I just laugh at the idea of saying RESPECT DEMOCRACY while defending a system where the person with the most votes doesn’t win

Good lols all around

You are looking at in a very narrow way.

The DNC needs to win what's now considered conservative states, which they have just as much of an opportunity as the GOP. It so happens there are more conservative states (more like classical liberal, but that's a different discussion) than progressive. Have the DNC go flip those states in a election. I digress, just cry about how they can't do that and how unfair that is.

Your smart ass remarks don't change this fact. Your argument implicated says the state system is undemocratic, but that's not true. The state system helps check federal overreach. So, no the DNC did not convince many state voters to vote for their candidate, regardless of how many people CA and NY voted for their person.

What you want is populism and a plurality, which is not Democracy.

LOL, a strong and overbearing central government is at the top of the list of any Democratic Republic, is it? Says the same people who think Trump is a dictator.

I don't know, dividing the country into states seems fine. Like other countries have states, providences, prefectures, sub units etc.

You're still avoiding the issue, that the US electoral system favors one party who writes the rules to entrench themselves in power making it less likely that the other party can come into power even when commanding the majority of the voters.

Now you could say that a party should win over a supermajority of voters to rule. That's what you seem to imply by telling Democrats to win over Republicans. Fair enough. But that seems to be undercut by you being perfectly happy with a party commanding a minority of voters ruling. Shouldn't the default be that if you can't get a supermajority of voters then no one rules?

Or it could be a fidelity to procedure, that's the rules we got so we follow them

But that ignores that the rules themselves produce bad outcomes







But you also kind of agree that no one really believes in procedural fairness, Democrats when they're in power will try to entrench themselves and Republicans would do the same. OK fair enough. In extreme though this leads to Carl Schmittian 'winner take all' everything's fair politics where politics is all about taking power and entrenching yourself and making sure political opponents never win by any means necessarily. In the less extreme version you have a game theory problem where one party is constantly defecting (Republicans) and entrenching themselves while trying to assure the other party (Democrats) that the rules are still fair.

That'd be believable if anyone bothered to point to any kind of fairness in the system itself but all we get is talk about winning over people in a frozen hell hole with less population than my city or else. No one believes the system is fair. No one expects Trump to win the popular vote or Republicans to win a majority of voters

No, you actually need to win over independents, and you don't need to win conservative votes, you need to win votes of people from Wyoming, GA, and other "red states" than the other team rather than win more votes in CA and NY. You think because the other team wins these voters they are somehow doing something wrong, or it's unfair. Go change those voters minds. The Republican party did not even exist when the electoral college and constitution was created.

You are ignoring that the state system that favors no one. It's up to the politician to win states. The GOP wins more of those states than the DNC, and it's not becasue of some rule.

Yes, I know WHY they did it.

But you tried to say it was provided for in The Constitution and now you're moving the goalposts. It's not about checking the presidents power here, it's about angle shooting and getting what your donors paid you to get for them.
LOL at the voters btw. Chumps, all of them.

ToxicCult.com

Jerrymandering isn't a rule per se. It's something that you do because the rules allow it.

Also, accepting unlimited political bribes (called donations) is part of the rules.

You pretending the system operates in a manner that gives the voters what they want is adorable though.

First of all, the argument fails, because if you truly meant it, you'd just shrug your shoulders and move on. It's just people voicing an opinion after all, which is of course also just using the system as it is intended.

It fails at a deeper level than that however, in that it implicitly argues: "It's okay, because it's legal". A democracy isn't run on laws, it is run on norms. The most most despicable regimes in the world can have nice shiny laws and impressive looking courtrooms, what they never have are good norms.

We can use an analogy. Say you move to a neighborhood. The neighbors don't like you, because they think you are subhuman and should not be allowed to exist. They'll never break a law, but they will use every possible way they can think of to get you to leave. They'll lie, they'll sue, they'll honk horns, they'll campaign for laws that hurt you, they'll play loud music whenever it is legal, they'll park their cars to inconvenience you, they'll mock your children, speak ill of your wife, post signs in their yard meant to unnerve you and they will never smile to you, talk politely to you or include you in anything.

They too are just using the system and therefore it is okay, right? No, it is not. It is dysfunctional, destructive and ruinous. Barring violent conflict, it is pretty much as far from a good neighborhood you can get. The same is true for this juvenile notion of an "anything goes" democracy. It's not how "it is supposed to be" and it is not okay in the slightest. If anything it is just shrugging your shoulders and enjoying the ride down the slippery slopes.

