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The last time the United States had three one-term presidents in a row, the calendar year began with an “18.”
Between Ulysses Grant and William McKinley, America actually had five straight one-term presidencies, including the two nonconsecutive terms of Grover Cleveland.
All of the elections in that period were quite close, and all were essentially about which party could bring the country together and move it forward after the Civil War. And while the divisive issues of that time were different from the divisive issues of this era, the mood and frustration of the country in the late 1800s seem to rhyme with the mood and frustration of the early 2000s.
For instance, the issue of wealth inequality — or simply, the idea that the system is rigged for the wealthy — was a belief back then (think Gilded Age), and it’s certainly a mainstream belief today. There’s a strong argument that we are in a new Gilded Age now, with the enormous wealth being accumulated and created in this period of tech-driven transformation. The gap between the rich and poor has never seemed more vast.
Ultimately, though, that period of political instability and frustration triggered a movement to reform the country’s political system. With the turn of the century came what is now known as the Progressive Era. In a 30-year span, the public demanded more from its government, including things we take for granted today, such as guaranteeing food safety and worker safety. This was when urban areas instituted regular trash pickup, which was then seen as a public health issue. The modern day environmental movement also took hold then, with a focus on preservation and conservation, as well as basic beautification efforts, including building parks and other shared spaces.
On the political side, this era delivered women the right to vote, the direct election of senators and the addition of more rigorous government oversight of the economy, which led to the first big breakup of corporate monopolies.
Some things went too far, like Prohibition (the banning of alcohol), but that was eventually repealed. Also in this era, a new type of journalism began to take hold, one in which accountability of those in power became the priority over and above partisan leanings. In the 19th century, one of the hallmarks of the media was its partisanship — every political party had its own newspaper mouthpiece around the country. That media landscape and mindset began to change in the early 20th century with the rise of so-called “muck-raking” journalism, which aimed to expose the scandalous behavior of many in power.
There’s no question in my mind that the public would like to see a period of true reform and modernization of our public institutions. Given how our politics appears to be repeating (or least rhyming with) the latter part of the 19th century, it’s not too big of a leap to think that just as the inequality and polarization of the Gilded Age triggered the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, that today’s new Gilded Age could give rise to something similar.
A new poll from the FrameWorks Institute — which bills itself as a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that hopes to help “frame the public discourse about social and scientific issues” — brings some clarity to the public’s mood. The group found that more than two-thirds of the country (70%) believe “the system is rigged.”
What was fascinating about the research is that the group intentionally didn’t give any specifics describing “the system” in the question. It simply used that basic framing, “the system,” without picking “corporate, political, cultural” etc.
When the group drilled down, it found that some folks thought the system was rigged “against” racial and ethnic minority groups.” Still others thought the system was rigged against the white working class.
Of course, a poll like this should be seen as an opportunity for a reform-minded politician or political movement. Clearly, there’s a feeling of powerlessness out there which may explain why President-elect Donald Trump’s style of politics is becoming more tolerable to some. Some of his voters may not like his personal character or personal motivation for power and wealth, but they do see him as an agent of disruption. At a minimum, simply disrupting the “rigged system” is preferable to many voters over trying to slowly reform the system from the inside, which was the basic argument the Biden-Harris team made over the last four years.
So what could a new reform movement look like? What issues could be tackled to give the public a renewed sense of confidence that public institutions are actually looking out for everyday people rather than the wealthy and most powerful?
As the year draws to a close, I thought this would be a good time to lay out a few ideas I have that, if instituted, could help restore confidence in various public institutions — be it the media, the judiciary or the government as a whole, from the local level to states to federal. This is by no means a comprehensive list of potential reforms that could restore the public’s faith in our society, but any one of them being implemented would lead to incremental improvement.
And what we learned from the initial Progressive era of the late 1800s through the 1920s is that a lot of small reforms can lead to big change. None of these ideas should be seen as “partisan,” though I’m sure folks on both sides of the aisle will view one or more of these ideas as somehow a threat to their hold on power. Hopefully, many of you see these ideas as a threat to both parties’ hold on power!
One of the great shifts of the last 30 years has been the nationalization of our politics. The old Tip O’Neill axiom that all politics is local isn’t true anymore, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be true.
