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This is one of the most accurate pieces I've read about the current @GOP. Encourage all to read as we think about how to heal our nation after 1/6. A few additional thoughts: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html
1/ First, the overwhelming majority of Americans are good people who believe in Democracy, rule of law and equality for all. We are a fundamentally good people.
2/ The problem is that we do not have a majoritarian government. But for peculiarities of the electoral college, neither George W Bush nor Donald Trump would be president.
3/ But for the fact that the Senate - by design - represents land rather than people, there would be Democratic Super majorities. I represent more people than live in Wyoming, but WY gets 2 senators + 1 rep and #IL06 only gets me.
4/ And of course, even when the Dems win the Senate, as we just did the filibuster creates a massive block against the will of the majority. The 20 smallest states comprise just 10.2% of the US population. Control them and you control the Senate.
5/ There is no high-minded, wisdom-of-our-founders permanent moral theory of law to justify this. The only reason they exist is because our founders never figured out how to reconcile a representative democracy with the reality of slavery.
6/ This is the central failure of originalism as a theory of Constitutional interpretation, and the central failure of our nation. So long as we refuse to acknowledge and address our original sin, we remain blind to its consequences.
7/ This has not always skewed to the benefit of one party. Look back over our history and while the issues in any election are eerily consistent, the way they combine into a given parties platform varies with time.
8/ But in every election since reconstruction, there has been one party that implicitly or explicitly ran on a platform to suppress the will of the ethnically-diverse majority. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that has been the Republican party.
9/ Trump has of course made that more explicit, but the only reason it has been less obvious in prior elections is because they were cloaked in Constitutionally-created tools of suppression.
10/ There is a reason why democracies that have followed our example have not created anything so ridiculous as the electoral college or the filibuster. And there is no reason for us to keep them.
11/ But to remove them would be partisan so long as the alignment of the political parties consists of one that is broadly majoritarian and one that is a coalition of "gamers and breakers" as @TimothyDSnyder so accurately describes.
12/ That doesn't mean it's a bad thing of course. Partisanship in defense of democracy is no vice. By contrast, bipartisanship in defense of half-measures and soothing, baffling expedients sure is.
13/ But healing from 1/6 will require first a recognition that the majority of our fellow citizens are decent, loving, empathetic champions of democracy, and...
14/ ...second, that so long as we retain a structures of government that were *designed* to give great power to people who's views are at odds with the majority of the people they serve, that American decency will be suppressed. /fin
