When you think it can’t get any crazier in US politics, it gets crazier.
Last week, it was the spectacle of the testimony by Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh and the woman accusing him of sexual assault ~30 years ago when they were teenagers, Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford.
Basically, you’ve got a situation where Republicans, shocked to have won with Trump in the first place, have already placed one illegitimate person on the Supreme Court (if you believe that Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, should have had a fair hearing as is Senate tradition instead of being blocked by Mitch McConnell under the flimsy pretense that it was “an election year“)
When Trump won, the Republicans filled that vacancy with Neil Gorsuch instead of Garland and now, they’re trying to fill another vacancy with someone who, by all appearances, is an entitled, frat boy turned political operative who has failed to show any semblance of fairness or impartiality.
This has led to lots of speculation about what the Democrats might do if they win the House (likely) and Senate (less likely) in just over a month to redress these unfair situations (I’m not an expert on this stuff so I have no idea if any or all of this is possible, if they’d need to control certain levels of say, the Senate, or what the longer-term repercussions might be.) What I do know is there’s a growing sentiment that Democrats have played too nice for far too long and the Republicans continue to crush them because of this.
There are many ideas out there how to fix US politics but some of the most radical ideas I’ve read include:
* codifying a lot of the generally accepted practices so it’s clear how things like filibusters, recess appointments and various other loopholes and exemptions that allow some of these tricks to work (or not work) can be tightened.
* create term limits for Supreme Court Judges instead of making it a lifetime appointment
* create a formula so that every President gets to select a minimum of one new judge during their term even if no one steps down or dies.
* expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court and fill it with more liberal judges
* fix/eliminate the electoral college so situations like 2000 and 2016 where the candidate winning the popular vote still doesn’t become President can’t happen
* give Puerto Rico and Washington DC statehood or at least formal representation so these populous but mostly minority-population American territories have equivalent representation as less populous but mostly caucasian areas like the American Rocky Mountain region of Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1041119772107132929
* Some have proposed splitting larger blue states like California (which has population of ~40 million but as many Senators as Wyoming which has a population of 600,000 into a number of smaller states which would make it easier to govern on the local level but also likely increase the amount of power that blue states have in Washington.
* If worst comes to worst, blue states, mostly along the east and west coast could secede in a horseshoe-shaped country surrounding the red states!
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