can determine how to fairly divide up a state and another measures how unfairly a state is divided up - instead of going full into computers-determine-everything it might be nice to just have a requirement that the result of the election in the state is relatively statistically probable given the proportions of votes for each party. So people could still draw districts we would just have a manner to prove their districts are acceptably fair.
1. There would be a lot of sudden changes, without any real explanation about those particular changes.
2. Unlike now there would be little on-the-ground reasoning to these changes. Districts would be split on random-seeming streets, with no respect at all about residents felt. Now at least you have someone to blame, and we like to have someone to blame rather than "the computer".
People actually will have to tune into politics since the differences will be diminished and you can't simply push the red or blue button and be done with it. 'aint nobody got time for that!
Why are we shifting to fancy math for this? Just mandate districts have to be simple geometric shapes; good luck isolating 16 individual neighborhoods in a city when all you have are four corners. I mean I know some mathematician will show that you can still tile them in such a way to benefit some candidate by 1.6% or whatever, but it would be the simplest way to get rid of the most egregious of district abuses.
Remember, you also have to sell the idea to the public, and which is easier to sell: "Trust this complex algorithm built by mathematicians and their fancy computer models who most certainly aren't secretly biased toward the candidate you dislike", or "RECTANGLES! :D"
> But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.
No you (practically) cannot, that's kinda the point
We already have that. Each state gets allocated a number of representatives in proportion to its population, which, in turn, determines the number of congressional districts in that state.
I believe they meant to have only a single congressional district per state, with multiple representatives allocated to parties proportionally according to election result.
Proportional representation is the most common electoral system for national legislatures (and is also used by e.g. EU parliament).
Seven US states have "at large" congressional districts, and a few states have one at large district. This seems easier and maybe more sensible for a state's representatives in the US Congress. [0]
Apparently, there used to be more at large states, except states were using it to dilute minority votes. (The white majority was large enough to elect all-white representatives.) In 1986, this was ruled to violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. [1]
Hard to rely on voting when the voting is rigged re: gerrymandering...
As for how to fix it, I'm no expert but off the top of my head
1. Allow public submissions for districts to prevent rigging choices
2. Create an objective set of measurements for scoring districts with the , e.g. maximize compactness, minimize perimeter, other measures that would help combat gerrymandering
3. Highest score wins? Top N finalists are voted on by legislature?
Hardly perfect, and I'm sure someone's thought about this harder and could do better. But nearly anything has got to be better than "the party in power every 10 years is given a carte blanche opportunity to further solidify their power"
I don't know if you're intending those questions about independent commissions to be figurative. People have thought about this and, in Michigan, we voted such a commission in:
You shouldn't have electoral lines at all. Proportional representation has a couple of advantages: all opinions, and not merely the majority opinion, gets represented; you're likely to get more than two parties, which means parties have to compromise with each other; and the system isn't nearly as easy to game.
One approach is to shift to multi seat constituencies under a proportional representation system. These are effectively impossible to usefully gerrymander.
The U.S. Federal government is not a direct democracy, it is a federal republic directed by representatives of states.
If you have a fine idea for a law at this scale, and you want democracy, you have it within your state.
For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws.
> abolish the EC ... to start with
No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.
The rural minority already receives disproportionate representation in the legislative. There is -no- part of the government that provides urban voters with disproportionate representation.
>> you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country
Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy.
But more generally...
>> abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything
Yeah, it will. For a start, it will fix the problem of the Electoral College existing.
It's an inherently undemocratic institution that is completely unnecessary in the 21st century.
And that's not a partisan position (I live in NZ so I really don't have skin in the game here). If you're a democrat living in Texas or a republican living in California, you may as well not vote in presidential elections.
You could move the presidential election to a Single Transferable Vote system and then you might actually get viable 3rd party candidates as people wouldn't have to worry about "wasting their vote".
> Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy.
This is ridiculous. The correlation of left-leaning and environmental advocacy is relatively new. Or rather, conservatives ignoring conservation is a rather new thing. Many of the first conservationists, and the reason we have things like national parks, and such were rural conservatives.
Would you please stop posting to HN in the flamewar style and stop using this site for ideological battle? You've been doing these things a lot and they're against the site guidelines.
I support abolition of the EC, but only if there is some form of geographic weighting (ideally a smart one) that doesn't allow a handful of cities to dominate the Federal gov't.
