More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Voting in America should be as straightforward as it is in democracies in Europe and elsewhere. This means we should do the following: 1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions. 2. Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen. This could be accompanied by the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens. The burdens of the registration process should not deter anyone from voting. 3. Expand early voting and easy
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES. Those who win the most votes should win elections.
Several steps can be taken to ensure that those who win electoral majorities actually govern: 8. Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote. No other presidential democracy permits the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency. Such a constitutional amendment very nearly passed as recently as 1970. 9. Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state (as in Germany). California and Texas should elect more senators than Vermont and Wyoming. Because Article V of the U.S. Constitution
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES. Finally, Americans must take steps to empower legislative majorities by weakening counter-majoritarian legislative and judicial institutions: 13. Abolish the Senate filibuster (a reform that requires neither statutory nor constitutional change), thereby eliminating the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities. In no other established democracy is such a minority veto routinely employed. 14. Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court
...more
The reforms we propose might appear radical, but they are already in place in the vast majority of established democracies, including highly successful ones like Denmark, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden. Making it simpler to vote, ending gerrymandering, replacing the Electoral College with a direct popular vote, eliminating the Senate filibuster, making Senate representation more proportional, ending lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, and making it a little easier to reform the Constitution—all of these changes would simply catch us up to the rest of the world.
Are democratic reforms “pie in the sky”?
The most powerful weapon against change is silence.
In 2020, the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report, titled Our Common Purpose,
Organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice, New America, and Protect Democracy have presented a range of innovative proposals to create a more proportional electoral system, end gerrymandering, expand voting rights, and improve the quality of elections.
Talk and ideas aren’t empty; they lay the groundwork for reform.
When institutional change happens, participants often quote the French poet Victor Hugo’s line “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” But an idea’s time can only come if someone has proposed
Democratic reform will remain impossible, however, unless we rethink our attitude toward constitutional change.
As Aziz Rana observes, many Americans embrace the Constitution with an “almost religious devotion.”
In other words, our society operates under the assumption that our founding institutions are, in effect, best practice—across history and in all contexts. The idea that the U.S. Constitution cannot be improved upon is not based on empirical evidence or serious debate. Rather, it is an article of faith.
That isn’t how institutions work. Constitutions are never perfect at their inception. They are, after all, human creations.
And even the best-designed constitutions require occasional revision because the world in which they operate changes—often dramatically. No set of rules is ever “best practice” for all time and under all circumstances.
John Roberts, later chief justice of the Supreme Court, recognized this when he championed judicial term limits in 1983, when he was working in the Office of White House Counsel under President Ronald Reagan: The framers adopted life tenure at a time when people simply did not live as long as they do now. A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty-five or thirty years was a rarity then, but it is becoming commonplace today. Setting a term of, say, fifteen years would ensure that federal judges would not lose all touch with reality through decades of ivory tower existence.
At America’s founding, the very notion of representative democracy had not yet been invented.
Changes in the world around us do not always require constitutional change, but sometimes they do.
The founders actually knew this. They were not wedded to the original version of the Constitution. They recognized the limitations of their creation and believed that later generations would—and should—modify them.
Thomas Jefferson was especially critical of those who “look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.” In his view, laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind….We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Institutions that do not adapt may limp along for years and even decades. But they can grow sclerotic and eventually undermine the legitimacy of the political system.
American history has been punctuated by rare but meaningful moments of democratic progress. During Reconstruction, three major constitutional amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) and a series of far-reaching new laws opened up the political system (albeit only temporarily) to African Americans. Likewise, between 1913 and 1920, America witnessed the passage of three democratizing constitutional amendments: the Sixteenth, authorizing a direct income tax; the Seventeenth, establishing direct elections to the U.S. Senate; and the Nineteenth, constitutionalizing women’s suffrage.
...more
For one, change doesn’t depend on the arrival of a single transformative leader. Many of America’s most important
These leaders’ transformations did not occur accidentally or overnight. They required robust political movements. A first step in this direction was getting reform on the public agenda. Indeed, critical to the success of any reform movement is the ability of advocates, organizers, public thinkers, and opinion makers to reshape the terms of political debate and gradually alter what others viewed as desirable or possible.
For example, the Democratic Party’s transformation from a defender of Jim Crow into an advocate of civil rights did not occur naturally, easily, or quickly.
But setting the agenda is only the beginning. Democratic reform also requires continuous political pressure. Meaningful change is usually driven by sustained social movements—broad coalitions of citizens whose activism shifts the debate and, eventually, the balance of political power on an issue.
Ultimately, social movements can change politicians’ electoral calculations by creating new constituencies for reform and discrediting the defenders of the status quo. In the case of the civil rights movement, the legal struggle was spearheaded by the NAACP, but the grassroots campaign was carried out by organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was based on a vast network of churches, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Politicians like Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson did not become reform advocates on their own. Rather, they embraced inclusionary reforms only when large-scale social movements altered their political calculus.
Each of the above reform periods was the product of a long, grinding struggle.
To get the word male in effect out of the constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign….During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to urge Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to induce State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into State constitutions; 277 campaigns to persuade State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms; and 19
...more
The women’s suffrage movement was scarred by defeat, infighting, and even a deep sense of betrayal, especially after female enfranchisement was pushed to the margins with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. To survive, the movement had to adjust its strategy. Leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony worked to develop an “origin story” for the movement, elevating the importance of the movement’s original 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
Mobilization was also critical. Following the merger of the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1890, the movement strengthened considerably.
There may be a lesson here: suffrage reform was initially achieved, in many cases, at the state level, which helped build momentum for federal constitutional change.
Other major constitutional reforms also took time and relentless effort. The Seventeenth Amendment, which established the direct election of U.S. senators, was preceded by decades of failed initiatives.
And it wasn’t just Black Lives Matter. The Trump presidency spawned a massive civic movement in defense of democracy. New organizations—many of them bipartisan—emerged to defend civil and voting rights, safeguard elections, and uphold the rule of law, joining established organizations such as the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, and the NAACP.
One prominent organization, Protect Democracy, was created in 2016 to “prevent our democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”
In 2016, Brown and Cliff Albright created the Black Voters Matter Fund, which supported community-based efforts—mainly in the South—to fight the closure of polling stations, educate citizens about new registration and voting requirements, and mobilize voters.
Young voters also joined the struggle for multiracial democracy during the Trump years. Gen Z is the most diverse generation in American history. It is also the most troubled by the state of contemporary American politics and, far and away, the most committed to the principles of multiracial democracy.
Historically, young people have not voted. Only 39 percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine voted in the 2016 election, compared with more than 70 percent of those over sixty.
Black Lives Matter and Gen-Z for Change are politically left of center, but the defense of American democracy was a bipartisan effort.
So in January 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Glenn created a nonpartisan Facebook group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG).
If there is one thing we’ve learned from democracy movements, past and present, it’s this: Democratic reform doesn’t just happen. It is made.
Reforming American democracy requires a reckoning with our not-so-democratic past.
Loving America with a broken heart means recognizing our own country’s failure to live up to its stated democratic ideals—its failure, for too long, to provide liberty and justice for all. It means committing ourselves to achieving those ideals, by building an inclusive, multiracial democracy that all Americans can embrace.
