Sometimes, the only realists are the dreamers.
—SENATOR PAUL WELLSTONE
I have gone from the fetal position to a determined advocate for democracy, the rule of law, and the protection of values and principles upon which this country was founded.
—LAUREN LISI, Indivisible Fighting 9 (Michigan)
In 1977, Jimmy Carter entered the White House on the heels of one of the most disastrous periods in American political history. President Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace after a series of investigations into his abuse of power to undermine his rivals. Vice President Agnew had been forced to resign to avoid federal prison time after evidence surfaced that he had taken bribes and kickbacks while in office. Both men responded to threats by lying, attacking the press, and pursuing a racist political strategy to rally white Americans and conservative Republicans to protect the president. The nation had been rocked by undeniable evidence that the administration had been routinely lying to them. Trust in government was at an all-time low.
The Democratic Party of 1977 had a historic veto-proof majority in the House of Representatives and a big majority in the Senate, too, courtesy of a 1974 blue wave midterm election. The year of Carter’s election was the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the spirit of reform was in the air. In his inaugural address, the new president acknowledged the challenges facing the bullied, battered, and divided nation, but he did not linger there. Instead he looked optimistically to the future:
I believe America can be better. We can be even stronger than before.
Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our Nation, for we know that if we despise our own government, we have no future. We recall in special times when we have stood briefly, but magnificently, united. In those times no prize was beyond our grasp.
A few weeks later, Carter unveiled his plan to reach for a very big prize: a set of bold pro-democracy policies that the New York Times called “one of the broadest political reform packages ever submitted by a modern President.” The package proposed universal same-day voter registration, public financing of elections, election security provisions, even a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College. Its aim was simple: to restore the public trust, reform American democracy, and make it more responsive to and reflective of the will of the people.1
The Heritage Foundation—a newly formed pro-business, conservative-Christian think tank—went on the attack. The Heritage Foundation declared it a mistake to “take for granted that it is desirable to increase the number of people who vote.”2 In a policy brief released shortly after Carter’s announcement, the Heritage Foundation picked apart the democracy proposal piece by piece, vigorously opposing every provision. The chair of the Republican National Committee denounced the package as a Democratic “power grab.”
The die was cast. Republican senators rallied against the public-financing portion of the proposal, filibustered it in the Senate, and killed it. None of the other pieces of the democracy reform package got a vote. Democracy reform in the post-Nixon era was dead.
Fast-forward four decades to early 2019. President Trump was embroiled in an investigation into corruption throughout his administration and campaign. He was attacking the press and going on racist tirades, seeking to rally white Americans and conservative Republicans to his defense. His bigotry, corruption, and nonstop aura of chaos had just been repudiated in a historic blue wave midterm election ushering Democrats into power in the House. A spirit of reform was in the air.
The new Democratic House majority came out swinging with the For the People Act, denoted as “H.R. 1” to signify that it was the first bill of the new Congress and thus their top priority. The package included bold proposals to make American democracy more responsive and reflective of the will of the people: automatic voter registration, public financing of elections, anti-gerrymandering reforms, election security provisions. The media called it “a sweeping anti-corruption proposal,” “a broad political overhaul,” and “the Biggest Voting-Rights Bill to Appear in Congress Since the Civil Rights Movement.”
You can probably guess what happened next. The Heritage Foundation went on the attack with a policy brief arguing that the proposed legislation was “unnecessary, unwise, and unconstitutional,” and that maintaining the status quo was the only option “for protecting our liberty and freedom.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, wrote an op-ed picking apart the proposal piece by piece and promising to oppose the bill at all costs. He labeled it a Democratic “power grab.”
The die was cast. The first hearing on the package devolved into a partisan fight, with the New York Times describing Republican committee members as “vociferous in their condemnation and occasionally inflammatory in their language.” McConnell would block the bill from even getting a vote in the Senate. Democracy reform was dead without Trump ever even touching the bill.
History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
So what can we learn from this? Let’s say Indivisibles across the country do everything described in the previous three chapters. Let’s imagine Democrats are wildly successful in 2020, winning the House, the Senate, and the presidency. In this best-of-all-worlds scenario, we know what will happen next. On January 3, 2021, the Democratic Speaker of the House will gavel in the 117th Congress. On January 20, the new president will give a soaring inaugural address on the promise of America’s future and her plans for reform.
Congressional Democrats will propose something like the For the People Act: pro-democracy reforms to make the government more responsive to the people’s will. This legislation will include small-dollar donor matches to balance out big money, and big reforms to tackle voting rights, ethics, and election security. They’ll also propose social and economic policies to take on the big issues of the day: the existential threat of climate change; the tragedy of our deficient health care system; the cruelty of our immigration system; the heartlessness of our criminal justice system; the scourge of gun violence; the historical embarrassment of growing inequality and stagnating economic opportunity; the viselike grip of concentrated wealth and political power.
We’ve got a lot to do.
All of these bills will be introduced with great fanfare and promise. And then Republican politicians and Fox News will kick into gear. They’ll brand these policies as a mix of socialism and power grabs. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—or whichever Koch-funded apparatchik succeeds him—will use the filibuster to kill the democracy agenda in its entirety and to block any other significant progressive change. Democrats will struggle to pass marginal economic policies through the budget process (which is not subject to the filibuster), but any bold reforms will be dead on arrival. A frustrated American public will punish do-nothing Democrats with a rout in the 2022 midterms. The cycle of dysfunction and gridlock will ratchet up another notch, and our democracy will continue its slow collapse.
The backlash to the short and dramatic Trump era may well produce a unified Democratic federal government in 2021. But the national fervor behind this backlash will fade—and the reactionaries aren’t going anywhere. Their donors are still their donors. Their base is still their base. The anti-democratic fortress they have built over the past several decades will stand regardless of the outcome of the 2020 elections. The same institutions that sank a post-Nixon pro-democracy platform will sink a post-Trump pro-democracy platform.
The 2020 blue wave will crash on the shores of our jagged and decrepit democratic institutions—a more terrifyingly effective wall than Trump could ever hope to build.
If we fail to reform our system in 2021, we may not have another chance. The demographic bias of the Senate toward conservative and white voters is accelerating. If we fail to change course, the Senate will slip out of our hands for good, permanently frustrating efforts to reform our democratic system or drive progressive change.
At that point, we’re looking at a future of either conservative control or divided government. Reactionaries will steadily consolidate their political advantages, using their power to gerrymander districts, further destroy unions, suppress voters, and pack the courts. Our societal problems—climate change, inequality, health care, and more—will get catastrophically worse, while government does nothing.
Does that sound like the future you want? Probably not. So how can we avoid it?
We can’t keep playing the same game and expect different results. We have to change the rules to put power in the hands of the people. And we have to do it on day one.
The very legitimacy of our democracy comes from the people, and every piece of the plan in this chapter is designed with that basic political fact in mind. This is a blueprint for democratizing America—for reforming our aging, outmoded institutions so that they actually reflect the will of the people. All the people.
Indivisible isn’t a think tank, and this isn’t a policy white paper. But we do have a clear vision of the reforms needed.3 We didn’t cook up these ideas ourselves. We relied on leading political scientists, advocates, and experts in American democracy and institutional reform. And we talked to local Indivisible group leaders across the country about the failure of these institutions, and the kinds of change we need.
We asked a simple question: What can we do to change the rules to make democracy more inclusive, representative, and functional?
We’ve got some ground rules about what’s included. First, everything you read below can be enacted via legislation. That means Congress could pass every part of it with simple majorities. And the entirety of this blueprint could be on the president’s desk on the first day of her administration in 2021.
We’ve reluctantly (but purposefully) excluded any reform that would require a constitutional amendment. Constitutional amendments have to be approved by three-quarters of state legislatures. To even get an amendment proposed, you need two-thirds of the House and Senate on board.4 And given the current political climate, we are not remotely close to that being an option.
This is a real constraint. Some of the fundamental flaws of a presidential system with polarized parties that we outlined in Chapter 1 cannot be fixed through mere legislation. We can’t institute a parliamentary system. We can’t abolish the Senate. We can’t reverse the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and Buckley v. Valeo to directly force money out of politics. All of these reforms would require constitutional amendments. But our democratic house is on fire now. We have to put out the fire, using the tools we’ve got, before we can talk about major renovations.
With that constraint in mind, we’re still going to go big in this blueprint.
Every proposal we cover below is realistic in the sense that it could be passed into law in 2021. Not every proposal we cover is realistic in the sense that it’s got a lot of political support right this minute. In fact, some of these ideas are barely even on the national political radar. We’re offering them up not because we believe that Congress is ready to act on these reforms but because we believe we should be thinking about answers that are actually as big as our problems.
In short, if we have the presidency, the House, and the Senate in 2021, the only thing that stops anything below from becoming law is political will. And that’s something we can build. That’s why this is a day one democracy agenda.
The policies won’t be implemented unless people demand them, so we aim to equip you with what you need to make those demands effectively. For each of the reforms we discuss, we lay out three pieces of information. First, we describe the problem: why an institution is faltering and the impact of that failure on American society. Second, we review the solutions: reforms demonstrated in American history, through existing local and state reforms, or in other industrialized democracies. Third, we discuss what the naysayers say—and why they’re wrong.
For those of you in a rush, here’s the CliffsNotes version:
While none of these reforms would require more than a simple act of Congress, that doesn’t mean they’re light lifts. Each requires upending the status quo, and most or all will be opposed by entrenched politicians of both parties. But if we’re going to build a truly representative democracy in America, this is how we start.
Before we get into the specifics of the democracy blueprint, we have to make things a little more complicated. Because if it were as simple as jamming these reforms through in one fell swoop, it’d just be too easy.5
The tricky part about the current moment is that we’re already in a fairly advanced stage of democratic breakdown. The modern Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to democracy and to democratic norms. And in a two-party system, that makes a democracy reform agenda—which ought to be bipartisan—much, much harder.
In How Democracies Die, a pair of Harvard political scientists give a historical, international lesson on how democracies, well, die. Reviewing democratic breakdowns in Latin America and elsewhere, the authors identify pillars of functioning democracies. The one we want to focus on is the idea of “forbearance”—or what non–political scientists might call “restraint.”6 This is the idea that political parties don’t run around changing the rules when they get into power. They respect the rule of law and political norms, even when they don’t have to.7 They’ve got a good reason to do so: one day in the future, they’ll be out of power, and they want the other party to do the same. Forbearance is basically the golden rule—do unto others—but for political parties.