I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities.
Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't.
Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc.
They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think.
Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is.
Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.
There's one big problem with this line of thinking: states don't vote. At least, not once you get rid of the electoral college. Once the EC is gone, it's people that vote. So cities don't dominate, people do.
And that's not just semantics; at the moment there are millions of conservatives in California whose vote gets ignored. There's millions of liberals in Texas whose vote gets ignored. Cities are not a homogenous voting bloc.
But that is exactly the problem. City dwellers know about city problems. If it's up to city dwellers, they may vote to fund things like public art in lieu of critical infrastructure like irrigation or government weather infrastructure because those things don't seem necessary when you're living in a metropolis, but are vital when you're a farmer.
Or, what if city dwellers choose to do things like burn fossil fuels for convenience and pay no attention to changing weather patterns, etc?
We shouldn't require our required rural brethren to become activists and lobbyists in the city just so the interests of the land can be surfaced.
But that's true for literally every issue. Rural voters are equally less aware of city issues. White voters are less aware of issues faced specifically by minorities. Men are less aware of female health issues. Skewing votes in favour of one group or another is never going to fix that.
The only way to fix it is to ensure that all opinions are represented. A multi-party system with proportional representation will accomplish that much better than a skewed and polarised two-party system.
agriculture lobbying is a $140 million industry[1].
public art and infrastructure might be nominal priorities for a presidential candidate, but these decisions are generally going to be made by representatives in Congress, so whether or not the EC exists doesn't really change how these issues are addressed.
legalization in several states like Nevada, Maine, and Oregon would have been threatened if they'd had models of representation like the EC. instead, it was the population centers of those states, i.e. the people, that got those laws passed.
You are correct, and that was the case in Colorado as well. I think that the difference here is that a state in the USA is ideally small enough for this to still kind of work.
On the scale and regional cultural variation in the US, I'm not sure it works at that level. But I really don't know.
> Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas
Trump is told what to do. Ideas mean nothing to him. He is a man-child who knows his days in power are numbered. For the next six months, he will try to unwind our environmental laws to benefit himself and his fellow Republicans.
Over the last three years I've become a single-issue voter/activist. That issue is seeing Trump on death row. Ideally along with the other Trumps + Barr, Whitaker, and so many others. But I'll settle for just Donny.
I would prefer to see all familial wealth that was at all tainted by conflicts of interest during the course of the administration be seized and the proceeds going to fund national voting by mail.
It's civil forfeiture - if they can definitively prove there was no crime they can have it back. And it's an easy bar to overcome just ask anyone who's ever had their property confiscated under that style of law.
You can't post like this here, no matter how strongly you feel. Perhaps you don't owe "Donny" better but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please.
It took a lifetime of effort from Reagan Republicans to get where we are now. Working tirelessly for decades to make sure government is ineffective and doesn’t work.
Censorship is alive and well at HN. Apparently the moderators have silently intervened and moved this post off of the front page.
Edit: Now this post is back on the front page. Moderation by algorithms is confusing, especially when the rules keep changing. What's important is to encourage respectful, reasoned discussion on any topic.
This is extremely dangerous. Waiving environmental review and consideration when building roads and bridges is extremely foolish. They greatly effect water quality at crossings and alongside the roads. My guess is this will be held up in courts and not allowed to go further -- it is an extreme deviation from what we currently do (which is held up by supreme court precedent). Entire industries are built on doing environmental impact studies and mitigation.
Environmental review is constantly used to stop housing construction and entrench existing segregation. Let's build some more of that so we won't need to drive anywhere :)
e: Since when do people on HN downvote calls to build more housing??
Stopping a mid-rise building during SEPA review because of migratory bird flight paths is one thing, but macro scale environmental impacts that could occur during the constructions of freeways etc - yea we should review thoroughly.
I agree that environmental protection is a top priority, but I think it will be overall better for the environment if we accept the reality of having a little visible infrastructure/manufacturing in our collective faces. If anything, visibility should drive us to develop cleaner alternatives instead of the current reality where things like the Foxconn iPhone factory suicide netting is a funny joke to many of us. I believe the move away from domestic manufacturing created an even bigger climate problem from the thousands and thousands of ships and planes carrying materials across the planet for assembly, carrying them back for sale, and spewing unchecked amounts of pollution the entire way.
