Democrats Must Champion Political Equality by Embracing Sweeping Institutional Reforms
The Democrats are in a strong position for the 2018 midterms. Trump’s approval rating has been below 40 percent for more than 7 months. Democrats currently enjoy a 7 point edge on the generic ballot and are slight favorites for retaking the House.
However, thanks to extreme gerrymandering, Democrats may need to win the popular vote by 7–8 points just to have a solid chance at winning back the House. They should run a strong economic agenda to present an appealing alternative to disaffected Trump voters.
However, in order to pass sweeping economic reforms in the first place, Democrats should first propose comprehensive institutional reforms that would shift the political balance of power between the corporate elite and citizens back in their favor. By championing political equality, Democrats can also appeal to broad majorities of Americans who feel that the political system is increasingly rigged and does not care about their interests.
Here are 8 topics that the Democrats should consider:
Reform Campaign Finance
Despite Trump’s low spending buoyed by $5 billion in media coverage, total spending in the 2016 election hit $6.44 billion, just slightly less in real terms compared to the 2012 election.
Even worse, the top 0.01 percent — about 24,000 people — donated a stunning $2.3 billion (about 36 percent of the total), a 45 percent increase from 2012. Meanwhile, donations of $200 or less declined by 3.4 percent, despite powering 59 percent of Bernie Sanders’s funding.
This sheer addiction to money has grave consequences. Congressmen routinely spend between 25 to 50 percent of their time fundraising. This entails spending hours every day holed up in a call center, dialing wealthy donors hoping for money.
With this level of dependence, combined with the fact that congressmen disproportionately spend their time with wealthy groups over their own constituents, corporate interests are able to hijack policymaking, which I have previously detailed at length.
So what can be done?
· Pass a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United and give Congress the authority to regulate campaign finance. Super PACs raised $1.7 billion and spent more than $1 billion in the 2016 election cycle, up from $600,000 in 2012. 57.2 percent of this spending supported Republicans.
Even without the unlimited spending of Super PACs, just 0.52 percent of Americans gave $200 or more in donations in the 2016 election cycle, and constituted 67.8 percent of all traditional funding. On the State level, eleven States impose no contribution limits. More importantly, since State races receive less scrutiny, even a couple thousand dollars could tip an election.
This tiny elite should not be able to monopolize fundraising and buy disproportionate access to politicians. Individuals should be limited to donating only $150 per race, with an aggregate contribution limit of $750 towards all candidates and parties per election cycle. The US should also severely limit outside spending, and scrutinize the identities of shell companies and 501c(4) organizations.
· Create a publicly financed system on the federal level. With severe funding restrictions, the next step is to democratize fundraising for those who are unable or unwilling to donate precious savings towards candidates.
There are several good options, ranging from a voting voucher system in Lawrence Lessig’s proposal to matching federal donations in the Fair Elections Now Act. Both crucially cap donations to a low level for participating candidates. Of the two, I think the Fair Elections Now Act would provide more robust financing and eliminate the need for big donations or outside spending.
· Ensure fair and affordable access to media markets. Since broadcast spectrum constitutes a public good, the FCC should reserve time for political advertising during election cycles for various races and ensure that all candidates can purchase spots at fair prices. It can also reserve time for multiple debates during primary and election cycles.
· Crack down on foreign interference in US Elections. In the 2016 election, a combination of Russian bots and incendiary advertising reached 126 million Facebook users and 20 million Instagram users. Russian groups have routinely interfered in democratic elections across the Western world, including in the Brexit and Catalonia referendums and the German parliamentary election in 2017.
The US should coordinate with the EU and other affected countries to detect and halt Russian intrusions. It should require social media companies to actively monitor and delete Russian trolls. Political ads on social media should come with disclosure requirements indicating who is funding them, and a database of approved ads should ensure visibility for the public, not just for the targeted groups ads target.
· Encourage the formation of State public financing laws. 13 States currently offer public financing in some manner. In Arizona and Maine, state congressmen reported spending more time engaging with constituents, and voters were more likely to vote all the way down the ballot.
For States without public financing laws, the federal government should set up a distinct public financing system for statewide and county races.
Revamp Voting Systems
Recently, gerrymandering has received a lot of attention, and rightfully so. In the 2012 election, Democrats actually won the overall popular vote in the House by 1.17 million votes, with 50.59 percent voting for a Democrat congressman. Nonetheless, the Republican Party had 234 seats to 201 for Democrats, a substantial 33 seat advantage and 18 seats above the number needed for a majority. That represents a 4.38 percent error in representation, driven by heavily gerrymandered seats in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
However, even with redistricting reform, one issue with single-member districts is its inherent winner-take-all feature (unhelpfully reinforced by first past the post). Even in a close election, the winning candidate’s party controls 100 percent of the district. Moreover, since a district may comprise of multiple communities with differing interests, it is difficult for a single member to effectively represent them all.