It’s pretty clear that Republican elites today have abandoned forbearance in favor of court packing, voter suppression, and wanton power grabs.8 But responding to this is a real challenge for those of us trying to save democracy, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because the Republicans are blowing up the rules to entrench their own power doesn’t mean Democrats can blow up some other rules to entrench their power. If we engage in a tit-for-tat campaign against conservative forces, the cycle of norm breaking will continue to escalate. The forbearance pillar will collapse.
That, political scientists will tell you, is when the whole system breaks down, sending democracy into its death throes.
We face a real conundrum. We desperately need nonpartisan pro-democracy reforms to make our government responsive to the people’s will. But when one party has abandoned its commitment to democracy, any reform effort inherently looks partisan.
So how do we advance democratic reforms that should be nonpartisan in an era when only one party is into that? It’s not enough for us to push through this democracy blueprint. We have to advocate for it carefully and judiciously, in a way that is as nonpartisan and small-d democratic as possible.
This is why building independent, progressive political power for this effort is crucial. This can’t be about putting power in the hands of Democrats. This has to be about putting power in the hands of the people. Indivisible is not an arm of the Democratic Party, and the reforms we’re calling for here would pose threats to both the Democratic and Republican establishment. We aim to democratize, not Democratize.
Yes, the word “filibuster” is ridiculous. It’s a silly name—and it’s also a very big problem. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that none of the reforms in the rest of this blueprint will be possible if we don’t first get rid of the filibuster.
But what is it? The filibuster is a Senate procedural loophole that allows any senator to keep debate open on a bill until the Senate votes to end debate. Under the current rules, ending debate requires 60 votes instead of a simple majority. If you don’t have 60 votes, you can’t move to voting. That means if your party is in the Senate minority, you don’t need 51 votes to vote a bill down; you need just 41 to prevent it from ever getting a vote.
The practical result—in an era when both sides are playing legislative hardball—is that in order to pass just about anything, you need to get 60 votes on your side first.
The filibuster has acquired an odd status as an iconic feature of American democracy. You might remember it fondly from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1930s Jimmy Stewart film that showed a heroic young senator taking a dramatic stand against a corrupt establishment through a marathon speech. It’s a nice old movie—and a wildly inaccurate representation of both how the filibuster works in practice and its actual role in American democracy.
In practice, there aren’t really “talking filibusters” full of dramatic speeches anymore. In a talking filibuster, someone actually holds the floor and talks while the rest of the Senate waits patiently for them to shut up so that a vote can be taken. The thing is, the Senate is full of old people and they don’t like pulling all-nighters, so, in practice, the mere threat of a filibuster is usually enough to kill legislation.
The history of the filibuster is also much murkier than you might imagine. It’s often represented as part of the Founders’ vision for the Senate’s role as a slower and more deliberative body. This is totally ahistorical: the filibuster is actually a fluke. The Senate was originally intended to be a majoritarian institution; a simple majority vote was supposed to allow business to move forward. The filibuster loophole was unintentionally created when Aaron Burr succeeded in eliminating the Senate rule that allowed debate to be cut off with a simple majority vote in the early 1800s.9 This created an unintended consequence: technically, a senator could now speak indefinitely if he wanted to prevent Senate business from moving forward. But Burr and the other senators had no idea that they had created this loophole, and they would all be long gone before it was ever exploited.
It would be more than thirty years after the filibuster first came into existence that someone actually used the loophole to “filibuster” legislation. Even then, filibusters were rare. Filibuster use didn’t really pick up until after the Civil War, when segregationists discovered that they could use it to slam Senate business to a halt whenever anyone tried to move civil rights legislation. In 1890, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge proposed a bill to establish federal oversight to protect the voting rights of newly enfranchised Black Americans. It passed the House, but Southern senators filibustered it. And they kept filibustering all types of civil and voting rights bills for decades. That’s right, decades. The basic idea behind the 1890 bill—federal protection against anti-Black, antidemocratic Southern voter suppression—wasn’t enacted until seventy-five years later, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.
Of course, no one ever made a movie featuring Jimmy Stewart dramatically holding the floor to block anti-lynching legislation. But that would have been a more historically accurate representation of the filibuster.
As the parties became more polarized, the filibuster morphed from a surgical tool to kill civil rights (and some other legislation) to a sledgehammer used to kill everything. The numbers tell the story of how things have changed: during Lyndon Johnson’s legislative heyday, from 1965 to 1967, there were seven motions to end a filibuster. During the height of Obama’s legislative success, from 2009 to 2011, there were 137.
But there’s a big caveat: it’s not standard operating procedure for everything. The filibuster doesn’t apply to giant tax cuts for corporations and rich people; changes to the rules in the 1970s allowed for budgets to move without the filibuster. That’s how George W. Bush passed the most regressive and largest tax cuts in history. And that’s how Trump did it too. The filibuster also doesn’t apply to confirming Supreme Court justices anymore, either: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell amended it to give Trump two new justices.
The things the filibuster now blocks are non-budget legislative proposals—i.e., all the democracy reforms discussed in this chapter, plus the Green New Deal, labor reforms, gun violence prevention, immigration reform, abortion rights, and just about any of the big twenty-first-century social and economic policies the rest of the modern industrialized world implemented long ago.
So if you’ve ever wondered, Why is super-popular legislation never getting voted on in Congress?—here’s an answer: we have a Senate in which 11 percent of the country’s population, spread across twenty-one disproportionately rural and conservative states, can prevent a vote from ever taking place. And not only can they—it’s become standard operating procedure.
Perhaps you’re wondering whether other countries have a similar legislative brake. We’re glad you asked! Through painstaking research, we’ve compiled an exhaustive list of modern democracies that give veto power over popular legislation to 11 percent of the population:
Of course no other modern democracy allows for such blatant tyranny of the minority. Imagine a system in which ten friends are deciding where to go to dinner. Nine agree on Olive Garden, but one says he’s not hungry, so the group decides to starve themselves instead. This is the U.S. Senate in the twenty-first century. Nobody’s getting any breadsticks.
Reforming the filibuster is one of the least radical positions discussed in this chapter. Don’t take it from us; take it from Barack Obama. Reflecting on his own presidency in 2018, Obama said, “Adding the filibuster… has made it almost impossible for us to effectively govern at a time when you have at least one party that is not willing to compromise on issues.” Obama is far from alone. A host of liberals, centrists, and even one or two conservatives have noted that much of our political dysfunction is fostered by the filibuster.
The good news is that technically speaking, axing the filibuster couldn’t be easier. Since the filibuster isn’t anywhere in the Constitution, there’s nothing to prevent the Senate from going into work tomorrow and killing it with a simple majority vote.
Most likely here’s the way this will actually go down: The 2021 version of the For the People Act—or some other package of democracy reforms—will first pass the House. Then that legislation will be sent to the new Democratic Senate. After a round of hearings and amendments, the new Democratic Senate majority leader will call it to be brought to the floor for a vote. Mitch McConnell or his replacement Senate minority leader will then promise to filibuster this “Democratic power grab.” At that point the Democratic Senate will face a choice. They can allow McConnell and his allies to kill democracy reform, or they can hold a simple majority vote to eliminate the filibuster and then pass the reforms. This choice should be a no-brainer.
Short of entirely eliminating the filibuster, there are other potential half measures to reform (lowering the filibuster threshold to fifty-five, for instance). But they don’t solve the basic problem: the Senate minority, representing a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, is strangling progress. So the real solution to the filibuster is pretty darn straightforward: ax the filibuster, enact your pro-democracy reforms, have a drink, and keep moving.
There are well-meaning naysayers when it comes to axing the filibuster, and it’s worth taking their concerns seriously. Progressive filibuster defenders have a real concern: What happens when the other side gets a Senate majority? If we ax the filibuster in 2021, won’t future McConnells use their slim majorities to enact their regressive agenda of tax cuts, Federalist Society judges, gutting abortion rights, and radical cuts to the social safety net?
There are two reasons we don’t find this concern persuasive.
First, practically speaking, we’ve already lost that fight. For the things Senate Republicans care about the most—judges and tax cuts—the filibuster is already gone. The current McConnell got rid of the filibuster when it stood between him and a Republican-controlled Supreme Court. We’ve seen again and again that McConnell and Senate Republicans do not let procedural barriers stop them from achieving their goals. If they need to fully eliminate the filibuster at some point in the future, they’ll do it. Nothing about their behavior over the past few years suggests otherwise.10
But second, and more important, there’s an imbalance here between conservatives and progressives. Gridlock is just better for conservatives. It reinforces their fundamental message that government doesn’t work and won’t help you. Progressives, on the other hand, are inherently not content with the status quo. We need government to do better, to take on the existential crises we’re facing. We win when government delivers real change. That means, over time, the ability to pass major legislation is much more important to us than it is to conservatives.
That doesn’t mean we should have just blind faith that everything will work out. To minimize the potential harm a future reactionary government might do, the first legislation in a post-filibuster world ought to be the type of pro-democracy reforms discussed in the rest of this chapter. By making our democracy more representative and functional, we preemptively protect against future reactionary power grabs. The cure for government dysfunction is more democracy, not less.
The Senate in its current form is an existential threat to democracy. It’s profoundly unrepresentative and dangerously ill-adapted to the current era. It’s where progressive policy goes to die.
We know we just went from zero to sixty in one short paragraph, so let’s back up a bit. The Senate has two big problems: a math problem and a racism problem.
The first big problem with the Senate comes down to basic math: the two-senators-per-state rule. It may surprise you to hear how controversial this was when the Constitution was written. Many of our leading Founding Fathers hated the idea of an equal number of senators per state. Alexander Hamilton wrote grumpily about Rhode Island’s and Delaware’s demands for equal representation: “Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina.”11 James Madison and George Washington also hated the plan, but they agreed to it because small-population states refused to join the union without it. “They forced themselves to pay what they knew was a corrupt and immoral price in order to get a barely acceptable deal…,” Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker. But, hey, we got a Constitution out of the deal.
It’s hard to believe the Founders would have accepted the same deal today. At the time of Hamilton’s frustration, Virginia, the largest state, had a population about twelve times the size of Delaware, the smallest state. Today, California is nearly seventy times the size of Wyoming. Seventy times. California’s population today is larger than the combined population of the twenty-one smallest states. So Californians get two senators, while the smaller number of residents of those other states get forty-two senators.