I'm trying to unpack what you're saying here because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You think we should roll back environmental protections so that the negative effects of manufacturing are more in peoples faces so that they care more with an end goal of... putting those same protections back I assume?
Pretty close, yeah! More like with an end goal of developing cleaner manufacturing processes that we can stand to be around. I think the environmental laws we have just take the same old dirty tech we've always had and move it far enough away that we don't see local negatives. The statistics I've seen about the environmental impact of the shipping industry are pretty alarming, and I suspect the actual impact is way worse than that since the entire area is so poorly explored.
I don't understand why fixing issues with shipping requires us to dismantle environmental protections elsewhere. This just seems like whataboutism to me.
Could an executive order be made to make the approval process more effective and efficient? We did the fist part of the work by identifying the bottle necks (at least broadly), the Acts where approved by Congress, so now let’s optimize.
It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if true seems like a big waste of time and resources.
I would be down for that, yeah. That's why I don't like the way Trump approaches things as mandates instead of conversations. I think it just ratchets up the divisiveness to the point that people start downvoting you on here if you like one thing Trump does because you think it's good to build houses and give people jobs to buy them with :p
You can't ignore the fact that labor costs were also a large part of the reason manufacturing moved offshore. Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.
The path forward is to continue to innovate, not roll back environmental protections.
>Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.
And many of those jobs no longer exist... they were automated away long ago. So even if you brought the factories back, it wouldn't put many people to work.
I don't believe an iPhone made in America would have to cost much—if anything—more than my iPhone from Foxconn. There's surely some spare change in Apple's hundred-billion-dollar cash pile that we could use to pay those more-expensive American workers a living wage: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on...
We should first examine environmental laws for their impact on communities, people and the economy. Far too often the environment is just a veil for NIMBY.
If this change actually results in that, then great. I seriously doubt that; this deregulation shit is always a giveaway to energy corporations and whatever other villains.
> Let's build some more of that so we won't need to drive anywhere
Have you been to the projects? There's housing, and nothing else. People still have to sit 2 hours on a bus to get groceries because it's still a food desert. Businesses won't show up because there's no money, because there's no job training programs and no public transit to where the jobs are, etc. Eliminating segregation and raising people out of poverty is complex, and I don't think eliminating environmental review would move the needle.
Can those kinds of environmental issues be fixed later, or are they generally unrecoverable? It may be worth some number of fixable environmental issues to recover from the pandemic faster.
Some environmental impacts can be fixed later, but it generally much more expensive to "bolt-on" a fix than to design the project properly in the first place. This of course means the fix is rarely implemented.
According to NEPA, when an impact is identified, the intent is to develop an alternative to avoid the impact entirely. It's only when alternatives are found to be infeasible that other mitigation methods can be considered.
I think you've gotten confused - my question was whether they are indeed permanent solutions, or if we can fix them later without having to dig the whole thing up.
The SF bay area is still fixing environmental damage from 50 years ago (semiconductors) or even 170 years ago (gold rush/mercury mines). Environmental problems can outlive everyone that will decide this issue.
Perhaps we can push back against what is effectively legislation by the executive branch. Then, here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.
I agree with the general principle, but in this case Congress can't exactly pass a bill for every project requiring environmental review. They have to delegate some authority to the executive here.
I always thought the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process was intuitive. Congress passed an act tasking the executive branch to pick which military bases to close, then there was a guaranteed for/against vote with minimal deliberation and no delays or Filibuster.
In parliamentary democracies, this sort of thing is normally a devolved ministerial power. Of course, it’s a lot easier to get rid of a naughty minister.
>here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.
Solution to that is a functioning Congress, which requires less polarization (i.e. more compromise) and sane campaign finance laws. Term limits couldn't hurt either.
It's a two party system where neither seems to care that the presidency wields too much power, so fixing it is probably in the realm of constitutional amendments at the moment.
Much of the power given to the President here seems to be from legislation itself or lack of legislation altogether. I don't think there's any constitutional changes that would need to take place in order to restrict executive power on subjects like environmental regulation, emergency powers, among other things.
100% this. Towing the party line at all cost is what the GOP are doing today.
20 years ago this wouldn't be the case, but keeping the party unified at all cost, against morals, ethics, logic, is what is happening.