We used to cover Washington and government as a whole through a “local prism.” There was a time that any news organization with a circulation or audience of 50,000 or more had a presence in Washington, where the focus of that individual journalist was solely only on how decisions in the nation’s capital impacted that local community.
That disappeared in the internet era. Now, Washington bureaus are basically a relic of the past, as most local news operations end up using syndicated national content to inform their local readers or viewers about what’s happening.
And that’s if there is a local news outlet at all. For many communities, Washington news only comes via national publications. There’s no specific local angle that gets covered when a major new piece of legislation gets passed. That leads folks to think nothing’s actually happening in Washington that impacts them personally or locally and that, in turn, leads to the growing belief that Washington is focused on the players in Washington and not on the rest of the country.
This also becomes self-fulfilling: The more nationalized our political coverage gets, the more nationalized our public officials become. Instead of focusing on what their own communities need, they gravitate toward the issues that get them media coverage. If our media were more grounded locally than nationally (as it once was), I promise you our politicians would care more about how their decisions impact locally.
Coinciding with the rise of polarization has been the rise of the “no party” voters.
Voter disillusionment with the two major parties over the last 25 years has translated to a growing number of Americans deciding to register as independent or unaffiliated. But the unintended consequence of this phenomenon has been something of a self-purge of moderates/centrists from both major parties. Now, the most partisan Democrats and Republicans dominate the primary process to select party nominees, leading to more polarized general elections and leaving moderates to decide which party they like the least.
If our primaries were more open to all registered voters, there would be more elected officials worried about more than one constituency in order to win re-election. Instead of only worrying about the right or the left flanks, you’d have more elected officials concerned about appealing to the growing middle and growing independent class of voters in order to survive re-election.
If you want a more reflective member of Congress, you have to create a more diverse and reflective primary electorate. The current system homogenizes the primary electorates and leaves large swaths of the country feeling unrepresented by either party.
When the founders split the legislative branch into the House and the Senate, they believed the House would be the institution that’s closest to the people. In order to fulfill that goal, House seats were apportioned based on population. In 1792, the ratio was one House seat for every 33,000 residents. Based on the 1790 census count of approximately 3.9 million people, that created a House with 105 seats. (Yes, the exact math suggests at first glance that there should have been 111 seats — but there’s always been some wiggle room as state populations are either rounded up or down to determine their final number of House districts.)
Over time, the size of the House itself continued to increase with the size of the country. In 1810, the ratio grew to one House member for every 35,000 residents (181 seats); by 1880, the size of the House was 325 seats with, approximately one seat per 150,000 residents.
The government stopped expanding the House after the 1930 census. The initial ratio for the first 435-member House was approximately 1 member per 280,000 residents, based on a census count of just more than 123 million.
Now, we have the same 435 House seats — but a national population (approximately 335 million) that’s almost three times what it was in 1930. That translates to approximately one representative for every 770,000 residents.
This makes every congressional district the equivalent of one of the 20 largest cities in America if compared to the populations of cities. Is that any way to have a representative democracy? It’s hard for one mayor to represent the diverse viewpoints of any one city, let alone a member of Congress who the founders truly believed would be representative of their community.
Currently, the population of the 50th largest city in America is just under 400,000 (Arlington, Texas). That’s probably a fairly decent ratio to divvy up the House. Using that ratio, the House would need to nearly double to 837 members. And while that may sound unwieldy, it would bring representatives to Washington who would be more directly representative of their actual communities.
An expansion along those lines could have a few other unintended consequences, including less need to gerrymander (communities would be easier to keep together under this plan) and making room in Congress for more diverse political ideologies (at 837, I promise you, there would be a lot more independent and third-party officeholders).
And significantly, an expansion of the House would create an electoral map for presidential elections that’s fairer and more representative of the popular will of the country, without having to change the Constitution to scrap the Electoral College itself.
The increase in the size of the House would increase the size of each state’s electoral vote counts. For instance, in the current makeup, a presidential voter in Wyoming has almost four times more electoral vote power than a presidential voter in California. (It’s one electoral vote per 721,000 California residents versus one electoral vote per 194,000 Wyoming residents.)