This baked-in inequality—surprise!—benefits conservatives. Cook Political Report calculates that there are more Republican-leaning states than Democratic-leaning states. Does this mean it’s impossible for Democrats to get a majority in the Senate? No. “Democratic” states go for Republican senators and “Republican” states go for Democratic senators all the time. But it does mean the Senate is structurally imbalanced in ways that favor one party over the other.
If you think the Senate is crazily antidemocratic (and anti-Democratic) now, hold on to your hat. Demographically, progressives are increasingly clumping in a smaller number of states. In 2040, half the population will live in just eight states. That means half the population will have sixteen senators, and the other half will have eighty-four senators. As Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times, “Republicans are on the verge of a durable structural advantage” that will give near-permanent control of the Senate to a Republican coalition of “rural whites, exurban whites and anti-tax suburbanites.”
The second big problem with the Senate is that even within this basic framework of being wildly unrepresentative, it’s also extra-racist, because part of the reason that the Senate is so unrepresentative right now is that a lot of Americans, predominantly people of color, don’t have any Senate representation at all.
Washington, D.C., has a population larger than two existing U.S. states, and its residents pay more in federal taxes than residents in twenty-two other states, but it has no representation in the Senate. Puerto Rico has a larger population than twenty-one states and no representation in the Senate. The other American territories—American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands—have together a population of over 380,000 people with no representation in the Senate.
It’s not a coincidence that all these unrepresented places are disproportionately populated by people of color. The history of Washington, D.C., is instructive. In 1867, Black men in D.C. obtained the right to vote. Just a few years later, and in large part as a result of backlash among local whites, the federal government revoked the city’s ability to govern itself and placed it under direct congressional control. This meant that the increasingly Black city was governed by the same segregationists who dominated Southern politics. And it’s not just Washington, D.C.: the territories mentioned above have each been shaped by a legacy of colonization and imperial devastation that our nation has not even begun to grapple with.12
In short, we’ve got a status quo in the Senate where a lot of near-empty white states are overrepresented and a lot of other Americans—overwhelmingly people of color—are underrepresented. This is bad.
Some observers have called for abolishing the Senate,13 and there’s a compelling case for that. But we can’t do that without a constitutional amendment, so, for now, we have to keep looking for solutions that can pass. And there’s really only one option: admit new states.14
If this seems far-fetched, remember that adding new states is how America became the America it is today. It was only sixty years ago that two U.S. territories, Alaska and Hawaii, became full-fledged states, adding four new senators to Congress. The battle in Congress to admit these states was contentious, partisan, and—you guessed it—heavily tied up with the fight over maintaining segregationist power in the Senate. But the states were added—and we can add states again.
In 2021, Congress should make D.C. a full-fledged state, giving its more than 630,000 residents representation in Congress. This can be done through a simple maneuver: reduce the “Capitol” to a small, ten-square-mile plot of land covering Congress, the White House, and the National Mall, and make the rest of Washington, D.C., into a new state. The residents of Washington, D.C., have voted in favor of this already. In 2016 a ballot initiative calling for statehood for “New Columbia” passed with an overwhelming 79 percent support. Congress should support the wishes of D.C. residents and admit this new state into the union.
The future for other American territories is more complex, and it depends first and foremost on their own wishes. If any American territory wishes to become a state, it should have that right. Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories should be able to make their own decision on self-determination with the confidence that if they choose statehood, they will be promptly welcomed by the federal government and receive the benefits of representation in Congress.
Opponents of D.C. statehood make up all sorts of stories. Testifying before a Senate committee in 2014, a representative from the Koch-funded Cato Institute worried that D.C. gaining statehood would mean the federal government wouldn’t have unfettered access to snowplows. Yes, snowplows.
In reality, most opponents of D.C. statehood just don’t want D.C. to get representation, but they usually try not to say that out loud. Sometimes they let it slip, though. Former Ohio governor John Kasich, a supposed moderate, gave the game away when he explained why he opposes D.C. statehood: “What it really gets down to if you want to be honest is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.” It was the same argument Southern segregationists made against admitting Hawaii in the 1950s: they didn’t want any more damn liberals in the Senate.
The most serious objection we’ll likely face is the claim that it’s unconstitutional to make D.C. a state via simple legislation—that, given its status as the country’s capital, D.C. statehood in particular would require a constitutional amendment. But that’s why the proposal on the table doesn’t call for making all of D.C. a state: it carves out the populated parts of the city to give them representation and leaves the Capitol and White House alone.
Puerto Rican statehood is more complex, given the history of racism and imperialism that has shaped its relationship with the federal government. Progressives have rightfully focused on Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination—whether it chooses statehood or independence. However, at a moment when Mitch McConnell is openly describing the idea of D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood as “full-bore socialism,” we should be very clear that if Puerto Rico were to choose statehood, we would enthusiastically support its recognition and rights as a state.
As for the other potential new states—Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands—the most commonly cited opposition to statehood among people who consider it at all is that, well, aren’t they really small? And indeed, these territories are smaller than other states. But historically this has never been a permanent barrier to representation when a territory is majority white. Alaska was smaller in population than other states when it joined the Union. In 1860, Nevada had only around 7,000 residents, and even after a silver rush boosted the population, it had fewer than 50,000 residents when it became a state in 1864—fewer than any of the modern-day U.S. territories.15
Everyone—especially Black, indigenous, and other people of color who’ve suffered from our legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and chattel slavery—deserves real political representation. The size of a potential state hasn’t stood in the way before, and shouldn’t now.
The Senate isn’t the only problem with Congress. We also have a House of Representatives that isn’t representative. There are two big drivers of this problem. First—and this may come as a surprise—the House is too small,16 and each member’s district is too big for them to do an effective job representing all their constituents. And second, our two-party system is just plain broken. It drives zero-sum political battles and deprives voters of real choices. The result is dysfunction, cynicism, and voter apathy.
Let’s tackle the size problem first. The House of Representatives was intended to be the “People’s House”—more responsive and reflective of the people’s will than any other institution in federal government. The typical House member at the founding of the country was often elected by only a few thousand voters.
Take the Pennsylvania House elections of 1794. The Second Congressional District of Pennsylvania saw a hotly contested election between Frederick Muhlenberg, who was then serving as the nation’s first speaker of the House, and Samuel Miles, a recent mayor of Philadelphia. Muhlenberg trounced Miles, winning 56 percent of the vote to the mayor’s 44 percent. Sounds like an impressive battle of political titans, right? Well, it does until you look at the vote count. Speaker of the House Muhlenberg was reelected with 656 votes, defeating Mayor Miles, who drew 510 votes. Your local college student body president probably received more votes.
How things have changed. In 2018, more than 150,000 residents of Pennsylvania’s Second Congressional District voted for Democrat Brendan Boyle, a congressman you’ve probably never heard of.17 Think about what it means that Boyle received more than 150,000 votes. Forget the House and even Senate elections: no U.S. president was elected with more than 150,000 votes until Andrew Jackson in 1828. In short, your personal unknown backbencher congressperson probably received more votes than presidents George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, among others. None of the Founders would have dreamed of a constituency so large for a single House member; it would have undermined the whole point of the “People’s House.”
A lot of the things people hate about Congress are driven by the size of our districts. Big districts mean voters interact less and less directly with their House member. Big districts cost more to campaign in, which gives candidates with deep pockets and big donors the edge over candidates with grassroots support. Big districts make it harder for diverse candidates—i.e., non-white, non-male, non-rich—to get elected. This might seem marginal, but academic research finds that it matters: democracies with bigger districts routinely have less trust in government and higher income inequality.
If that doesn’t convince you, we’ve got one more reason to add House districts: it helps to rebalance the Electoral College. Currently, each state has the same number of electoral votes as it has senators and representatives. If a state is overrepresented in the House and Senate (e.g., Wyoming), it is also overrepresented in the Electoral College. Expanding the House would add more electors, addressing some of the inequities of the Electoral College. This wouldn’t totally fix the Electoral College, but it would help bring it closer in line with the popular vote.
Going beyond the size of our districts, we’ve got another big problem: the two-party system is broken. Yes, the Republican Party has fallen off an ideological cliff. But the Democratic Party isn’t winning any popularity contests, either. The truth is that most people don’t feel represented by either party. They feel suspicious and jaded and powerless when it comes to choosing their elected officials—and they’re right to feel that way. Why shouldn’t they? We barely give people a choice.
The vast majority of Americans live in “safe” House districts.18 Before they go to the polls, they know the Democrat is a shoo-in or the Republican is a shoo-in. In each of the four national elections from 2006 to 2012, more than 90 percent of Americans didn’t have a competitive House race. And these elections have gotten less competitive over time. A 2017 analysis found that, since the mid-1990s, the number of competitive House districts had declined by more than half. There are far fewer competitive House districts now than there were ten years ago, and there were fewer ten years ago than there were fifty years ago.
We hear the shouting already: this is because of that damn partisan gerrymandering! It would be nice if getting rid of gerrymandering would solve the problem, but unfortunately it’s not that simple. While gerrymandering is infuriating, it’s actually not the main driver of noncompetitive seats in Congress. The reality is that Republicans and Democrats are increasingly sorting themselves into geographically isolated communities, with more and more conservatives living in rural areas and progressives in cities. This demographic trend means, as one analysis summed up, “more and more areas come, in essence, pre-gerrymandered.” One political scientist sums it up: “Efforts to substantially change redistricting aren’t likely to do much to either mitigate polarization or improve Democrats’ electoral fortunes.”19
This helps to fuel continued polarization, because most members of Congress are more afraid of a primary challenge than they are of a general election challenge. And polarization at the district level drives the polarization at the national level. As we covered in Chapter 1, if there are two polarized parties, each one wins when the other one loses. When you’re out of power, your best chance of winning the next election is to play hardball and block everything. That’s how we get continued gridlock, no matter who wins, year after year.
Representative democracy is about the people making choices, but we’re increasingly not giving voters much of a choice. As the famed political theorist turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has observed, “There are dictators who win by less” than the typical House member.
But what’s a voter to do? Vote for a third party? That’s a wasted vote, or worse. Third-party candidates are often spoilers, throwing the election to the candidate who is furthest from your values. When lefties vote for the Green Party, they take down the Democrat; when conservatives vote for the Libertarian, they take down the Republican. Our two-party system just isn’t set up for people to vote their conscience in general elections. It’s not set up to actually give people choices.
So there we have it. The House is too small. Most districts aren’t really competitive. And the result is gridlock, dysfunction, and voter apathy. So what are we going to do about it?
We need to build a bigger House with smaller constituencies, and we need a voting system that gives every voter a real say in who represents them.
