Rather than focusing on personalities and blaming, I think it is more productive to look at the underlying systems that support the unwelcome behaviors.
In considering the Constitution and the lofty goal of “checks and balances,” I think it is worth considering why the United States has devolved into a parliamentary system against the intention of the writers of the Constitution, who specifically rejected that model. With the example of the most democratic government in that age, the British parliament, they did not just reject the king, but chose to try to establish a system that would truly provide the maximum of freedom for the states through limited power authorized for the federal government, and to spread that power to prevent it from falling into the hands of one faction or person. What would truly provide “checks and balances?”
How is it that presidential candidates run on an agenda? Where is it in the Constitution that the president is supposed to be acting like a prime minister as head of a political party to enact legislation? How well is that working? The Constitution provides that the president’s duty is to execute the laws passed by Congress, not make law, and certainly not to rule by “executive orders.” The only authority granted to the president is to oversee the activities of the agencies he is tasked with overseeing, which does not include universities or the press.
The problem, as President Washington feared, is caused because the states have ceded their authority to govern election procedures to political parties, which effectively control the election process. They do this by registering people to vote by political party; by having candidates run by political party in separate primary elections (effectively having the candidates chosen by a minority of the electorate), and restricting candidates in the election to one candidate from each party, then allowing the one with the most votes, even if as little as 26%, to win. Then they allow the parties to control the rules in each house of Congress.
In Elizabeth Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” she mentioned that Thomas Jefferson had a copy of “The Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which to this day still forms the basis for rules and procedures in the House of Representatives.”
I believe the Constitution itself needs amendment to provide for elections that would require that no candidate could win without majority (50%) support. Further, every state should be required to hold an open primary on the same day. Political parties could still decide which candidate to support, and candidates themselves could decide to drop out to enhance the chances of any other candidate of their party. But no candidate would have a party listed next to their name on the ballot, nor would parties be able to target their propaganda to lists of voters of their party, extracted from the state voting lists of registered voters. Voters should not be registered by party nor restricted in how they vote in primary elections.
Then, federal elections should adopt rank-choice counting to ensure that the candidates in the final election were those supported by the most people. I think this method would, in the primary, eliminate the most extreme candidates (those who were hated by the most people) at the outset.
This method would demand of candidates that they speak to all the voters in the primary, not just to those of their own party, and the elimination of the restriction of one candidate for each party in the final ballot would allow the voters more choices, while the ranked-choice counting would ensure that voters would not be throwing their votes away.
The other major change needed to the Constitution is the elimination of the Electoral College, which was written originally to allow states with minority populations greater power. At the time, people did not consider themselves as citizens of the United States but of the state in which they lived. This is no longer the case, so the provision is obsolete. It denies equal value to every vote, a denial of the principle of “one man, one vote.”
Judith Truesdell lives in Greenfield.