If we expanded the House to make sure we had one representative per 400,000 residents, California’s electoral vote total would be 99, giving its voters one electoral vote for every 393,000 residents. As for Wyoming, with its population of just under 600,000, it would likely still have only one House member, keeping its electoral vote power at one per 194,000 residents. While that’s still an advantage for the Wyoming voter, it’s not nearly the same advantage as they currently have.
There are a few other ideas that I’d like to see tackled, which could definitely make government more transparent, more accountable and more responsive to a changing country.
I’ve written about this before, but if you read the Federalist Papers, specifically Alexander Hamilton’s description of what a fair judicial system would look like, it’s clear the founders wanted judges akin to umpires in baseball — there to simply call balls and strikes on the Constitution. It’s painfully obvious that today’s federal judges “wear” red or blue robes more often than the more neutral mindset of a judge in a black robe.
How could we institute a fairer judiciary? I don’t think it’s that difficult. But it would take a radically new way of thinking about the judiciary. Raise the threshold for confirmation to three-quarters of the Senate, or 75 votes, period. No carve-outs, no filibusters — if a judicial nominee can’t get 75 votes, then they can’t sit on any bench.
A threshold that high would mean presidents would look for a different set of candidates to preside on the bench. You’d still have conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court and other courts, but they would be the kind of conservatives and liberals who demonstrated to the other side that they could leave their politics at the door before they walked in.
If you wanted to tier the confirmation process to 60 for district judges, 67 (two-thirds) for circuit judges and 75 for Supreme Court nominees, that would still be an improvement. But what doesn’t work is 50-plus-one for lifetime appointments to our judiciary. This is among the many reasons why folks are losing their faith that the judicial system is fair.
One of the things government rarely does is contract. And one of the reasons is that we rarely re-examine whether an agency or Cabinet department is relevant for the current challenges of the moment. More often than not, we try and retrofit an old regulatory model to handle a new problem.
Take crypto. Should it be treated as a security or a commodity? Is it a good or a financial instrument? Should the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulate it?
Well, what if Congress could reimagine both agencies through the prism of today’s challenges? Instead of trying to retrofit crypto into either agency, maybe we should make sure today’s financial and trading regulators have congressional mandates that match the challenges. Could these two agencies be combined? Should their mandates change? If there was a forced sunset of, say, the SEC every 25 years (or once every generation), it would force Congress to review what the agency was initially designed to handle and what this agency needs to be able to do going forward.
Of course, you wouldn’t want every agency expiring the same Congress. But forcing a review of one or two major departments or agencies every Congress to see if the initial congressional mandates were being met — and whether those bodies needed expansion or contraction going forward — would allow government to be more nimble addressing the needs of the moment while also being, potentially, more fiscally prudent.
Trying to create a commission like Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” might help identify areas to focus on, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to make any real change because the power of the purse lies with Congress. And Congress doesn’t do anything voluntarily, which is why creating automatic sunset clauses would force the issue of examining government efficiency on a more regular basis.
One of the Founding Fathers’ odder decisions was not only to include the pardon power in the Constitution but to have it lie in the hands of one person.
For a group of folks concerned about the autocratic ways of the British monarchy, it’s actually odd that the pardon power was given to simply one person. It should have always been something that was done by a group. No single individual in a representative democracy should have the authority to decide if someone is incarcerated or not.
While there have been many wrongs righted by presidential pardons (or gubernatorial pardons), there has also been a lot of graft associated with pardons. It’s the ultimate tool of the elite and usually only accessible to someone if you have enough money to hire the right lawyers or happen to know someone with access to power. We could reform the Constitution to create a pardon board including the likes of: four members of Congress (the chairs and ranking members of the two Judiciary committees), two members of the executive branch (say, the attorney general and the secretary of state) and the three newest members of the Supreme Court. The nine-member parole board would then decide who gets pardons.
These ideas are just a start, but if the public’s broad goal is to reform government so that people believe society is less rigged, any of these provisions, if enacted, would make incremental improvement. And only one of these ideas would need to be done via constitutional amendment (the creation of a pardon commission). Everything else is more directly in our hands: we can demand and support a more localized media, we can demand and support a more open primary process, we can demand and support a change in how we pick our judges, and we can demand and support a more representative Congress.
All of this would give us the tools the country needs to create a less rigged society which, ultimately, is the goal of a representative democracy.
Chuck Todd is NBC News’ chief political analyst and the former moderator of “Meet The Press.”
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