Comment on [deleted]
mlg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Impeachment is the US legislative form of this, but it almost never happens because getting the two party system to engage it in both the house and senate is too high of a task.
That being said, be careful what you wish for: en.wikipedia.org/…/No-confidence_motion_against_I…
Parliamentary can be better, but there’s always the chance it backfires and it becomes a massive bribery scheme, which would be even worse in the US because lobbying in the US is legal. You’d just end up in a situation where highest bidder can change between parties on a whim with reduced repercussion from voters.
All they really need to do is reset the senate into proportional representation with a constitutional amendment because state’s rights stopped existing decades ago, especially after SCOTUS torpedoed basically all the individual rights asserted by previous cases, including limits on lobbying.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Resetting the senate into proportional representation isn’t enough. It will still not fix the two-party issue. You’d need a senate that’s fully proportional, not just a bunch of first-to-the-post races.
It needs to be setup in a way that if 5% of all voters across the whole US vote for party X, then party X should have 5% of the seats in the senate, regardless of whether that party won a single state or not.
The problem right now is that the first-to-the-post system punishes vote splitting.
Say there’s three parties on an imaginary spectrum (purposely avoiding the labels left and right here). The spectrum goes fro 0 to 1, with 0 and 1 being extreme positions. Party A is at 0.2, Party B is at 0.6 and Party C is at 0.9.
Party B and C are very popular, party A is tiny.
Our imaginary voter is at 0.1 of that spectrum. So they would really like Party A to win. They don’t really want party B to win, but they would absolutely hate it if party C wins.
But if they vote for A, that vote is lost because A has no chance of winning, thus their vote for A causes and advantage for C to win, compared to the voter voting for B.
In fact, if 60% of the voters split their votes equally among A and B, and the rest votes for C, C will win, even though a majority would be against this.
Germany has a quite good system. They have first-to-the-post direct mandates to make sure there’s direct representation of constituencies. And then there’s a pool of list mandates that are filled on-demand to make up for the difference between the direct mandates and the national proportional vote.
That would mean if our hypothetical party won 5% of the votes but no state, they would have no direct mandates in the senate but would get enough list mandates so that 5% of all seats would be filled with their representatives.
This would allow coalitions which in turn increase voter choice, representation and compromise.