Sounds somewhat like the statewide party lists used to elect half of the congress in Germany - the other half being elected by majority vote in each district.
RE my own suggestion for PR/MMD... I've been trying to reconcile our presidential constitution with a more multiparty-compatible method of coalition building, and I've finally figured out the last piece of the puzzle.
Start with expanding the House, instituting PR through STV with MMD. Over in the Senate, after admitting DC, PR and Guam/USVI/whoever else (and/or gerrymandering California and NYS), you can't do much else BUT require RCV, which'll have to do.
That leaves the EC. How in the WORLD do you make sure that a President actually emerges from some sort of coalitional negotiation? Most parliaments' PM is basically the equivalent of our Speaker of the House on steroids, and if they have a separately elected president, they're usually very weak and irrelevant.
Well, first of all, we'd obviously proportionalize the EC to mirror what we've just done to the House. Duh, right? I'd also make the EC's own election RCV, and I'd invite them all to DC as part of an "Electoral Convention" (with the obvious Designated Survivor rules in place, one for each state).
The big lynchpin is, you make it so that *Every Elector Is A Presidential Candidate*. Whether you make it statutory, or constitutional, or whatever, you make it so that every Elector and ONLY Electors are eligible to win. This gives us [535 + expansion of House] candidates, and yes, most of them will obviously not win. But what this does is it (1) forces them to win back in their own home district, (2) forces the other chambers to actually take an interest in the EC's coalitional negotiations, and (3) incentivizes Electors to actually run as presidential candidates, instead of party hacks.
The bonus is that it helps deal with incumbency problems without resorting to the brute idiocy of term limits: If you're an ambitious back-bencher or Senator alike, you actually have to sit out a cycle in order to run! Every Senator might see a future President in the mirror, but how many are willing to give up the next 6 years if they lose?
I know it's crazy, but it strikes me as one of the few ways that we could make this work without having to do some amendments that the normal partisans would object to. The sheer public drama of winnowing down 600+ candidates would also be nicely suited to our reality-TV-addicted culture.
Can't we shift the focus of governance from the federal govt to the States? This shift would reduce authoritarianism and increase government responsiveness.
States are where democracy was supposed to flourish. The federal government wasn’t designed to be responsive, it was designed to provide for the common good (and not the will of the people, which is the responsibility of the states).
It just seems like we are re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic with all these notions if we aren’t addressing the elephant in the room - the federal government can’t simultaneously serve the country’s interests and the people’s interests. This leads to dysfunction in any organization whenever an executive suite tries to be all things to all people.
Sounds somewhat like the statewide party lists used to elect half of the congress in Germany - the other half being elected by majority vote in each district.
RE my own suggestion for PR/MMD... I've been trying to reconcile our presidential constitution with a more multiparty-compatible method of coalition building, and I've finally figured out the last piece of the puzzle.
Start with expanding the House, instituting PR through STV with MMD. Over in the Senate, after admitting DC, PR and Guam/USVI/whoever else (and/or gerrymandering California and NYS), you can't do much else BUT require RCV, which'll have to do.
That leaves the EC. How in the WORLD do you make sure that a President actually emerges from some sort of coalitional negotiation? Most parliaments' PM is basically the equivalent of our Speaker of the House on steroids, and if they have a separately elected president, they're usually very weak and irrelevant.
Well, first of all, we'd obviously proportionalize the EC to mirror what we've just done to the House. Duh, right? I'd also make the EC's own election RCV, and I'd invite them all to DC as part of an "Electoral Convention" (with the obvious Designated Survivor rules in place, one for each state).
The big lynchpin is, you make it so that *Every Elector Is A Presidential Candidate*. Whether you make it statutory, or constitutional, or whatever, you make it so that every Elector and ONLY Electors are eligible to win. This gives us [535 + expansion of House] candidates, and yes, most of them will obviously not win. But what this does is it (1) forces them to win back in their own home district, (2) forces the other chambers to actually take an interest in the EC's coalitional negotiations, and (3) incentivizes Electors to actually run as presidential candidates, instead of party hacks.
The bonus is that it helps deal with incumbency problems without resorting to the brute idiocy of term limits: If you're an ambitious back-bencher or Senator alike, you actually have to sit out a cycle in order to run! Every Senator might see a future President in the mirror, but how many are willing to give up the next 6 years if they lose?
I know it's crazy, but it strikes me as one of the few ways that we could make this work without having to do some amendments that the normal partisans would object to. The sheer public drama of winnowing down 600+ candidates would also be nicely suited to our reality-TV-addicted culture.
I definitely think there's something to the fact that the EC was more or less designed as a decision-making body...
Can't we shift the focus of governance from the federal govt to the States? This shift would reduce authoritarianism and increase government responsiveness.
States are where democracy was supposed to flourish. The federal government wasn’t designed to be responsive, it was designed to provide for the common good (and not the will of the people, which is the responsibility of the states).
It just seems like we are re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic with all these notions if we aren’t addressing the elephant in the room - the federal government can’t simultaneously serve the country’s interests and the people’s interests. This leads to dysfunction in any organization whenever an executive suite tries to be all things to all people.