Expanding the House is the opposite of a radical idea—in fact, it was standard practice for the first 120 years of the republic. From the 1790s to the early 1900s, Congress regularly expanded the House, but House expansions stopped abruptly in the 1920s, when Congress capped the total size at 435. The motivation behind the cap was simple: they were worried about the increase of “foreigners” who were concentrating in cities. The best way to keep these immigrants’ political power from increasing was to stop expanding the House.
So there’s nothing magic about the 435 number of congressional districts; it was simply the number the House agreed to at the time. While the cap was being debated, one representative said, “There is absolutely no reason, philosophy, or common sense in arbitrarily fixing the membership of the House at 435 or at any other number.” The hundred-year-old, unchanging quota is the product of xenophobia and congressional dysfunction, nothing more.
What would the right size of the House be? That’s a great question! There are several different options for expansion. If we were to say that every member of Congress’s district should be no larger than our smallest-population state (Wyoming), then we’d end up with 545 seats. If we were to expand the House in line with international norms for representative bodies, as a 2018 New York Times editorial endorsed, that would give us a House with 593 seats. If we were to expand the House to its 1930 people-per-member levels, we would end up with 1,163 members.
Think 1,163 sounds like a huge House? Had James Madison had his way, the first amendment to the Constitution would have been the Congressional Apportionment Amendment. The amendment dictated that the size of a House constituency would be 30,000, with provisions to allow it, at the extreme end, to ratchet at least as high as 50,000. Had one more state ratified this amendment, we’d have a House of thousands of members today.
So there are a lot of reasonable ways to think about the size the House should be—and they all point to a bigger House.
A bigger House would bring representatives closer to their constituents. But it wouldn’t change the competitiveness problem, not on its own. If we want all Americans to live in a competitive district, we need proportional representation. Let’s talk about how this would work.
In our current system, if your party gets 40 percent of the vote in a district, you lose the election and get no congressional representation. In fact, if all your candidate managed was 40 percent, that means your district is so darn lopsided in favor of the other party that the race wasn’t competitive at all. You live in a safe district, and your vote effectively doesn’t matter. You have that in common with nine out of ten of your fellow Americans.
The basic idea behind proportional representation is that if your party gets, for example, 40 percent of the votes, then your party should get 40 percent of the seats in Congress. That’s why it’s “proportional” representation. The way you get proportional representation is by changing the rules to elect multiple representatives in each district instead of just one representative per district.
That’s not what America has today. Instead, every House district is represented by a single member. If you live in California’s Fiftieth District, you have one House member. If you live in Texas’s Thirty-Fifth District, same deal. But it doesn’t have to be this way; it’s not included in our Constitution. In fact, it’s a method of electing representatives that is out of step with our own history and international norms.
For the first several decades of America’s history, many House members won in races where they were the second or even third or fourth choice of voters in their districts, because districts often elected two or more members. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, states all over the country used multimember districts or statewide districts to select their House members until Congress mandated single-member districts in 1967. Multimember districts are still used at the state level to fill legislative seats in ten geographically and ideologically diverse states, from Washington to Arizona to West Virginia.
So how would you vote in these multimember congressional districts? The best way is with ranked-choice voting. Under this voting system, you don’t just say who your first choice is—you rank your choices. If your first choice doesn’t get enough votes to surpass a threshold, your vote for a second choice is counted. You might rank two, three, or more candidates.
To see why ranked-choice voting matters, let’s take one particularly painful recent example: the 2016 presidential election. If we’d had ranked-choice voting, Jill Stein voters could have voted for Stein as their first choice and Hillary Clinton as their second. Stein would have been eliminated for failing to amass enough votes, and anyone who chose Clinton as a first or second choice would have gone in Clinton’s column. People could have voted their conscience, and Stein wouldn’t have been a spoiler candidate. The same logic holds for Libertarians: they could rank a Libertarian candidate first and an establishment Republican second if their heart so desired.
This makes so much sense that a 2018 New York Times editorial endorsing ranked-choice voting noted that “nearly everywhere it’s in use, voters and candidates say they’re happier with it.” This includes a growing number of major American cities, such as Minneapolis, Santa Fe, and Oakland, California. Most recently, in 2018, Maine became the first state to use ranked choice to elect its representative to the U.S. House.20
How would this combination of reforms play out in the real world? Let’s take two examples: Manhattan and Louisiana.
Manhattan has four overwhelmingly Democratic districts where voters regularly elect Democrats by 30 points or more. If you’re a Republican running in any of these districts, you’re screwed. If you’re a voter in Manhattan, you’ve never voted in a competitive general election. Now imagine a twist: there’s one election for all of Manhattan, and the top four vote-getters become members of Congress. Suddenly, to be elected, you need only place fourth, so you need only 20 or 30 percent of the vote. So Manhattan might end up with two Democrats, one Democratic Socialist, and one Republican. And if you’re a Manhattan voter, you suddenly have actual choices in the general election.
Now let’s take Louisiana. Louisiana has a very Republican congressional delegation. Most Louisiana Republicans are afraid of primaries from the right—not general elections. But what if they had to run in a general election against not just a Democrat but a Libertarian candidate, or a right-wing populist, or an anti-Trump “moderate”—or all of the above? How might that change their incentives? How might it change the Republican Party?
That’s the magic of this reform: it isn’t about helping Republicans or Democrats; it’s about restructuring the two-party system and ending the era of “safe” districts. Suddenly, Green Party, Libertarian, Democratic Socialist, and other candidates can win in places that used to be considered safe Republican or Democratic seats. Suddenly the Republicans who’ve been clinging to Trump out of fear of primary challenges have a whole new set of problems. We can’t predict everything that would happen with this shift, but what we can say for sure is that if we’re going to take on polarization, we have to take on the parties.
In the end, it’s a simple proposition: with this reform, nobody lives in a “safe” district anymore. Every constituent has a real shot at electing a representative who actually represents their values. Everybody lives in a competitive district; everybody gets a choice.
This would be a really, really hard reform to pass. But the effects would be dramatic and far-reaching: proportional representation would make elections more competitive, give voters real choices, address hyperpolarization, and improve our political system’s responsiveness to the people. That’s why political scientists at UCLA and Northwestern conclude in their book on saving democracy that “no other reforms are likely to be effective without it.”
There are three big arguments against expanding the House.
The first is obvious: people hate Congress. Who in their right mind wants more of a bad thing? Opinion polls back up this knee-jerk reaction. Expanding the House isn’t a popular idea right now. But polling shows that when you provide additional context about how historically out of whack our current House is, support for expanding the House shoots up. If we believe this is the right policy—and we do—we need to educate the public as to why a larger House would make Congress less terrible.
Second, people worry a big House will be a dysfunctional House—that having more members will limit deliberation, limit the ability to build relationships, and make it difficult to get things done. But the House is totally dysfunctional already! House members skip hearings, play for the cameras, and spend hours every day calling rich people to ask for money. They’re not spending their days debating political philosophy and bonding with each other; that’s not how it works. As one political scientist studying the House notes, “Whatever idealized deliberation and bonhomie might be lost with a larger House is already long gone, and it isn’t coming back.” The benefits of a more representative House outweigh the costs here.
Third, expanding the House would mean more districts, and more districts would mean more opportunity for gerrymandering. You literally can’t gerrymander states like Delaware and Vermont: they all have just one representative. States with three or four representatives are tough to gerrymander, too: there are only so many ways to carve up those districts. But if you vastly increase the number of districts, you increase the opportunity for gerrymandering. So we get this argument; it’s a real threat. And it’s why any sort of House expansion should be accompanied by serious anti-gerrymandering reforms to prevent these shenanigans from the outset.
As for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting, there is one very serious concern based in historical experience: How does this impact communities of color? As mentioned above, Congress outlawed multimember districts in 1967. Why then? In the 1960s, Southern states were using multimember districts to water down the votes of Black voters. Combining ranked-choice voting with proportional representation guards against that. FairVote, one of the leading advocacy groups behind improving the fairness of our political institutions, found that combining ranked-choice voting with multimember districts would significantly increase the percentage of racial minorities with the power to elect candidates of their choice. The current system of designating majority-minority districts does indeed help candidates of color in those specific districts, but overall, our system of single-member districts produces a significantly lower proportion of representatives of color. A proportional representation system would help make our elected bodies even more representative.
The other big objection to this idea is that, well, it’s just weird. Sure, it sounds nice in theory, but who actually does representation this way? As it turns out, a whole bunch of countries do. A survey of 195 countries found that the most common voting system was proportional representation. America’s single-member, winner-take-all system is far less common.
This is one of those ideas that might seem out there and wacky but actually has backing across the political spectrum. Supporters of these reforms include the proudly centrist Third Way think tank as well as some of the most progressive members of Congress. Conservative columnist David Brooks has endorsed the reforms in no uncertain terms, arguing that making this shift was the “one reform to save America.” The New York Times editorial board echoes that sentiment, concluding that implementing these reforms is “the only way a democracy can survive.”
Proportional representation and ranked-choice voting are such a challenge to existing power structures that even some of those sympathetic to the reforms are skeptical they can get done, going so far as to label them a “quixotic fantasy.” And, indeed, every single member of Congress got elected under the current rules, so why would they want to change them? We understand this—it will be tough. This sort of reform would require overwhelming constituent power demanding change. As a step in that direction, advocates could seek to simply have Congress remove the ban on multimember congressional districts so that proportional representation could be tested by the states. Let the proof be in the pudding—and let that proof fuel wider-scale reform.
Republicans have appointed fifteen out of the last nineteen Supreme Court justices. This just does not pass the smell test for a legitimate democracy.
Reactionaries have spent decades waging an intensive campaign to pack the federal courts with ideologues—and that campaign has been very, very successful.
Their strategy is simple: when they’re in power, they appoint as many judges as they can, as fast as possible. When they’re out of power, they block and delay appointments as much as possible.
