General Discussion

Scuba

(53,475 posts) Fri Sep 28, 2012, 09:46 AM Sep 2012

The Unraveling of Government

I would subtitle this article "the power of grass roots politics". In contrast to the Tea Party being created from astroturf to promote candidates mindful of the Koch brother's needs, we need to keep our side active and promoting progressives who will work for positive changes to our system.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/the-unraveling-of-government/

Let’s begin with the election process itself. In most states, party leaders have conspired to create “sore loser” laws that deny any place on the November ballot to a candidate who loses in a party primary or convention, no matter how few people participated. The two most egregious recent examples were former governor Mike Castle’s losing a spot on the Senate ballot in Delaware in 2010 because 30,000 people, in a state of nearly one million, voted for his primary opponent, and Utah, with a population of nearly three million, where Senator Robert Bennett was denied a place on the general election ballot that same year because a convention of 3,500 party activists denied him their endorsement.

This year, the same thing happened to Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who lost a primary to a man who vowed never to compromise. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch survived this year only by disavowing his own bipartisan credentials. Two incumbent Democratic House members, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, both moderates, were tossed out of office by liberal activists in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primaries earlier this year, just as Senator Joe Lieberman, after having been his party’s vice-presidential nominee, was defeated in a Connecticut Democratic primary in 2006. (Because Connecticut is one of the states that doesn’t have a “sore loser” law, Lieberman was able to run as an Independent in the general election where his re-election demonstrated that the primary results did not reflect the preferences of Connecticut voters.)

Because activists can use closed primaries to deny ballot access to people they deem insufficiently pure, the majority of voters — many of whom would prefer the candidates who have been eliminated — simply lose the ability to make that choice. Why we would allow parties in a democracy to limit voter choice is simply beyond me. The primary system was introduced by Progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a reform to expand democracy and give voters a greater voice in the selection of public officials, not to squeeze voters out of the picture. If the goal is to send to Washington the preferred choice of the state’s voters (or a congressional district’s voters), all credible candidates should be allowed to appear on the ballot and all the voters, regardless of party, should be allowed to determine who will represent them.

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Here’s the hard part. The dysfunction – the inability to consider ideas that emanate from “the other side”, the unwillingness to compromise, the constant maneuvering for party advantage – derives directly from the power we have given those parties to shape who sits in office and how they function. And every single piece of that rotten puzzle can be undone by the people themselves. Nearly half the states allow for initiative petitions, by means of which voters themselves can change election and redistricting laws (to be clear, I don’t favor the use of citizen initiatives to set policy; it’s a power that should be reserved to setting the rules of the game, the process by which lawmakers are chosen).