No compromise in sight for modern election reforms

The election is only days away; the country is in a funk; talk about the decline of democracy is in the air. If nothing else, the toxic mixture of this nasty midterm election campaign, the hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage on Capitol Hill, and the general unease about election validity have underlined some of the shortcomings of an American political system that, only a quarter-century ago, seemed robust, and of an American nation that seemed stable.

None of that is true anymore. One of the reasons may surprise you: It isn’t 1959 anymore.

On the surface that wasn’t such a terrific year. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were on the ascendancy in Cuba; France was recovering from political paralysis; and on a single day, a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper went down in Iowa and an American Airlines plane went down in New York’s East River. But the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened; the Mercury astronauts were chosen; John Coltrane and Miles Davis were making marvelous music; The Twilight Zone and The Sound of Music had their debuts; and Sheena Easton and Lester Holt were born.

But the matter that involves us this morning is this: Both Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union.

That represented a substantial change not only in the American flag (two more stars!) but also in the nature of the United States itself. It was the first time in 47 years that a new state was admitted. It rounded off the Senate to a convenient 100 members. And it deepened the country’s identity as a Pacific as well as an Atlantic nation; the Japanese attacks on both Hawaii (Pearl Harbor, 1941) and Alaska ( the Aleutian Islands, 1942) demonstrated the strategic importance of both places.

This was a great American pivot, and it had bipartisan support. There was a reason for that: Republicans thought they would have longtime support in Hawaii and the Democrats believed they would easily win longtime support in Alaska. Never mind that today both senators from Hawaii are Democrats and both senators from Alaska are Republicans. There was a partisan balance in admitting both states.

What’s the relevance to today?

No such balance exists on the principal elements of contemporary American politics that are undermining the country’s democratic values. In 1959, the Democrats swallowed the admission of Hawaii and the Republicans swallowed the admission of Alaska and the deal kept the political balance intact. Today there’s no deal — one party getting an advantage in one critical area and in turn swallowing its disadvantage in another — for the carbuncles of the Constitution that cry out for change.

There are historical reasons for some of these irregularities, many of them relating to the Founders’ efforts to balance the new country’s national interest with the existing states’ demands for their prerogatives. Every 11th grade history pupil knows them, but most of the rest of the country has forgotten them — and, in any case, they seem increasingly irrelevant.

There once was a rationale for electing the president through the Electoral College. In Federalist 39, James Madison speaks of “the act of the people as forming so many independent states, not as forming one aggregate nation” and sets out one of the baseline governing principles of the early Republic: to combine the power of the individuals who comprise the country and the power of the states that created the country.

But in truth, slavery was a huge motivator. The Southern states wanted threefifths of the enslaved to count for representative purposes but not to vote. That meant there needed to be an indirect method of selecting the president — one removed from the popular vote but still reflecting population factors.

Five times — in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 — the winner of the popular vote has lost the presidential election. The fact that it has happened twice in recent years has added fuel to the critique that a country that stands for popular rule should allow the popular vote to determine who shall rule.

The principle of preserving state power is part, but not all, of the rationale of the composition of the Senate, which awards two members to each state; another reason, as every American schoolchild once knew, was to have a body that would temper the impulses of the House of Representatives, then as now known as the “peoples’ house.” But today Wyoming and California have the same number of senators even though Wyoming, with a population the size of Milwaukee, has about 1.4% of the number of people of California, which has more people than Canada. That stunning incongruity feeds into the Electoral College, because in calculating the number of Electoral votes for the states, each gets to add two — the number of its senators — to the number of its House members.

Now there is the matter of the lack of congressional members — and the lack of statehood — for the District of Columbia, which has a bigger population than Wyoming and Vermont, and Puerto Rico, with a population almost exactly the size of West Virginia and Hawaii combined and a bigger population than 20 of the states, including the political powerhouses of Iowa and New Hampshire.

All these elements in defiance of democratic values have historical antecedents that made sense — more than two centuries ago. Some retain some rationality; a national election conducted for the popular vote would create campaigns that would emphasize big population areas. Candidates would merely campaign in California, Texas, Florida and New York and a handful of other states — but not elsewhere. That would be the cost of assuring the “one person, one vote” principle enshrined in other parts of our national polity.

So why can’t the country do any of these things, to accomplish the goal of making a more perfect union?

Because this isn’t 1959. The Democrats got Alaska; the Republicans got Hawaii; the country got two endlessly fascinating states, and everyone was happy.

In 1959, there was a deal to be made. In 2022, there’s no comparable bargain available. The Democrats want all of these changes, the Republicans want none. There is logic to both parties’ views. Approve one, or approve them all, and the Democrats are set, at least for a while. The Republicans know that, and as a result they won’t budge on any of them. Their opposition is perfectly rational. And this is not 1959.