James Madison should have fought harder
"He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had."-Chief of Staff John Kelly (from Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in The White House)
Unless the Kremlin manages to steal the election again, it's likely that the Democrats will win a substantial majority in the House. Starting next January, Speaker Pelosi could have 250 votes to the GOP's 185, give or take. If reports from Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee (which includes 3 of Congress' intellectual giants-- Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, and Jamie Raskin-- come up with the evidence to impeach, it won't be that hard for the House to do it, despite all the New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party the DCCC is stocking Congress with. But what happens then?Trump would then be tried by the Senate. No matter which party gets the majority-- and it will be close (possibly depending on whether or not Beto beats Cruz)-- it would be hard to imagine the Senate finding Trump guilty regardless of what Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee find. Even if you want to discount the fact that Doug Jones (D-AL) is up for reelection in 2020 and will be reluctant to vote against Trump, the Democrats are would need 67 votes, meaning more than a dozen Republicans regardless of how well they do in November. That's virtually impossible, unless Mueller can prove definitively that Trump was taking boatloads of cash from Putin to-- for example-- wreck NATO and undermine U.S. alliances worldwide.And there's more than just basic math in play here. A couple of weeks ago Justin Fox, writing for Bloomberg News and Dave Wasserman, writing for the New York Times explained how inherently un-representative (or anti-democratic) the Senate is-- and was meant to be. Wasserman: "a majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population... much whiter, more rural and pro-Trump than the nation as a whole. In effect, geography could again be Mr. Trump’s greatest protector: After all, the Senate-- not the House-- would have the final say on any impeachment proceedings."Justin Fox's OpEd, The Senate Has Always Been Wildly Unrepresentative just to the reasons why it was created that way. "The primary author of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, wanted to replace the ineffectual governance by sovereign states of the Articles of the Confederation with a national system built on individual representation, and thought it obvious that Senate seats should be apportioned on the basis of population. He also seemed confident that his view would prevail, writing to George Washington a few weeks before the start of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that:
A majority of the States, and those of greatest influence, will regard it as favorable to them. To the Northern States it will be recommended by their present populousness; to the Southern by their expected advantage in this respect. The lesser States must in every event yield to the predominant will. But the consideration which particularly urges a change in the representation is that it will obviate the principal objections of the larger States to the necessary concessions of power.
But, as Fox pointed out, "the lesser states did not yield and the larger states did," which resulted in the un-representative, anachronistic Senate of 2018. He referenced an essay by Philip Bump who pointed out that by 2040, 70% of the population will live in just 15 states and thus select only 30% of U.S. Senators. The huge populations of California and Texas are especially viewed as unfair (in those two states) and there has been talk about breaking up into several states and even about seceding from the Union.Fox explains that 10 states growing the fastest are losing per-person Senate representation (above) while in the states losing population, residents "have been gaining lots of per-person Senate clout" (below).Juan Williams took a shot at this yesterday for The Hill, noting that "Republican control of Capitol Hill and the White House is based on a 'fake majority.'... America’s politics are being run by a cabal in the Senate that fails to represent 82 percent of the American people." The results that Williams sees are catastrophic-- especially in terms of the Supreme Court.
For starters, the 18 percent controlling the Senate have their own right-wing agenda beyond protecting an unpopular president.They want a Supreme Court majority that reflects their views and not the views of the majority of the people.To take control of the court they blocked President Obama-- a Democrat twice elected with a majority of the popular vote as well as a majority of the electoral college-- for close to a year from appointing a centrist judge to the high court.Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who will preside over this week’s hearings, refused to even give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone an up or down vote.And now having already replaced Garland and installed a solid conservative-- Neil Gorsuch-- the Senate Republicans, who represent fewer than 1-in-5 Americans, are about to force another conservative on the Supreme Court.If they succeed in locking in another conservative, this time Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they will cement a conservative majority on the court for decades in an act that might be described as tyranny.It is not just the Senate that is acting against the will of the majority.Remember that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.If Kavanaugh is confirmed, there is nothing stopping the 5-4 conservative majority on the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and denying millions of American women the right to an abortion.This despite the fact that only 29 percent of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases, according to a July Quinnipiac poll. The vast majority of Americans, 64 percent, want it legal in all or most cases.Then there is the tyranny of Trump-led GOP efforts to cripple the Affordable Care Act (ACA).With Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ.) death, there is nothing stopping the 18-percent-Senate-majority from passing their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and strip health care from millions of Americans-- even though the latest Kaiser poll taken over the summer shows that 50 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the ACA compared to 41 percent who view it unfavorably.A June Quinnipiac poll similarly found that 51 percent want the ACA to remain in place and 44 percent want it repealed. McCain famously killed the repeal effort because, for all their complaints, Republicans never came up with a better bill to help Americans with the high cost of healthcare.Will the Arizona Republican who is appointed to fill his seat display the same courage?Then there is the tyranny of GOP tax cuts.The 18-percent-Senate-majority passed tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest one percent of Americans.Forty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the Trump tax law, according to Quinnipiac polling.An August Fox poll found that ObamaCare is now more popular than the Republican tax cuts. More than half of voters, 51 percent, favor ObamaCare compared to 40 percent who approved of the tax cuts.That finding is bolstered by another poll, a CNBC survey from June, which found that 49 percent of working American adults-- a plurality of all the people polled-- said they do not have more take-home pay because of the law.How about the president’s aggressive focus on border security? Again, a majority in the Fox poll said they disapprove. Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration policy.And when it comes to the Republican president’s handling of race relations, 58 percent in the Fox poll said they disapproved.So, to recap: The lives of over 300 million Americans are being affected by policies foisted on them by a Senate “majority” that represents less than one-fifth of them and a president who was elected with three million fewer votes than his opponent.Meanwhile, even as daily controversy, including federal convictions of his associates, surrounds Trump, the 18 percent represented by the GOP majority in the Senate protects the president from impeachment.What is wrong with this picture?...Trump has normalized many horrible things in our politics: racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption.Future historians may look back and conclude one of the most corrosive things he normalized was minority-posing-as-majority tyranny that cheats the majority of the American people out of their democracy.