Voting systems should be reformed in the following ways:
· Institute multi-member districting in House races, using single transferable vote. Multi-member districts simply increases the number of members sent from each district (States that currently only have a single district would remain intact). Under the single transferable vote (STV), a ranked voting system would then be used to select the representatives in a way that most closely matches the preferences of the district’s constituents. Such a system would also allow third parties to win seats: instead of having to win majorities in a district, they can simply appeal to a sufficient number.
(A primer on STV could be found here).
· Create nonpartisan commissions for decennial redistricting. Although multi-member districts are less susceptible to gerrymandering, they are not immune. These commissions could include a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
They should include officials who have experience in the redistricting process and are knowledgeable of the competing priorities that should be considered when drawing a district. Moreover, these commissions should come equipped with experts who are qualified to run and interpret sophisticated map-drawing software.
The redistricting process should prioritize three goals and reconcile them as well as possible:
a. Making election results as proportional as possible to the number who voted for each party.
b. Maximizing the number of competitive districts.
c. Keeping communities together.
Commissions should hold public hearings to hear testimony from the community. They can listen to outside expertise, though safeguards and transparency requirements should be made to prevent outside groups backed by dark money from hijacking the process.
· Introduce instant runoff voting in Senate and presidential elections. One of the nastiest results of first past the post voting is that of the spoiler effect. In the 2000 presidential election, Bush won Florida by a margin of only 0.0092 percent. Meanwhile, Ralph Nader won 1.63 percent of the vote in that state, arguably “spoiling” the election.
With instant runoff, third party candidates are free to run, and voters are free to support them without splitting the vote. In instances where either major party candidate is especially unpopular, a third party candidate may have a solid chance to win.
· Abolish the electoral college. The electoral college is an antiquated relic that is grossly unrepresentative. Since 1824, 5 presidential elections have resulted in the winning presidential candidate losing the popular vote, including twice since 2000. Only voters living in swing states have any real influence on the result: in the 2016 election, just 13 States were decided by 5.5 percent or less.
By passing an amendment overturning the electoral college and determining the winner of presidential elections by popular vote, we can once again ensure that “one man, one vote” applies on the presidential level.
Restore Access to Voting
Since 2008, various States (disproportionately controlled by Republicans) have enacted various laws restricting voting, including voter ID, curtailing of early voting periods, cuts to the number of available voting polls, and elimination of same day registration. These measures disproportionately harm lower income and minority voters. In 2016, the ACLU reported that 17 States had restrictive voting laws, affecting 110 million Americans.
Access to voting should be expanded in the following ways:
· Automatic voter registration. The burden to register voters should be on the state. This could also include the mass distribution of a voter ID card.
· Universal two-week early voting periods. Many voters choose to vote early as a point of convenience. This program should be expanded to all States, including those that recently curtailed such policies. Voting booths should also remain open the weekend before Election Day.
· Same-day voter registration. In case automatic voter registration failed to successfully register a voter, voters should nonetheless be able to register on Election Day and proceed to vote.
· Make Election Day a national holiday. This would help workers who are currently unable to vote because of work obligations. Moreover, this allows voters to wait in line without disrupting other aspects of their lives.
· Modernize ballot machines and defend voting infrastructure against cyberattacks. The current patchwork of voting infrastructure is largely outdated. There have been a number of demonstrations on how easily legacy systems can be hacked. In the 2016 election, Russian groups attempted to hack the voter databases of 21 States.
Ballot machines should have up-to-date software and hardware and produce a verifiable paper trail to certify election results. Along with all aspects of voting infrastructure, they should be subject to regular audits to stress test for vulnerabilities and detect evidence of compromise.
Increase Congressional Independence from Special Interests
Since the 1980s, the number of congressional and research staff dramatically decreased. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS) both have 20 percent fewer staff today than in 1979. At the same time, the number of committee hearings steadily declined, and nowadays they are used for partisan theater rather than genuine fact searching.
This reduction in institutional support coincided with enormous increases in societal, technological, and political complexity. The result is lobbyist capture: in 2010, lobbyists spent $2.6 billion on lobbying, twice as much as Congress spent on staffers. Moreover, 80 percent of all spending is made by corporate interests, while 90–95 percent of lobbyist organizations represent businesses.
