First, they have taken up the most ambitious program of vote suppression since Jim Crow. These gerrymandered states then spread their minoritarian poison in two distinctive ways. Why are we so sanguine about legislatures that are regularly controlled by the party that won fewer votes across the state?
We are all outraged when the Electoral College selects a president who hasn’t won a plurality of votes, something it has done five times in its history. Yet this fact is all but invisible to most Americans-including, as she evinces, justices on the Supreme Court. State legislatures, as Seifter characterizes them, are “the least majoritarian branch” of our representative democracy. Likewise, Republicans in Virginia won just 44.5 percent of the vote but received 51 percent of statehouse seats. In Wisconsin, for example, the popular vote for Republicans in 2018 was 44.7 percent but Republicans controlled 64.6 percent of the seats in the statehouse. As Miriam Seifter, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison summarized in a recent article for the Columbia Law Review, “across the nation, the vast majority of states in recent memory have had legislatures controlled by either a clear or probable minority party.” Her work was based in part upon an extraordinary analysis published by the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, which found that after the 2018 election, close to 60 million Americans “live under minority rule in their US state legislatures.” The most egregious states in this mix are also among the most important in presidential elections. Because the Supreme Court has declared that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the ken of our Constitution, states have radically manipulated legislative districts. The corruption of our majoritarian representative democracy begins at the state legislatures. And every aspiring democracy around the world should understand the specifics of that corruption-if only to avoid the same in its own land. Instead, that commitment is now corrupted in America.
The United States is instead a failed democratic state.Īt every level, the institutions that the US has evolved for implementing our democracy betray the basic commitment of a representative democracy: that it be, at its core, fair and majoritarian. We are not a model for the world to copy.
But it is right that we “confront” these “imperfections” “openly and transparently.” Because what’s most striking about America’s understanding of our own democracy is our ability to see what’s just not there. I’m not certain who precisely is going to be showcasing our own “imperfections.” The agenda online is incomplete. America will also, the page continues, in what is certainly the money quote of the whole conference, “showcase one of democracy’s unique strengths: the ability to acknowledge its imperfections and confront them openly and transparently, so that we may, as the United States Constitution puts it, ‘form a more perfect union.’” Representatives from around the world will assemble, virtually, “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal.” For the United States, the webpage declares, “the summit will offer an opportunity to listen, learn, and engage with a diverse range of” democratic actors.
The State Department is hosting a democracy summit this week. Democratic Senators Tom Udall, Chuck Schumer, and Sheldon Whitehouse unveiling to the press the For the People Act at the Capitol, Washington, D.C., March 27, 2019
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