The gold medal for court packing goes to Senator Mitch McConnell. During Obama’s presidency, he used every tool at his disposal to slow and defeat the appointment of federal judges. He waged a low-grade war to delay and reject as many lower court appointments as possible. Most famously, he took the unprecedented step of refusing to even consider President Obama’s nomination to fill the Supreme Court seat vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, there was every reason to believe Republicans would double down on this strategy. When Hillary Clinton appeared poised for victory, Senate Republicans openly promised to deny her any Supreme Court appointments. NPR reported that Senator Ted Cruz dismissed the idea that the Court needed nine justices to function—the open implication being that Republicans would rather change the size of the Supreme Court than confirm a Democratic president’s nominee.21
Then Trump won, and Republicans made an abrupt U-turn. McConnell and Senate Republicans began expediting federal judicial appointments, packing the courts with reactionary ideologues. They eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, allowing Trump to appoint Neil Gorsuch to the seat stolen from Merrick Garland and to confirm Brett Kavanaugh over resounding opposition. In his first two years as president, Trump successfully shifted the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court sharply to the right and confirmed more appeals court judges than Obama and Bill Clinton had appointed in the first two years of their presidencies combined.22
The result of this scorched-earth partisan approach to what should be a nonpartisan institution is clear. The Supreme Court now functions as an arm of the Republican Party. Don’t believe us? Take it directly from Donald Trump, who in 2018 got into a Twitter fight with Chief Justice John Roberts23 when Trump asserted that there were “Obama judges” and “Trump judges.” Trump was not confused. He understood perfectly well that his job was to complete the transformation of the Court into a partisan institution.
This now Republican institution has played its part well. The Court has attacked organized labor and labor rights, gun violence prevention, and civil liberty protections. It is likely to either repeal or functionally gut the protections of Roe v. Wade. The graveyard of progressive policies killed off by Republican justices grows every year.
What’s more, the Court has become increasingly antagonistic toward democracy itself. In just the past decade, Court decisions have upheld partisan gerrymandering, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and opened the floodgates to dark money in political campaigns—and this is only a partial list. Ian Millhiser, author of Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted, worries that the conservative Court is so antagonistic toward representative democracy that the U.S. “will, of course, continue to carry out elections, but the results will be preordained.”24
The biggest long-term victims of this brazenly partisan approach to the courts are the courts themselves.25 The judiciary doesn’t have an army or the power to provide funds to carry out its decisions. The only power it has is the power to persuade Americans and the other branches of government that its rulings are legitimate. The other branches can and have ignored Supreme Court rulings, and there was little recourse left to the courts. Republicans’ nakedly partisan approach has endangered the perceived independence of the courts—which is ultimately a threat to the legitimacy of the judicial system and the health of our democracy.
We face a conundrum: we absolutely have to address the right-wing imbalance of the current Court right now. But we also have to do it in a way that makes the Court less openly partisan over the longer term. That’s a tricky line to walk.
There’s no way to rebalance the Court without expanding it. Neil Gorsuch isn’t going to politely give his stolen seat back. McConnell isn’t going to start seeking broad bipartisan support for justices. It’d be nice if we could hold Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas accountable for the allegations of sexual misconduct and potential perjury, but removing a Supreme Court justice requires two-thirds of the Senate.
The only solution to unpacking the Supreme Court is to add new justices. The Court’s size isn’t written into the Constitution. It can change and has been changed throughout American history. A simple act of Congress signed by the president can expand the Court.
But remember, we have two goals: unpack the current Court and depoliticize it for the future. That means we need to think about ways of adding justices that make the Court less political over time.
One proposal on the table is to commit to automatic expansions of the Court going forward. For instance, in 2021, the Congress and the president could pass legislation creating a new rule: every president gets to appoint two additional justices (one every two years). If there’s a Democrat, they get to nominate two justices; if there’s a Republican, they get to nominate two justices—regardless of vacancies. This would make appointments less random: the path of our society shouldn’t rest on the health or illness of a small number of very old people. And it would allow us to both unpack the Court and create a foundation for a more functional, consistent, and less partisan process going forward.
Congress could also impose term limits for Supreme Court justices. In 1919, Congress passed a law allowing federal judges to take “senior status,” which allows them to remain official judges but no longer vote or author opinions.26 This is sort of like auditing a college class: you’re still a student, but you don’t take the tests or get a grade. That hundred-year-old law creating senior status excluded Supreme Court justices, but it was expanded to the highest court in 1937. A new Congress and president could revise the legislation further, implementing mandatory senior status for Supreme Court justices after an eighteen-year term. The justices could then opt to stay in quasi-retirement or rotate into serving on lower courts.27
These options aren’t mutually exclusive. Expanding the court, committing to automatic expansion going forward, and instituting term limits is a reasonable combined strategy. Our point here is not to choose the one and only path, but rather to point Indivisibles, national leaders, and other progressive advocates in the right direction. For progressive reforms to survive, we must unpack the Court. For the Supreme Court to remain legitimate, we must depoliticize it. Any effective reform must tackle both goals.
One critique of our solution is that it’s too cautious. A knee-jerk solution for Democrats in 2021 might be Let’s just add more Supreme Court justices! This would help address the first part of the Republican court-packing problem. If the incoming Democratic government were to enact a one-off expansion of the Court, they would undo the ideological packing from years of Republican appointments. Such a Supreme Court, full of progressive justices, might reverse bad old decisions like Citizens United and uphold new progressive reforms enacted by a unified, post-Trump Democratic government.
But this kind of one-off expansion would exacerbate the second part of the problem. Responding to court packing with additional court packing would further politicize the Court, diminish the Court’s power to persuade, and endanger its legitimacy as a core American democratic institution.
Another critique might be that creating automatic Supreme Court appointments won’t do anything if the Senate simply refuses to confirm them. We could enter a new stalemate whereby whenever the president and the Senate are of opposite parties, the Senate simply refuses to confirm new justices. Or, as Ian Millhiser cautions, a battle over the judiciary could become “a full-out war. Republicans will retaliate with more court packing if they regain control of the federal government.” We know that, given the chance, Republicans will indeed retaliate. They spent years packing the Court without provocation, so imagine what they’ll do when provoked.
We agree that these are all frightening prospects. Responding to the history of Republican court packing is a dangerous undertaking, and we shouldn’t embark on it lightly. But we also can’t accept conservative court packing as the new normal. We can’t allow the theft of the Supreme Court to dictate our social and economic policies for a generation. If a Republican-packed Court continues to gut pro-democracy legislation and block world-saving climate reforms and lifesaving health care policies, defenders of democracy will have little other recourse but to demand Court reforms—and that includes expansion.
We can’t allow Republican court packing to threaten our other democratic institutions—like free and fair elections, the right to vote, and the right to representation. If we accept this, the game is over. We’ll lose by forfeit. And we’re not willing to give up like that.
In early America, full citizenship was reserved for wealthy white men. That changed slowly over time. In fits and starts, over much of American history, more and more classes of people—poorer whites, naturalized immigrants, Black people and other people of color, women—won the right to vote and participate as full citizens. America has never attained some sort of ideal, permanent, inclusive state of voting rights. The war to stop people from voting is ongoing.
We all know that voter suppression is central to the reactionary strategy. Today that looks like throwing Black people off the voter rolls in Georgia, instituting poll taxes in Florida to block returning citizens from reclaiming their rights, or creating long voting lines by closing polling places in North Carolina.28 And it shows up in hostility to literally any policy that makes voting easier, more accessible, or even just not an enormous burden for Americans—for instance, early voting, voting by mail, extending voting hours, and automatic voter registration.
Beyond voter suppression, we have to confront the fact that millions of Americans who should have the right to vote are still deprived of that right. The disenfranchisement of millions of Americans distorts and perverts the rest of our representative institutions.
We’re going to focus on three broad classes of Americans being systematically deprived of the right to vote: immigrant Americans, younger Americans, and Americans with a felony conviction. Taken together, enfranchising these classes could add more than 30 million people to the voter rolls. To put that in perspective, about 113 million Americans turned out to vote in the historic midterms of 2018. Expanding the electorate to these Americans would make our democracy more representative of all our people.
More than 20 million American immigrants living in this country do not have the right to vote, including both documented and undocumented immigrants. More than 9 million of these people are lawful permanent residents (also known as green card holders) who are eligible to be naturalized and gain full citizenship rights, including the right to vote. The vast majority of the roughly 11 million undocumented Americans have lived here for over a decade. They’ve worked, gone to school, paid taxes, and contributed to society in every state of the union for years. At least 9 million are of voting age, but they’ve never been allowed to vote.
These undocumented Americans aren’t just treated like second-class citizens; they’re treated as if they’re invisible. It’s an absurd and cruel feature of our immigration laws that this population plays such a critical role in our economy and our national community, yet has no say in our government. Meanwhile, they face an onslaught of racist, degrading treatment from Trump and his allies, and a renewed reign of terror driven by our out-of-control enforcement agencies. These attacks are about making America whiter and keeping the voting population as white as possible.29
We often take for granted that the voting age is eighteen. But it wasn’t always so, it isn’t the case in a few American cities today, and it’s not the case in many other modern democracies. Countries like Scotland and Austria have extended voting to sixteen-year-olds. In recent years a few American cities have lowered the voting age to sixteen for local elections, and more than a dozen states allow seventeen-year-olds to vote in primaries. But localities and states can’t lower the voting age for federal elections; only Congress can do that.
The last time federal legislation lowered the voting age was 1971. Americans under twenty-one were fighting and dying in Vietnam, and the question was reasonably asked: Why should they be able to die for their country but not vote in their country?
Today’s sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to be attacked by school shooters and young enough to die from the effects of climate change, but they’re excluded from choosing the elected officials who could do something about it. We’re requiring our youth to bear the brunt of our public policy failures, but we give them no say in choosing the representatives who create our policies.
About 6 million American citizens are deprived of the right to vote because they’ve been convicted of a felony. This is far out of step with international norms. In many other democracies, not only can formerly incarcerated citizens with a felony conviction vote, but currently incarcerated citizens can vote as well. The logic is simple: going to prison doesn’t erase your humanity or your rights as a citizen.
Voting rights for Americans convicted of felonies vary widely among the states. Maine and Vermont look like many other democracies in the world: they have no disenfranchising restrictions, including for those currently incarcerated. On the other end of the spectrum, twelve states prohibit some or all returning citizens from voting, even after their time is served and they’re off parole.
Voter disenfranchisement cannot be understood independent of the legacy of mass incarceration. America has by far the largest incarcerated population in the world. We incarcerate more people than any other country on the planet, including authoritarian countries like China and Russia. This is fundamentally about state-sponsored control and suppression of people of color, and specifically Black people, a legacy that stretches back to the era of slavery. It’s not an accident that both incarceration and disenfranchisement rates among Black voters in the former Confederate states are extraordinarily high. But it’s also not just the South. Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, Wyoming, and Arizona (among others) have extraordinarily high rates of Black voter disenfranchisement. In states with the harshest restrictions, more than 20 percent of all potential Black voters in the country are disenfranchised.30
Let’s start with the obvious. Voting should be a simple, safe, and easy part of everyone’s life. There is no reason Americans should not be automatically registered to vote. There is no reason that you should have to miss work to vote. There is no reason that lines at the polls should be hours long. There is no reason that voter suppression should be condoned by the federal government. There is no reason that elections should be vulnerable to foreign threats. It should be easy to vote and hard to steal elections.