To close to the circle, a lot of these overworked and underpaid staffers eventually seek to enter the revolving door towards lobbying, where they make multiples off their current public salaries (Lawrence Lessig estimates a minimum of six times their current salaries). Turnover is also extremely high: of the staffers that started in 2005, 82 percent of Senate staffs and 70 percent of House staffers left by 2012.
To restore congressional independence from special interest groups: the following steps should be taken:
· “Double the committee staff, and triple the money available for salaries.” The increase would be split into specialized committee staff under committee chairs and an additional committee staffer on a congressman’s detail. This allows for long-term staff unaffected by electoral change who would have the historical knowledge and expertise to advise congressmen on policy issues.
· Restore staff from the Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, and Government Accountability Office to at least 1980s levels. Research staff are a critical source of accurate, nonpartisan knowledge on a variety of subjects. The GAO in particular can identify the efficacy of various programs and expose wasteful instances of government spending.
· Create a hyperlinked and connected database for the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States Code. This includes showing how it changes over time. It could be combined with CBO projections per section.
· Institute a 2-year waiting period for staffers and congressmen before they can enter lobbying. One reason prospective lobbyists command such a steep premium is because they can leverage existing relationships with other congressmen. While the issues they are advocating are sometimes benign, this influence is improper. Sitting congressmen should be swayed by the merits of an argument, not their personal relationships. As such, waiting for a single congressional cycle should curtail the most adverse effects of the revolving door while ensuring their policy expertise can still be of use.
Halt Political Brinksmanship
In July 2011, House Republicans came close to refusing to raise the debt ceiling, nearly resulting in the catastrophic default of US debt obligations. From this crisis, The Budget Control Act of 2011 was passed, imposing harsh discretionary spending limits and setting the stage for future government shutdowns by limiting options for bipartisanship in budget bills.
Accordingly, in October 2013, House Republicans shut the government down for 17 days over their attempts to delay the individual mandate and induce a death spiral in Obamacare. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats shut down the government for 3 days over DACA reform.
While immigration reform is a worthy cause, threatening government shutdowns should not become the new way to extract concessions. These tactics badly undermine trust in government and in Congress.
To halt this brinksmanship, the following should be considered:
· Invoke the 14th Amendment to bypass the debt ceiling. From the 14th Amendment:
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
Instead of bowing to economic terrorism and normalizing its use, Presidents should use this constitutional provision to keep creditors paid until a deal can be made. On the congressional level, the debt ceiling itself should be abolished.
· Repeal the Budget Control Act. As of May 2014, the US still enjoys a fiscal space of 165.1 percentage points of debt-to-GDP ratio. At this time, there is absolutely no reason to restrict spending, hamstring budget negotiations, and endanger discretionary spending programs that provide social safety nets for millions of Americans.
· Alter Senate rules to allow the passage of Continuing Resolutions with a simple majority. Even if the government is unable to agree on a new budget, an obstinate minority should not be able to shut down the government by blocking funding at current levels. (If a simple majority is unable to keep the government open, that is a different story).
· Limit filibuster abuse for the sake of wasting time. Norm Ornstein observes that filibusters are now routinely used even on uncontroversial legislation or nominations that ultimately passed near-unanimously. Senators would use filibusters on motions to proceed as well as the bill itself, and insist on the full 30 hours for debate allowed after cloture simply to waste more time.
Ultimately, the filibuster should be limited to being used once per bill. Meanwhile, the Senate parliamentarian should be authorized to limit time for debate after cloture if it is explicitly being used to stall.
Invoke Political Antitrust
Since the publication of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, courts have been notably lax on antitrust enforcement. Riding off a decade of mergers worth $10 trillion, corporations are now more consolidated than ever. A wide range of industries has seen increasing consolidation, ranging from airlines to hospitals to banks. Aside from increased prices and reduced competition, corporate consolidation has been responsible for widening regional inequality, and has even constrained wage growth via a monopsony effect.
Corporate consolidation has also increased their political influence to a troubling degree. The sheer clout and size of Fortune 100 companies gives them significant influence and deep pockets for campaign donations and lobbying. The more consolidated an industry is, the easier it becomes for companies to coordinate on advancing policy interests and mobilize against legislation that threatens their bottom lines.
Political antitrust shares several features with economic antitrust:
· Increase funding and resources for the FTC and DOJ to litigate and break up consolidated companies. To determine industry concentration, the FTC could use the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) as a proxy. Lobbying expenditures should also be scrutinized before and after specific mergers.
· Block mergers and acquisitions that threaten to increase industry concentration. The FTC and DOJ could force divestments or spinoffs as conditions for these M&A deals, or reject them entirely.
· Push for transparency and accountability algorithms used to make economic projections. A number of large companies have brought on well-paid economists to devise models that never receive public scrutiny. These should be accessible to the public, with steep penalties for companies and economists when their models prove significantly wrong.
