You Tell Me It's the Institution. Well, you know . . .

            As I said in the last post, I think Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a “political revolution,” has his heart in the right place.  But our governing institutions are set up in such a way as to make such a revolution, brought about by a single presidential election, highly unlikely.

            Bernie’s idea is that good people around the United States will, on election day, stand up to the wealthiest 1% of our population who have polluted our politics and captured our government by to electing him president..

            Well, you know . . .

            Even if a majority of Americans wholeheartedly agree with every plank in his platform, there is almost no chance that those good people will be able to give Bernie everything he wants.  Our system of governance, as currently configured, is simply not designed to give a clear majority of our population the power to get, through democratic means, the policies it wants.  Preventing sweeping change through democracy is a design “feature” of our system and not a “bug.” 

            The Senate was specifically designed to be a speed bump—and that’s before we even begin to discuss the filibuster.  Before the adoption of the 17^th Amendment, each state’s legislature would decide who would represent the state in the Senate.  That served to insulate Senators from popular opinion.

The 17^th Amendment provided for the popular election of Senators, but that doesn’t solve Bernie’s problem with the Senate.  Senators have 6-year terms and only a third of them ever stand for re-election during any national election. That means that even if Bernie’s revolution completely succeeds, two-thirds of the Senate will still be in the hands of the ancient regime when the dust from the 2016 election settles.  It will take at least one more election after 2016 before a majority of the Senate could be controlled by Bernie’s revolutionaries.

            That’s all theoretical, though, it and doesn’t account for the facts on the ground.  For purposes of argument, lets ignore the fact that not all Democrats or Republicans hold the mean ideological positions of their respective parties and assume that all Democrats who hold Senate seats in the next Congress would rubber-stamp all of Bernie’s proposals while also assuming that all Republicans holding Senate seats in the next Congress would uniformly oppose them.

            There are currently 46 Senate Democrats and 54 Senate Republicans.  Of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs in 2016, only 10 are held by Democrats while 24 are held by Republicans.  Seven of those Republicans occupy seats from “blue” States that twice voted for Barack Obama.  None of the Democrats occupy seats from the “red” states that voted for the Republican candidate in the last two presidential elections.

            Since this is Bernie’s fantasy, let’s assume that even though incumbents tend to have electoral advantages over challengers, every blue state Senate seat flips, and Democrats end up controlling 52 Senate seats in 2017.

            That’s enough to gain control of the Senate committee structure and floor schedule, but sadly, it’s not enough to pass legislation.  The de facto threshold for legislating is 60 votes, which is the number of votes required to end a filibuster.  The Bernieites would be 8 votes shy of that number, and so the Republican forces of reaction (this is Bernie’s fantasy, after all) would easily be able to block anything suggested by Sanders.

            The Constitution does not provide for filibusters.  They are, instead, creatures of the Senate’s arcane rules.  In theory, it is possible for a majority of the Senate to change the rules regarding filibusters.  In the real world, neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown much stomach for disallowing filibusters (though the Democrats did “go nuclear” by outlawing filibusters against presidential appointees other than Supreme Court nominees).  Both sides know that they may need to be able to use the filibuster when they become minority parties in the Senate.

            But again, let’s suppose that Bernie’s forces in the Senate are able to take the fateful step of dispatching the filibuster.  Even so, it’s far from certain that Bernie’s forces will be able to keep control of the Senate for all 4 years of his first term.  In 2018, the tables turn.  Democrats will be defending 25 seats, at least 5 of which are in reliably red presidential states.  And Democrats tend to do worse in mid-term elections than they do in presidential years.

            Ponder well the observation that even though the bulk of our population lives in states that reliably votes for Democratic presidential candidates, there are more states that reliably vote Republican.  Since every state has two votes in the Senate, Republicans are likely to control it more often than Democrats.

            The life of the revolution is not going to be much easier in the House of Representatives.  Though the House depends on proportional representation, that representation can be determined by the way states draw the boundaries of their congressional districts.  In states like Texas and Pennsylvania where the Republicans controlled the redistricting process after the 2010 Census, Republicans ended up controlling more House districts than their proportion in the population would call for.  States like Maryland can offset the effects of gerrymandering to some extent. But, because Democrats tend to live in more compact densely populated areas than do Republicans, there are likely to be more Republican districts than Democratic ones.

            While 2016 could be Bernie’s big year (well, you know . . . ), he’ll still be stuck with more maps favoring Republicans than Democrats.  Even if his election also sweeps a large number of revolutionaries into Congress in a Democratic wave, the tide is likely to turn in 2018 when he is not on the ballot.  Reactionaries tend to vote in off-year elections in greater proportions than do Bernie’s summer soldiers.

            The only way for the true voice of the people to be heard the way Bernie wants it to be heard is to change our institutions.  Specifically, we’d need to abolish the Senate—an institution that has less and less to do anyway--and to make House of Representative terms coterminous with that of the President.  Assuming that House members always vote with their parties, that’s the only way to insure that the people always get the policies they want.

            That would be far more democratic than what we have right now.  But democracy may not always be what we want.  I shudder to think what would happen in a truly democratic society that elects, not Bernie Sanders and his followers, but Donald Trump and his.

            Does anyone still want a revolution?