The For the People Act includes automatic voter registration, beefs up election security, curbs partisan gerrymandering, expands public financing for elections, protects voting rights, and prohibits voter roll purging. The House has passed this bill already; it should become law in 2021. This is the baseline.
But that’s not enough.
America’s expansion of the franchise is a rich and storied part of its political history—one of the things we should be most proud of as a country. We should build on this history. The specific reform may vary for each class of currently disenfranchised voter, but don’t lose the forest for the trees: more Americans voting is a good thing, and we should encourage this basic level of participation in our democracy. It will make us stronger.
Enfranchising immigrants need not be a partisan issue. Ronald Reagan signed the single largest immigration reform law in American history, providing a path to citizenship and voting rights to nearly 3 million undocumented Americans. Subsequent laws extended a path to citizenship to millions more. So the solution is looking us in the face: we need to provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented Americans living here, and voting rights guarantees for documented immigrant Americans as well.
This is important first and foremost because immigrants deserve to live in safety and dignity in our country. And a critical part of that is political representation. So, in 2021, a unified progressive government should prioritize a compassionate immigration reform bill that extends citizenship to the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
For younger Americans, the solution is also pretty clear. Congress can’t regulate the minimum voting age for state and local elections, but it can and should pass a law lowering the voting age to sixteen for all federal elections. This would immediately enfranchise about 8 million new voters, and it would open up the opportunity to tie high school civics education to actual practice. This could also have a “trickle-up” effect; research has shown that when younger people in a household gain the right to vote, it encourages more participation among their parents.
At least within progressive circles, this shouldn’t be a controversial position. In 2015, Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, publicly embraced lowering the voting age to sixteen or seventeen. In 2019, newly elected Representative Ayanna Pressley introduced legislation to lower the voting age to sixteen, and Speaker Pelosi reiterated her support for the idea.
When it comes to restoring the rights of incarcerated Americans, the simplest voting rights reform—and the one that many criminal justice advocates support—is following Maine’s and Vermont’s lead. No more restrictions on voting, period. The For the People Act includes a weaker version of this, allowing restrictions for those currently incarcerated. But why go weak? We need to end the epidemic of mass incarceration, and a critical part of that is protecting the right to vote of every person incarcerated or formerly incarcerated by the state.
We all know what anti-immigrant advocates would say about offering a path to citizenship to the immigrants living in American communities. We aren’t interested in arguing with Trump supporters about this. But immigrant rights partners we’ve talked to have raised a different and important concern.
For years, one of the top goals of the immigrant rights movement has been relief from deportation and a path to citizenship for immigrants. But Congress has been totally incapable of passing any such legislation for decades. As a result of this political reality, many advocates within these communities have turned their focus to securing basic economic opportunity and personal security. In other words, they argue that citizenship shouldn’t be a precondition for justice, economic stability, safety, and dignity for immigrant families. They are absolutely right. At a time when immigrant communities are under constant attack by the government, this becomes more important than ever. Citizenship with full voting rights is the ultimate goal, but on the road to that goal we can’t abandon protections for non-citizen immigrants. And we shouldn’t sacrifice protections for one group of immigrants in exchange for citizenship for another.
As for expanding the franchise to younger voters, the knee-jerk objection to lowering the minimum voting age is that sixteen-year-olds are too young. Opponents say that this population is just not mature enough, or not educated enough about civic life, and won’t take the opportunity to vote if it’s given to them.
None of these arguments holds up under a basic review of the evidence. As one psychologist in favor of lowering the voting age to sixteen wrote in the New York Times, “The skills necessary to make informed decisions are firmly in place by sixteen.” And studies show that sixteen-year-olds are just as civically knowledgeable as their slightly older counterparts, or, according to some studies, more knowledgeable. Which, when you think about it, makes sense: they’re all in school studying American history and government! In fact, cities that have extended voting to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds have found that their voting rates are far higher than those of the rest of the voting-age population. As with any habit, it helps to start early. In short, if you want more young people to vote, you should make it possible for young people to vote.
When it comes to restoring rights for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Americans, there’s a reason these laws are so prevalent in the states of the former Confederacy: they serve the same purpose that poll taxes and literacy tests once did. And there is still viciously open prejudice against those who’ve served their time. In 2017, as Florida was considering a historic ballot initiative to restore this population’s voting rights, an advocate against the initiative explained his position: “I don’t think felons oughta be allowed to vote, the same way I don’t think felons ought to be able to own a gun or become lawyers or handle your money or give you investment advice.” His argument didn’t carry the day. In a statewide election where the Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator lost by a slim margin, the rights-restoration initiative received supermajority support from Florida voters.31
For those of us who are not formerly incarcerated, young, or immigrants, the question we should be asking ourselves is simple: Do we think more voting is a good thing? Do we believe everyone in our country deserves to have their voices heard? Do we think our society is strengthened by shutting out new voices? For a pro-democracy movement, these aren’t complicated questions to answer. If the cure for our democracy is more democracy, one simple way to administer that cure is by opening up the voting booths to more Americans.
A healthy democratic republic requires an informed population. Americans need to know what’s happening in the world. They need to know what their government and their representatives are or are not doing. The reforms in this chapter aim to make our democracy more responsive to the people. But how informed are the people it’s responding to?
The problem we face today is that Americans don’t just disagree about what to do about the social and economic problems facing the country and the world. We disagree about reality itself. This is the direct product of a crisis in American media. It’s “a crisis,” wrote the authors of “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers” in the Nation more than a decade ago, “that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake.” Those words seem prescient now.
Like other crises described in this chapter, America’s media crisis has a history that stretches back a few decades. Four decades ago, the vast majority of Americans who got their news at all got it from the three big networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Walter Cronkite, one of the few guys32 whom nearly 30 million people watched every evening, was well-known and well-liked by broad swaths of Americans, in blue, red, and purple states alike. He was the guy who gave them the news—news about the world they could trust to actually reflect reality. But Cronkite got out of the game near the peak of that old world. The rapid expansion of cable news in the 1980s and 1990s, the creation of Fox News in the mid-1990s, and the Internet news explosion in the early 2000s transformed America’s media environment. Nobody in American media today—not Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper or Sean Hannity—comes close to Cronkite’s audience in raw numbers or influence. We live in a different media world today.
At the same time that the national political news environment was fracturing, local media was dying. Newspaper circulation has declined literally every year for the past three decades, and the number of journalists, editors, news photographers, and other news staff in our country has dropped precipitously. From 2008 to 2018, nearly 47 percent of newspaper jobs disappeared.
This drastic drop has been driven by simple market dynamics. The economic model for local news has collapsed, especially in the past couple of decades as the Internet gave people alternative options to buy and sell their stuff, and gave ad makers alternative places to place their ads. The decline is so bad that there are now “local news deserts” across the country. Things are grim. Robert W. McChesney, one of the authors of “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” told us, “We’re just one recession away from the end of traditional journalism altogether.”33 Scary stuff.
It’s scary because we can see the results all around us. The journalists who used to cover national politics for local papers don’t have jobs anymore. Statehouses and city governments operate with ever less press scrutiny. Today we’ve got a few surviving national news outlets, we’ve got cable, and we’ve got the Internet. The advertising dollars that once paid for your local newspaper have moved over to digital platforms like Facebook and Google, Silicon Valley giants that aren’t in the business of news production.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with cable or the Internet. Cable brought such great things to humanity as seasons 1–6 of Game of Thrones. The Internet has brought us many delightful cat videos and memes. And news too! There are now a lot of options for news—news of every size, shape, and flavor. At its best, social media has helped voices long excluded from the mainstream media—people of color, women, LGBTQ persons—make their perspectives heard.
The problem is that some of the options that have flourished in this brave new world are pretty dangerous. And the danger is growing.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re a progressive.34 If so, take a trip to another universe and turn on Fox News, read Breitbart, and visit the Daily Caller. In that conservative world where millions live, Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist, Hillary Clinton is a corrupt traitor, and Donald Trump is a heroic warrior prince. Government is giving away the store to people of color, immigrants are coming to hurt your family, and college kids think you’re racist or sexist or homophobic for being “politically incorrect.” It’s a totally different reality, and it makes compromise, even on the most basic and should-be-bipartisan issues, like voting rights, totally impossible.
To be sure, progressives live in their own media bubbles, too, but it’s not really comparable. As with so many of the challenges we face, this problem is not equally felt on both sides of the aisle. It’s true that trust in media has declined overall over the past several decades. But this trust has particularly dropped among Republicans: today, nearly 80 percent of Democrats trust the media and only about 30 percent of Republicans do. This is a yawning gap, and it plays out constantly in our politics.
A leading force behind this growing distrust is Fox News. Fox shovels a mixture of news and misinformation to the public while actively working to discredit other news sources. Viewers of Fox News tend to be less informed than other consumers of media; in fact, they tend to be less informed than people who don’t watch news at all.35 Under the Trump administration, Fox has become a full-fledged propaganda operation. Trump seems to be in on the scam, regularly calling Fox News competitors “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.”
The impact of this propaganda machine on the national political environment is huge. Through this sustained misinformation campaign, Fox News has helped drive the entire American electorate to the right. A 2017 study found that Fox News is responsible for a significant vote swing in Republicans’ favor. Without Fox, the popular vote would have gone to John Kerry instead of George W. Bush in 2004, and Obama’s 2008 victory would have been an absolute landslide. Of course, Fox was only stronger by the time Trump was running for president in 2016.
The conservative attack on facts and objective journalistic standards isn’t limited to national media. In the places where local news is still available, viewers are increasingly finding conservative coverage. And the source of that conservative local media is often the same: Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Sinclair Broadcast Group isn’t as well-known as Fox News, but it has a huge impact on the modern American media environment. Sinclair owns or operates nearly two hundred local television stations that reach about 40 percent of U.S. households. And Sinclair is just as much of a conservative bullhorn as Fox News. Sinclair’s chairman believes that “99.9 percent of the media is left of center,” and he’s used his company’s national broadcast footprint to push his conservative agenda. Sinclair mandates that their seemingly objective local news anchors pass down the company line, sometimes verbatim. In one particularly Orwellian example in 2018, dozens of Sinclair anchors across the country were required to read the exact same script about how other sources of media were fake news and a threat to democracy. It was honestly pretty spooky.