Not even the guys who created the system thought that. They explicitly said it was to favor some people over others and it does!.

Yes sir

+1

Hahahahhahahahahahaha.

Imagine posting this like you actually expected people to take you seriously.

By the way it's not necessarily bad. Mexico and Argentina both have large central cities and the peripheral providences rightfully complain that they're neglected, because they are. But it's weird to not even acknowledge that there's some balancing act going on here.

Bolded is a bad system.

Italicized is a myth taught in school. USA is not even conceived as a democracy. Certainly is not a democracy.

Seems like you want to have your cake and eat it too. On one hand you're tossing out all these "but them's the rules" arguments, justifying the GOP's repeated escalations because the rules allow them to do it, but on the other you can't stand the GOP looking like villains so you make up a bunch of stuff about how the Dems are responsible for all this by being just as bad, unsupported by any facts.

You can stick to "them's the rules" as your justification if you wish - you are right, those are the rules! - but this "Dems are just as bad" nonsense is looking even more and more silly with each contradictory post you make.

In any case, I'm glad there's no disagreement here that should Dems retake the House + Senate + presidency, they're well within their rights to add several justices to the court should they wish.

I can't believe that this is a sentence that was written. The R's have really got their brainwashing down to a science now. 'We are the real proponents of democracy because we defend you from the majority!'

Well it goes with the second part where it demonstrate republican are for law and orders only when it advantages them ......

For anyone who's curious how we got here, since our ignorant Republican friends haven't been doing much in the way of citing information and simple questions like "what did he do" are attacked as toxic and go unanswered, here is a handy chart. Senate Republicans were, in 2014, placed in the same situation that Senate Democrats were in 2006 - taking control of the Senate for the first time in the final two years of a two-term President. How did they each deal with this newfound power to control the opposing President's judicial appointees?

	GWB	Obama
District court appts. per Congress, first 6 years	68	83
District court appts., final Congress	58	18
Appeals court appts. per Congress, first 6 years	17	18
Appeals court appts., final Congress	10	2

Obama finished with the fewest Court of Appeals appointments of any two-term president dating back to Dwight Eisenhower. Republicans were extremely proud of this.

As is generally the case, both of these things are true:
- them's the rules
- turns out both sides aren't equally bad

Makes sense

Its', you do realize when you say that there are a lot more conservative states, that many of those conservative states you are talking about are just huge swaths of empty land. Wyoming for example has less than 600 thousand people living in a state the size of most countries. In other words, half of the conservative states are as populated as the Sahara desert.

And their very existence is inherently political. The only reason the Dakotas are two separate states with four Senators between them is because Republicans won an election at a favorable time:

(of course, Republicans were the good guys in the late 1800s. How times change!)

And I mentioned it in another thread, but the Supreme Court is only so important and so partisan now because republicans know they can’t pass any of their agenda democratically through Congress. They are an extremist, fringe right wing group that can only get their agenda through via radical reimagining of existing law. Writing new laws explicitly to ban abortion or replace Obamacare is out of the quest because 2/3 of the country disagree with them.

A popular vote will lead to more third party candidates, as it will take away the electoral college and remove the state's influence, and consequently political parties influence on elections. That means who ever wins a plurality, wins the election. There is also no check on populism. Those are two really dangerous things for a democracy, especially when steps are taken to remove check of centralized power, such as the state system. There is a reason why Democrats want to use the popular vote, and it has not based on their thoughts on democracy, but rather entirely becasue it would benefit them because they engage in populsim way more than the classical liberal.

So? The country was founded on a state system with limited and well checked federal government. The individual states are at the bedrock of who our leaders will be, not the national popular vote. The state is important. As with Capitalism, Democracy has its flaws (especially in regards to the central government) that need to be accounted for, which the state system is reasonable at doing. There is also nothing that stops Democrats from selling their ideas and turning those states into Blue states. The state system is not undemocratic.

https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofec...of-government/


It's not impossible for a Democrat to win in November, nor is it even that rare. I guarantee you and everyone else that wants a popular vote would not have an issue with the system if FL and TX went blue every election.


The left is the nut low when it comes to crying about losing an election.

LOL. Tea Party protests, birtherism, and unprecedented Congressional obstruction all say hi. You have the memory of a goldfish.