Restore Media
Since the corporate raids in the 1980s, newsrooms have routinely laid off dozens of its staff members via layoffs and buyouts to please Wall Street. The transition towards the Internet, followed by the Great Recession, has accelerated the decline of media. Since 2000, the size of the newsroom contracted by almost 40 percent. Newsrooms now face long-term declines in ad revenues, and routinely produce sensationalist drivel to drive eyeballs. TV news is especially terrible at informing the public.
Right now, Americans spend 5 percent of their time on all news media; however, media still comprises 20 percent of all ad revenue. This trend cannot continue forever. Meanwhile, not only are Google and Facebook crowding out ad revenue, they provide 70 percent of all referrals to news sites.
Like other industries, they have gotten increasingly consolidated: nine out of ten newspapers are owned by a media chain, and investment groups own newspapers in 514 of the 3,142 counties. Moreover, news publications’ corrosive relationship with corporate advertising limits the scope for conversation. Economically, it has become increasingly unsustainable as a business model.
The past decade has been so difficult for smaller media publications (circulation of major regional papers declined 42 percent) that a number of local regions have little to none substantive local coverage, with rural areas being hit hardest. Without coverage, there can be little knowledge of local issues, and politicians and corporate groups can act unethically without getting caught.
What can be done to restore the fourth estate?
· Institute a media voucher (tax credit of $50) allowing Americans to donate to a US news publication of their choice. In exchange for this source of citizen-funded journalism, these publications should agree to take down paywalls and provide free digital archives of all their stories. They should also eliminate their sources of corporate advertising and force investment groups and media chains to divest them.
· Triple funding in public media programs. In 2014, the US spent only $3 per capita funding its public media programs — including terrific programs like PBS and NPR (the UK, by contrast, spent $114 per capita). Consequently, these programs must cobble together funding from state, local, and private funding, including from periodic pledge drives.
This funding should allow for the elimination of pledge drives and reduce dependence on private corporations for funding. They should also be used to drive additional investigative journalism, as well as state and local level reporting.
· Encourage reincorporation of news organizations as L3Cs. As low-profit limited liability companies, news organizations could enjoy additional tax advantages. This tax relief could also extend towards the personal taxes of journalists themselves.
· Break up the Sinclair group and prevent concentration in media ownership. Sinclair owns local news stations and forces them to peddle conservative talking points. With the help of FCC deregulation on media concentration, its proposed merger with Tribune group would give it access to 72 percent of all American households (it already owns 193 stations across 89 US markets). More broadly, just six companies own 90 percent of the media.
This level of media ownership is inappropriate. Local news segments should inherently avoid having a partisan bent. Antitrust should be applied to break up consolidated media groups and increase independent ownership.
Resuscitate Unions
The decline of private unions is a national tragedy. Private unions are only a modest drag on the economy (0.4–0.6 percent of GDP), but they represented a powerful voice for the middle class and would increase the wages of both union members and nonunion workers within the industry. Unions even increased voter turnout (unions distributed information to their members and bussed them to the polls).
Alas, thanks to the twin forces of globalization and policy drift (the failure to pass badly needed reforms during the Carter and Obama administrations), private union membership fell from 26 percent in 1978 to only 10.7 percent in 2017. Moreover, in States that passed “right to work” laws, which allowed employees to free ride off union benefits without paying dues, has decreased the Democratic presidential vote share by an estimated 3.5 percent, with similar effects downballot.
Private unions should be rescued using the following reforms:
· Pass the Employee Free Choice Act. This bill was designed to allow unions to form upon the consent of the majority of workers rather than hold an additional election. Right now, employers divide and conquer workers through one-on-one intimidation and fire over 20 percent of employees actively involved in forming a union (the fines for doing so are trivial). They sometimes delay elections for years, and even after the union is successfully formed, stall when creating the first contract.
The bill would increase penalties for employers discriminating against workers due to union advocacy, and force the arbitration of a contract to enforce the power of a private union.
· Repeal the provision in the Taft-Hartley Act allowing “right-to-work” laws. These laws starve unions of funding and prevent them from bargaining as effectively for better wages. They also represent a broader race to the bottom some States are pursuing in an effort to poach business from high-tax blue States, straining their economies and State budgets.
· Reform corporate bankruptcy proceedings to hold them accountable towards employees. American Airlines used its bankruptcy in November 2011 as a bludgeon to curtail worker pay and benefit plans. Under current bankruptcy law, the interests of creditors take precedence over those of its workers. It should not be used as a loophole to undermine workers’ rights.