Sinclair enjoys just as cozy a relationship with Trump as Fox News does. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has admitted that the Trump campaign struck a deal with the media giant to give access to the campaign in exchange for better local media coverage. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) slapped down Sinclair’s proposed multibillion-dollar acquisition of Tribune Media, Trump himself came to Sinclair’s defense. Trump, so often the master of saying the quiet part loud, tweeted, “So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn’t approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People.” Trump gets it: in place of thousands of local, independent media sources, we’ve got a pro-Trump bullhorn pumping propaganda into living rooms nationwide.
But what about that great democratizing force, the Internet? Surely that will save our free and independent media, right? Of course you don’t believe that—because you’ve been living through the meltdown of recent years, just like we have.
First, the Internet itself is under threat. In 2017, Ajit Pai, Trump’s political appointee at the FCC, revoked the set of regulations governing “net neutrality”—the requirement that Internet service providers treat all Internet traffic equally. This sounds dry and sort of boring, but it’s crucial to information freedom. As one of the holdout FCC commissioners, Mignon Clyburn, says: “Net Neutrality is the First Amendment of the Internet.” Without this basic protection, we’re at the mercy of big corporations to control the speed with which we access the web—and we’re all just waiting to find out what Comcast and Verizon will do with that power. This is a threat to all the independent voices who’ve used the Internet to connect and to make themselves heard, and especially for communities and activists of color.
Then there are the social media companies themselves—the corporate behemoths that shape the information we see every day. Facebook in particular has transformed the media landscape, driving a series of destructive trends in the media industry and exerting enormous power over the news we consume while taking almost no responsibility for its content or accuracy. In recent years, tweaks to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm have driven dramatic surges—or collapses—in entire sectors of the media. It is, functionally, the world’s biggest media company, but it’s subject to none of the same regulations or expectations.
Free Press, one of the leading American organizations advocating for—wait for it—a free press, notes that rather than spreading joy by connecting billions of people, Facebook has instead divided us into warring camps, helped spread hate, misinformation, propaganda, and has consistently taken advantage of people’s personal data, all with “little accountability, transparency or consequence.” In 2016, Facebook accepted ads from Putin-linked sources explicitly aimed at dividing Americans and throwing the election to Donald Trump.36 There’s been no real accountability and there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again in 2020.
The ad revenue that used to support well-staffed local and national newsrooms is now flooding these online platforms. While Facebook and Google grow, newsrooms shrink, and federal legislators and regulators do little or nothing about it. So, unfortunately, no, the Internet will not save us.
In short, we’re facing a set of interlinking problems. The national media environment, which in the mid-twentieth century provided a set of agreed-upon facts to the American electorate, has fractured. The rise of a national conservative propaganda operation has systematically misinformed the public and shifted debate to the right. At the same time, the economic model for independent journalism, especially local journalism, no longer exists. As local news has died off, conservative media conglomerates have absorbed an increasing share of that local coverage. At the same time, the free and open Internet is under attack and massive profit-driven social media platforms hasten the spread of misinformation in relentless competition for the next ad dollar.
Whew! That’s a lot of problems. Do you feel a little anxious now? Maybe you need to take a minute. That’s fine. Put down the book. Close your eyes for a second. Breathe.
OK, now let’s talk about how we’re going to fix it.
There’s no one silver bullet for saving American media. So we’re going to offer up two bullets: regulate and break up the conglomerates to unleash more competition, and invest in a new era of independent American media.
Let’s start with breaking up the big tech and media conglomerates. The tech giants are too big, and it’s a big problem. Today, 70 percent of all web traffic on the Internet flows through Facebook and Google, and that translates into a whole bunch of ad revenue. Facebook had just shy of $56 billion in revenue in 2018, and Google had about $137 billion. If Google were a state, that revenue would make it the second largest—just behind California in terms of revenue. Sinclair Broadcast Group for its part is one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country, and it has plans to expand even further. They’re huge, and they use their power to extract wealth from us and, purposefully or not, undermine our democracy.
We need to break up the megacorporations and enact regulations to protect the American public from their excesses. A hundred years ago, Republican president Teddy Roosevelt trumpeted the importance of breaking up and regulating big corporations to protect the public interest. In his day he was going after the oil, beef-packing, and other industries, but the logic behind breaking up the conglomerates (“bad trusts”) was all the same.37 When corporations get big—we mean really big—they can use their bigness to squash competitors, prey on consumers, and avoid accountability. Roosevelt took this to heart and went toe-to-toe with corporate giants like Standard Oil that were exploiting their monopoly power precisely this way.
The dangers of megacorporations are as real today with big media and tech conglomerates like Sinclair Broadcast Group, Facebook, and Google.38 As media and tech companies get bigger and bigger, profits soar, and we all lose. These are the Standard Oil of our day, and the harm they do to consumers, society, and democracy is just as real. The solution now is the solution a hundred years ago: break up these massive corporations to loosen their stranglehold on the American public. In their place we’ll get more competition and more options for all of us, and we’ll reduce the power that any single massive private corporation has over American society.
To promote free and open competition, breaking up these bad trusts needs to go hand in hand with a plan to promote a media system that gives more people a voice in our democracy. That starts with reinstating net neutrality. It’s a basic step to protect freedom of the Internet, and it should be enshrined into law so that no future Republican administration can use the FCC to revoke it again.39
Proponents of breaking up Facebook include an early Facebook investor and mentor to founder Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote that the platform and its peers like Google harm “public health, democracy, privacy and competition.” One of Facebook’s original cofounders (and a former roommate of Zuckerberg’s) also supports breaking up the tech giant, writing in 2019 that “we are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.”
So we’ve taken on the harm done by the tech and media giants, but how do we support real, crucial journalism? We start by acknowledging that independent local and national journalism is a societal good. We need it for our democracy to function. And, unfortunately, private markets aren’t producing enough of it. The twentieth-century economic model for quality journalism—especially quality local journalism—is not coming back. If the market isn’t going to supply this societal good on its own, that means we need public investment.
There hasn’t been a major new investment in public media since the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That legislation created stuff you might just take for granted now—the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR). Is the media environment the same as it was half a century ago? Of course not. It’s been completely transformed in all the ways we described above. So why haven’t we reimagined how to support new public services in this new media environment?
It may sound crazy, but why not try revitalizing journalism in America by investing in journalism in America? Compared to our peer democracies, the United States drastically underinvests in media. Every year America spends about $3 per person in public funds for public broadcasting—around the cost of a venti regular coffee at Starbucks once a year.40 By comparison, Germany invests more than $140 per person per year. That’s a lot of coffee.
A big reason America has such a crumbling media infrastructure is because we don’t pay for it. Imagine an alternative: a real commitment to actually creating a healthy media environment that produces an informed electorate. McChesney supports the creation of a new universal media voucher that could be used at any nonprofit media source. All Americans would get an annual $200 voucher that they could donate to the nonprofit media source of their choice—almost literally democratizing the media by allowing people to vote with their vouchers for the media they want to see. Free Press proposes a big new “Public Interest Media Endowment” that would support local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and news and information for underserved communities. This seems worth the cost of a few more cups of coffee to us.
How could we fund this new investment in independent American media? Providing a $200 voucher to every adult American to invest in nonprofit media would cost around $40 billion per year. To add on top of that, a Public Interest Media Endowment would cost just a couple of billion more. We could pay for it like the modern GOP pays for just about everything it wants, from military increases to corporate welfare: by simply racking up more debt. Or you could reverse some small portion of the Trump tax cuts for the rich, which cost about $230 billion per year. Or if you don’t like that, Free Press recommends adding a small tax on the hundreds of billions that companies like Facebook and Google collect in ad revenue.
Regardless of how we pay for it, if we want a vibrant democratic society, we need an independent and flourishing media environment. The free market isn’t going to produce that for us, so public investment has to do it.
Supporters of big tech and media say that government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the market, and that the companies themselves can self-regulate their behavior. Others who are more amenable to oversight still argue that breaking up companies is too extreme a move, or that the real problems will remain even if the companies are broken up into small pieces.
There will always be arguments against breaking up a monopoly. Reasonable people can disagree on where to set the threshold of “too big.” But at this point, pretty much no one is prepared to argue that Facebook is having a positive effect on our media environment, or that it’s successfully regulated itself. Facebook now occupies such a pivotal role in our world that slight tweaks to its algorithm can spell doom for the rest of the media ecosystem. That’s just too big. And no one would argue that one company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, having functional control over so many local media markets is good for democracy. That’s just too big.
The most common line of argument against public investment in reviving American media is that media should not be publicly funded. Of course some of this comes from reactionary conservative types who don’t want government to spend money on anything beyond corporate subsidies and military boondoggles. The same Heritage Foundation, which helped kill Carter’s democracy reform package in the 1970s and opposed the For the People Act in 2019, has come out swinging against public funding for media. They call the fifty-year-old practice of taxing Americans to fund public media “sinful and tyrannical.”
But it’s not just right-wing reactionaries who have concerns about publicly funded media. Authoritarianism, politicization, and bureaucratization are all risks with a publicly funded program. If government controls the media, and government is controlled by politics, won’t politics infect our press? If government picks winners and losers in the media, how can it be truly free and independent? These are all valid questions.
These concerns are not new. In the 1960s, as a unified Democratic federal government was considering the Public Broadcasting Act, lawmakers worried about public funding interfering with editorial independence. In laying out the program, President Lyndon Johnson declared that the system “will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free, and it will be independent, and it will belong to all our people.” Imagine if fears about independence had prevented us from creating NPR. The concerns were valid then and they’re valid now—but they were also solvable then and are solvable now.
There will always be conservative hacks who bray about left-wing media bias in NPR and PBS; there’s no getting around that. But fifty years later NPR is still here; PBS is still here; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is still here. And the popularity of these institutions remains quite high. A 2018 poll found that Americans trusted PBS and NPR news more than any other news source, including networks like CBS and ABC, cable news like Fox and MSNBC, and national papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Even GOP voters oppose cutting funding for public media by a nearly two-to-one margin. So, yes, it is indeed possible to craft a public investment for media that doesn’t lose public confidence. We’ve done it.
