Abolish Malapportionment
In the United States, our electoral system is rife with malapportionment. The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Electoral College all give disproportionate voting power to low population parts of the country. In recent decades, this design flaw in the Constitution has been increasingly entrenching minority rule by the Republican party which frequently wins control of the House, the Senate, the presidency, or all three despite losing the popular vote in the relevant elections.
Democrats often talk about adding more states to the union, abolishing the Electoral College, or packing the Supreme Court to balance things out better. While doing that would improve things somewhat, it wouldn't be nearly enough to undo all the structural unfairness that the Constitution burdens us with. For instance, even with four new Democratic states, the Senate would still be biased towards Republicans. To truly get rid of all the malapportionment and to redesign the system so that it can never be exploited to entrench minority rule ever again, we need to enact a series of constitutional amendments enshrining the supremacy of the popular vote across all layers of government.
Of course, amending the Constitution seems like a nonstarter to most voters and elected officials alike since it requires a supermajority of states to ratify any proposed amendment. There aren't nearly enough Democratic states to do that unilaterally and low population states are exceedingly unlikely to ratify amendments which would strip them of their disproportionate power over American politics. But despite how hopeless that sounds, it can actually be done with a simple majority via little-known, unconventional means.
There is a loophole in the Constitution to get amendments ratified with a simple majority that nobody has exploited yet
If Democrats manage to gain control of the House, the Senate, the presidency, and crucially abolish the filibuster first, then their power to admit states to the union with a simple majority is also power to ratify any constitutional amendment they want with a simple majority via an obscure loophole in the Constitution that has never been exploited before: Simply admit Washington D.C. to the union as 150 states instead of one state. Those 150 micro-states would have the power to ratify any constitutional amendment without the consent of even one of the currently existing 50 states.
It may seem like an absurd idea, but there are strong arguments that amending the Constitution this way is both totally legal and morally necessary.
What constitutional amendments should we pass by these means?
- Abolish the Senate and transfer its powers to the House.
- Reform the House into a mixed member proportional system.
- Expand the Supreme Court to 15 members and put on staggered 18 year term limits to undo minority rule on the Supreme Court.
- Abolish the Electoral College and elect presidents by national ranked choice popular vote.
- Alter the constitutional amendment process to require a supermajority of people to ratify amendments rather than states, so this bug in the Constitution can never be exploited again.
- Importantly, do absolutely nothing else; no single payer amendment, no free college amendment, etc. This immense power grab should only be used to undo structural unfairness in elections, not cement a new unfairness of our own.
- Compress the 150 D.C. states back into one after all of this is done. (For the sake of the flag!)
Yes, this proposal is an alarming, norm-breaking power grab and we should do it anyway
If we don't do it first, then the next time the Republicans get a trifecta, they could just as easily go ahead and do it themselves by splitting South Dakota into 150 states some day to cement their minority rule for generations to come. After all, the only reason we even have two Dakotas to begin with is due to Republicans gerrymandering the Senate in the 1880s, so it's not like this is without precedent.
So if this bug exists in the Constitution just sitting there waiting for someone to exploit, then how about we do it first so we can fix the bugs in the electoral system?
How to make this happen
We need to move the Overton window on this proposal from unthinkably radical to mainstream and popular. For now that means sharing this document with as many people as possible and persuading them that it is sensible and necessary. The more people we get to take this idea seriously, the more likely it will be that we can get elected Democrats to take it seriously.