What saddens me is the majority vote says they shouldn't be in power in many cases but ultra effective wielding our laws in corner cases has led us to this point. Even while I loathe it, I must say it is quite effective.
> Then, here's the tough part, don't expand executive power when your own party is in the white house.
Optimistic Democrats cheered Obama's expansive use of executive power (so progressive!), and were dismayed when Trump revoked every executive order that Obama's name was on pretty much immediately after taking power. Perhaps this will be a lesson... but I'm betting that Biden would veto any such limitation even if he had a friendly Congress and Senate.
They cheered because he was doing things they liked, not because he was expanding executive powers. They knew full well that these actions could be undone by the next executive. No one is surprised by this. Obama was doing what he thought was right in the only way left to him: the Republicans controlled the other branches of government and were openly opposed to any compromise. The Republicans still control the Senate and the the courts and Trump, with their complicity, has neutralized all oversight of the executive branch, but it is in his character to rule by fiat, so here we are. What is more remarkable is how little Trump accomplished in his first two years despite controlling all branches of government.
Something’s gotta give. There’s always going to be some sort of gross underbelly to this level of economic damage. I would personally prefer vastly higher taxes but I recognize that it has to come from somewhere.
> The order will waive several long-standing environmental laws
Is it possible for an executive order to "waive laws"? I thought laws take precedence over executive orders. If this were possible, then the President could waive all the laws he didn't like, and have more power than a king.
I'd be grateful if someone who understands thew law better than I do could give some color here.
As far as I've understood, the president as boss of the executive branch can order the executive branch to not apply a law or at least not prosecute violations. One means to do this is to impose a certain interpretation, e.g. ordering "severe environmental impact" to mean nothing less than "making the area uninhabitable for anything beyond bacteria for more than 100 years" or something.
Also, laws are often vague and their intent is clarified in regulations issued by the executive, e.g. the EPA. The president could order those regulations to be changed.
Yeah, but can't the next administration simply start enforcing those laws again? A company would have to be incredibly foolish to count on something like this to protect them.
Yes, the next administration could do that. But permits that have already been granted under the old rules usually remain valid. If not, possible lawsuits and damages awarded.
The executive, and specifically the DoJ, has significant discretion to abstain from trying court cases. But regulatory agencies are a different matter. More importantly, in this context it would seem the EPA would be affirmativelyapproving projects without following the legally required process. I'm not sure what kind of discretion regulatory agencies have in completely abstaining from undertaking some action, but AFAIU they definitely don't enjoy much discretion to simply ignore the rules once they take that first step; not unless there's other legislation that gives them an escape hatch.
The executive branch can simply not enforce the law which effectively nullifies it. That being said, the POTUS still doesn't have the power to make up new laws to serve his interests.
Could an executive order be made to make the approval process more effective and efficient? We did the fist part of the work by identifying the bottle necks (at least broadly), the Acts where approved by Congress so now let’s optimize.
It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if true seems like a big waste of time and resources.
It’s a subtle difference but it’s the difference between how something is computed vs what is computed (i.e. the processes in place to enforce a law vs the word of the law).
I’m definitely not a legal scholar but I optimize code a fair amount that computes the same thing as the un-optimized code.
Take for example multiplication of natural numbers, e.g. 2x2=4, there are a number of ways this could be implemented to get the desired result, bit shifting, symbolic mathematics, heck even trained machine learning or an impl on a trinary computer. If The computation is correct the vast majority of the time great! If not, a judge can order the process be updated to implement the law.
Effectively, Congress Makes the laws, the executive branch manages their administration, and the legislative branch ensures they are being administrators in accordance with the law.
In case anyone considers writing this off as a partisan or economic issue, it's worth remembering that both of the acts mentioned here -- the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act -- were enacted by a Republican president during a recession.
He was hardly an environmentalist, either. That's how important this was 50 years ago.
Because when your guy gets in you want them to have power to make real change.
That's the idea anyhow. If we nerf the powers for one side, when our side gets in they will be nerfed also. Other systems do things differently of course, but every system wants to maintain itself.
Ok, can someone please explain to me what the limits on executive orders are? It seems like the president is allowed to right executive orders at any time, for any reason, and completely side step the legislature?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.6 ms ] threadIf your response is that the above is a bad idea, I agree; I think the legislature should be prevented (by Constitutional amendment, if necessary) from punting regulation to the executive. Anything that has the force of law--and regulations issued by executive agencies do--should have to go through the Constitutional process to create a law. But that's not how things are currently done.