Critics of voucher proposals raise a related concern: Won’t right-wingers give their vouchers to right-wing hack media companies? Yes, yes, they will! By limiting eligible recipients to not-for-profit media organizations, a media voucher program could cut down on the influence of the most egregious profit-stealing fake news sites. But part of accepting that we live in a democracy is accepting that people are going to do dumb stuff, and we’ve got to let them. As wacky as it sounds, that’s the whole theory of democracy—so why not apply it to our media too?
We’re not starry-eyed idealists. What drives us now is necessity. American democracy is crumbling while the existential threats to our country and the earth mount. We have a choice between waging a long-shot fight for a real American democracy that can solve these problems or giving up. We choose to fight.
We don’t have time to wait. The country faces permanent conservative control of the Senate—and, by extension, the courts—if we fail to act soon. The planet faces calamitous consequences if America fails to overcome its dysfunction and tackle climate change fast. If we fail to retake power in 2020 and build an inclusive democracy in 2021, we may not have another shot. The stakes for the country and the planet are high.
The reforms presented in this chapter are democratizing reforms: they would make our federal system of government more responsive to and representative of the people. Combined, these reforms can stave off minority, oligarchic rule in America, and each reform would reinforce the others to create an increasingly inclusive and representative democracy after Trump.
That “after Trump” part is key. President Trump will not sign any part of this blueprint into law. Nor will Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allow any of the reforms in this chapter to come to a vote. The only pathway to bringing this vision off the page, through Congress, and onto the president’s desk is to wrest control of our government from the reactionaries who currently control it.
We know that the post-Trump era will not come on its own. That era is within our grasp, but it will take all our combined power to successfully reach for it. The Indivisible lessons described in Section 2 are intended to guide that effort. We believe that the grassroots energy that surged after Trump’s election can translate into power. Then, and only then, will we have our chance at building the democracy described in this chapter.
Even then, we know full well that the reforms laid out here will not be easy to achieve; real change never is. We know this vision for American democracy will be attacked from all sides. McConnell and establishment elected Republicans will smear it as a radical “power grab” made by political rabble-rousers. Establishment Democrats will call it unrealistic or impossible. Politicians of all stripes who have acquired power through existing structures will laugh at us, and fight to kill the reforms or blunt their impact.
But this inclusive American democracy is achievable if we demand it.
In this book, we’ve given you a lot of theory. We’ve talked about the political philosophy and strategies behind the forces undermining our republic. We’ve explored the history of American civic engagement. And we’ve laid out a blueprint of reforms that will ensure that our democratic system better represents all of us. This is complex, sometimes abstract stuff.41
But Indivisible is not a thought experiment. The thousands of Indivisible groups organizing themselves around the country right now are defined by action—by their energetic involvement in our democracy. Because we all know that power concedes nothing without a demand. We know that electeds can’t resist the demands of their electorate indefinitely. They may try to ignore it. They may try to delay. They may try to fight back. But ultimately electeds must give in to what the people want—if the people consistently and forcefully insist on it.
This is the challenge for all of us fighting for an inclusive democracy in America. We will not save democracy by defeating Trump. We will not save democracy by winning any individual election. We will not save democracy by defeating one bad bill or by implementing one good reform.
We will save democracy by standing together in communities across the country and demanding that the system bend to the will of the people—all the people. We’ll do this by working across lines of difference. We’ll do this by organizing ourselves and partnering with others. We’ll do this by leading and by following.
This is how we defeated the attack on the Affordable Care Act in 2017. This is how we built the blue wave in 2018. This is how we’ll wage the coming battle to defeat Trump and his lackeys. And this is how we’ll build a real democracy once they’re gone. This is how we win.
1. If we were academics, we might say something like There’s actually no such thing as the single, unified “will of the people,” because the people are diverse. But we’re not academics, so we’re going to stick with “will of the people,” knowing full well that the people in a democracy are all special snowflakes.
2. Yes, this is a real quote from the leading Republican think tank. When they tell you who they are, believe them.
3. Our focus is on federal-level reforms, but versions of many of these policies could be—and in some cases have already been—adopted at the state and local levels. Other policies we miss entirely because of this federal focus. A good example is the elimination of the Electoral College. While that can’t be done federally without a constitutional amendment, it can be done through state-level action. This is just one example; many other pro-democracy reforms are achievable at the state and local levels. By all means, get involved in your local Indivisible group to fight for them too.
4. You can also propose constitutional amendments if you get two-thirds of states to call for a constitutional convention. That’s never been done in the history of the republic. And even if that was done, you’d still need three-quarters of the states to adopt any proposed amendments.
5. Just kidding! It would still be incredibly hard to build the political will necessary to implement this stuff. Sorry. But we still have to try.
6. The other one of the two pillars they discuss is “mutual toleration,” which basically means that political factions don’t treat each other’s social, economic, and foreign policy platforms as wholly illegitimate: you can disagree with your opponents without thinking they’re out to destroy democracy. We’re in a sticky situation with this one, too, because the Koch-controlled Republican Party really is out to subvert democracy.
7. They don’t, you know, unilaterally rob a president of a Supreme Court justice appointment (*cough* Gorsuch *cough*).
8. See Chapter 1. It’s bad and scary.
9. As if you needed more reasons to hate Aaron Burr.
10. Some have argued that the filibuster protected the Affordable Care Act from repeal during the first two years of the Trump presidency. That is flat-out wrong. The reason Republicans never repealed the legislation was not because the filibuster protected it; it was because they couldn’t even scrape together 50 votes to do it. The Affordable Care Act’s own popularity saved the Affordable Care Act.
11. High school history teachers know this grumpy note as The Federalist No. 22.
12. We can’t possibly do justice to this history here except to note that each of the territories mentioned above has its own complex relationship to the United States and the federal government. Going forward, our interactions with them have to be governed not by what’s best for U.S. politics but by what’s best for the people of each territory. What we can say on our end is that it is unacceptable to maintain territories without allowing them to be represented in the halls of power.
13. Among those is former representative John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in the history of the republic.
14. Well, this is half-true. One option for admitting new states is to split up existing states. For instance, there have been proposals to split California into two or more states. The decision to create that division would have to come from Californians, but then Congress could admit the new states through a simple majority vote. Frankly, this hasn’t gotten a lot of traction yet.
15. The story of Nevada statehood is fascinating—and a good example of how admitting new states has always been a political process. In the middle of the Civil War, Union forces wanted another Republican state for the 1864 presidential election and to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Nevada was admitted as a state eight days before the election and voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln and a Republican representative. Lincoln himself didn’t have much to worry about: the presidential election was a landslide. But the following year the Thirteenth Amendment would pass the House by just seven votes, with Nevada’s newly elected representative providing one of them.
16. We know, we know. Who on earth looks at members of Congress and thinks, The problem is that there aren’t enough of these people? But bear with us.
17. No offense, Brendan—we’re sure you’re great.
18. For the purposes of this, we’re defining a competitive election as being decided by less than 5 percent of the vote. In a House election with 200,000 voters, that would mean the race was relatively close: 105,000 votes for one candidate and 95,000 votes for the other, or closer. These are nail-biters in which significant grassroots engagement and turnout could turn the tide.
19. Note that we’re talking here specifically about congressional gerrymandering. Gerrymandering of state legislature districts can often be even more egregiously partisan.
20. Maine implemented ranked-choice voting after a Trump-like governor won election twice in elections that featured third-party spoiler candidates. The logic was simple: shift to ranked-choice voting to eliminate the negative impact of spoilers going forward. It proved effective in the very next election, when Democratic congressional candidate Jared Golden eked out a victory over an incumbent Republican. Golden didn’t get a plurality of first-choice votes, but because of ranked-choice voting, he ended up winning the seat with second-choice votes.
21. He wasn’t alone. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina agreed: “I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.” Even Senator John McCain of Arizona, long viewed as a paragon of bipartisan virtue, said, “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president,would put up.”
22. The court reforms we discuss here are all focused on the Supreme Court, but there’s nothing stopping a unified progressive Congress from also unpacking the lower courts. Nothing in the Constitution mandates a certain number of circuit court judges: Congress can (as it has in the past) expand and alter the court structure through simple legislation.
23. We can’t believe we’re writing these words, either.
24. Of course, this is far from a new phenomenon. No account of the fundamentally partisan nature of the courts is complete without noting that in 2000 five Republican-appointed judges literally stopped a recount in Florida to hand the presidency to the Republican candidate, George W. Bush.
25. Also the American people, America itself, and, you know, the world.
26. We were pretty excited to find out about this because initially we had thought term limits would require a constitutional amendment. Brian Fallon, who leads the national court reform organization Demand Justice, gets credit for pointing us in this direction.
27. This isn’t some ridiculous hypothetical. Two living former Supreme Court justices, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter, have themselves taken senior status and continue to issue opinions in federal appellate courts.
28. “Returning citizens” is the preferred term for formerly incarcerated people.
29. In 2018, Trump was caught in the Oval Office saying he wanted fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and more from mostly white countries (“places like Norway”).
30. The story gets worse. In the U.S. Census, the federal government counts the nonvoting prison population when apportioning House seats. Lawmakers often strategically take prisons into account as they draw congressional district maps. This practice, called prison gerrymandering, further empowers largely rural, largely white areas. If this feels uncannily like the Three-Fifths Compromise, which gave slave-owning states greater representation, that’s because it is.
31. Conservatives took power in Florida in the same election in which voters passed the rights-restoration ballot initiative. In one of their first acts, the Republican state legislature and governor gutted the initiative.
32. And it was always white guys. So, just to be clear, we’re not saying that this was some perfect era of journalism. As with politics in this era, this level of universality hinged on excluding a lot of people—especially women and people of color—from the conversation entirely.
33. This isn’t a U.S.-only phenomenon. Other better-functioning democracies like Canada are also struggling with the demise of local media. The economic model didn’t break just here; it broke everywhere there’s Internet.
34. If not, good for you for getting outside your comfort zone.
35. In response to a poll by an academic institution that showed non–news watchers were more informed than Fox News watchers, Fox News went on the attack: “We suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling.”
36. It worked! :(
37. Fun historical fact: Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, was actually a much more zealous anti-monopolist, but he’s mainly remembered for an apocryphal story about getting stuck in a bathtub.
38. This very book is being published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is both one of the largest publishers in the world and is also owned by one of those giant media conglomerates, CBS Corporation. We’ll see if this footnote survives editing!
39. After taking the House in 2018, the Democrats passed a bill to do precisely this.
40. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has repeatedly proposed eliminating even this meager funding.
41. Sorry, we’re both policy nerds at heart.