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Showing Original Post only (View all)Democratic Reforms Held Hostage To Absurd Amendment Process [View all]
If we ever are to make common sense democratic reforms to our federal system... it has to be done by amendment. Yet the absurdity of this process rarely is examined. I'll be using approximate numbers in the following...
To get a proposed amendment out of Congress it has to be approved by 2/3 of both houses. Leaving aside gerrymandering in the House, in the Senate, 18% of the US population gets 52% of the seats. Regardless of what the House does, any amendment can be blocked in the Senate by states with less than 15% of the US population.
Once a proposed amendment gets to the states where 3/4 approval is needed... it can be blocked by states with as little as 4% of the population yet ratified by states with 40% of the population.
But here's where it gets even nuttier... these numbers assume unanimous approval in those states... but chances are there won't be. So assuming a 49-51% split of opinion in each state... amendments may actually be blocked by 2% of the population yet ratified by between as little as 20% of the population (by this I mean their representatives).
Given the hurdles, does it come, then, as any surprise that not ONE of the core antidemocratic features of the federal system has ever been amended away?