All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with 1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers.
There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has the political will to do it.
I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.
It’s honestly surprising that only two states are winner-takes-all by district. The other 48 are winner-takes-all for the whole state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
> The Constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of electors.
Nevertheless, Article IV, Section 4:
> The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
If a state is choosing electors based on voters not in the state, then the citizens of the state no longer have a republican form of government. The state cannot simply arbitrarily choose who to force their electors to vote for. The process must be a republican one somehow.
Set it in this font: https://uglygerry.com
Can you elaborate on why that’s relevant? Sorry, I’m not going to buy and read an entire book on this.
Gerrymandering to warp democracy and give the members of your party more power than members of the other party are OK, according to our current supreme court.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymander...
Right now, anything goes (and the fact that gerrymandering with the explicit intention of entrenching a political party isn't illegal is bonkers).
The courts have held that gerrymandering based on race is unconstitutional.
Gerrymandering based on political advantage has yet to be ruled unconstitutional and continues unabated.
But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.
If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?
Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?
This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side)
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematician...
I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair -- what are some downsides of this, though?
But actually - there are two classes of algorithms out there: one can determine how to fairly divide up a state and another measures how unfairly a state is divided up - instead of going full into computers-determine-everything it might be nice to just have a requirement that the result of the election in the state is relatively statistically probable given the proportions of votes for each party. So people could still draw districts we would just have a manner to prove their districts are acceptably fair.
1. There would be a lot of sudden changes, without any real explanation about those particular changes.
2. Unlike now there would be little on-the-ground reasoning to these changes. Districts would be split on random-seeming streets, with no respect at all about residents felt. Now at least you have someone to blame, and we like to have someone to blame rather than "the computer".
Remember, you also have to sell the idea to the public, and which is easier to sell: "Trust this complex algorithm built by mathematicians and their fancy computer models who most certainly aren't secretly biased toward the candidate you dislike", or "RECTANGLES! :D"
No you (practically) cannot, that's kinda the point
Proportional representation of house members per state is one option. Which would be completely constitutional, btw.
Proportional representation is the most common electoral system for national legislatures (and is also used by e.g. EU parliament).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Apparently, there used to be more at large states, except states were using it to dilute minority votes. (The white majority was large enough to elect all-white representatives.) In 1986, this was ruled to violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornburg_v._Gingles
As for how to fix it, I'm no expert but off the top of my head
1. Allow public submissions for districts to prevent rigging choices
2. Create an objective set of measurements for scoring districts with the , e.g. maximize compactness, minimize perimeter, other measures that would help combat gerrymandering
3. Highest score wins? Top N finalists are voted on by legislature?
Hardly perfect, and I'm sure someone's thought about this harder and could do better. But nearly anything has got to be better than "the party in power every 10 years is given a carte blanche opportunity to further solidify their power"
Aren't voting them out and gerrymandering somewhat mutually exclusive?
https://votersnotpoliticians.com/redistricting/
We'll see how well it works after this census.
For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws.
> abolish the EC ... to start with
No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.
Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy.
But more generally... >> abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything
Yeah, it will. For a start, it will fix the problem of the Electoral College existing.
It's an inherently undemocratic institution that is completely unnecessary in the 21st century.
And that's not a partisan position (I live in NZ so I really don't have skin in the game here). If you're a democrat living in Texas or a republican living in California, you may as well not vote in presidential elections.
You could move the presidential election to a Single Transferable Vote system and then you might actually get viable 3rd party candidates as people wouldn't have to worry about "wasting their vote".
This is ridiculous. The correlation of left-leaning and environmental advocacy is relatively new. Or rather, conservatives ignoring conservation is a rather new thing. Many of the first conservationists, and the reason we have things like national parks, and such were rural conservatives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Getting 38 states to approve eliminating it is highly unlikely.
> No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything <random rant>
Fix? What does that even mean? It would start to bring it back to a direct democracy, expanding the franchise beyond the state, as _you_ pointed out.
I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities.
Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't.
Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc.
They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think.
Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is.
Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.
And that's not just semantics; at the moment there are millions of conservatives in California whose vote gets ignored. There's millions of liberals in Texas whose vote gets ignored. Cities are not a homogenous voting bloc.
Or, what if city dwellers choose to do things like burn fossil fuels for convenience and pay no attention to changing weather patterns, etc?
We shouldn't require our required rural brethren to become activists and lobbyists in the city just so the interests of the land can be surfaced.
The only way to fix it is to ensure that all opinions are represented. A multi-party system with proportional representation will accomplish that much better than a skewed and polarised two-party system.
public art and infrastructure might be nominal priorities for a presidential candidate, but these decisions are generally going to be made by representatives in Congress, so whether or not the EC exists doesn't really change how these issues are addressed.
1: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/sectors/summary...
On the scale and regional cultural variation in the US, I'm not sure it works at that level. But I really don't know.
Trump is told what to do. Ideas mean nothing to him. He is a man-child who knows his days in power are numbered. For the next six months, he will try to unwind our environmental laws to benefit himself and his fellow Republicans.
It's civil forfeiture - if they can definitively prove there was no crime they can have it back. And it's an easy bar to overcome just ask anyone who's ever had their property confiscated under that style of law.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Since it hasn't for decades, the Imperial Presidency rises to fill the vacuum.
Edit: Now this post is back on the front page. Moderation by algorithms is confusing, especially when the rules keep changing. What's important is to encourage respectful, reasoned discussion on any topic.
e: Since when do people on HN downvote calls to build more housing??
The offshoring of US manufacturing jobs also disproportionately hurt Black Americans and others who were once able to use those jobs as an accessible path to a middle-class life: https://equitablegrowth.org/african-american-workers-are-hur...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping... (Paywall: http://archive.is/Pf7Bw )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...
It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if true seems like a big waste of time and resources.
The path forward is to continue to innovate, not roll back environmental protections.
And many of those jobs no longer exist... they were automated away long ago. So even if you brought the factories back, it wouldn't put many people to work.
Have you been to the projects? There's housing, and nothing else. People still have to sit 2 hours on a bus to get groceries because it's still a food desert. Businesses won't show up because there's no money, because there's no job training programs and no public transit to where the jobs are, etc. Eliminating segregation and raising people out of poverty is complex, and I don't think eliminating environmental review would move the needle.
According to NEPA, when an impact is identified, the intent is to develop an alternative to avoid the impact entirely. It's only when alternatives are found to be infeasible that other mitigation methods can be considered.
By doing what? Protest?
Solution to that is a functioning Congress, which requires less polarization (i.e. more compromise) and sane campaign finance laws. Term limits couldn't hurt either.
20 years ago this wouldn't be the case, but keeping the party unified at all cost, against morals, ethics, logic, is what is happening.
What saddens me is the majority vote says they shouldn't be in power in many cases but ultra effective wielding our laws in corner cases has led us to this point. Even while I loathe it, I must say it is quite effective.
Optimistic Democrats cheered Obama's expansive use of executive power (so progressive!), and were dismayed when Trump revoked every executive order that Obama's name was on pretty much immediately after taking power. Perhaps this will be a lesson... but I'm betting that Biden would veto any such limitation even if he had a friendly Congress and Senate.
Is it possible for an executive order to "waive laws"? I thought laws take precedence over executive orders. If this were possible, then the President could waive all the laws he didn't like, and have more power than a king.
I'd be grateful if someone who understands thew law better than I do could give some color here.
Also, laws are often vague and their intent is clarified in regulations issued by the executive, e.g. the EPA. The president could order those regulations to be changed.
I’m definitely not a legal scholar but I optimize code a fair amount that computes the same thing as the un-optimized code.
Take for example multiplication of natural numbers, e.g. 2x2=4, there are a number of ways this could be implemented to get the desired result, bit shifting, symbolic mathematics, heck even trained machine learning or an impl on a trinary computer. If The computation is correct the vast majority of the time great! If not, a judge can order the process be updated to implement the law.
Effectively, Congress Makes the laws, the executive branch manages their administration, and the legislative branch ensures they are being administrators in accordance with the law.
He was hardly an environmentalist, either. That's how important this was 50 years ago.
It’s annoying how many laws flip flop every eight years.
That's the idea anyhow. If we nerf the powers for one side, when our side gets in they will be nerfed also. Other systems do things differently of course, but every system wants to maintain itself.