Thinking about the huge minoritarian, oligarchic challenges that face those Americans... the majority... who favor democracy over oligarchy...I come up against the following as the only feasible way to achieve this goal.
1. Gain and keep control of a majority of the House and a Senate with at least 50 senators willing to suspend or end the filibuster to accomplish our goals. Elect a Democrat to the White House. This is a desperate fight to the death. We cannot lose. We must win.
2. Pass voting rights, reproductive rights, etc. legislation on a house-on-fire emergency basis. I don't enumerate the agenda because it is well known. The fact that the Supreme Court will try to eviscerate this agenda is not a reason not to proceed... see below.
3. "Pack the court." Yes. The hell with it. They've shown every intention and willingness to bend and break norms and rules. There is precedent to change the number of justices. So change it. Give the Democratic president four new seats to fill, immediately. This is clearly the only way to restore legitimacy, meaning some reflection of the actual views and norms of the country as a whole, to the Court.
4. The remaining challenges... the electoral college and the minoritarian Senate chief among them... cannot be fixed without Constitutional Amendments, which are impossible in the current climate. The only solution I can come up with is more states. Again, they have been willing to break every norm and rule to achieve their 50-year plan. We must do so as well. Add DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands. Split New York, California, Oregon, Washington.... wherever it's possible to do it, into multiple states with at least one additional Democratic dominant state extra in each case to increase the overall representation of the majority of the population in the Senate. In some states this will not be possible, but in enough of them it is possible. Abandon any pretense that there is any purpose to this other than to increase Democratic representation in the Senate and gain the ability to amend the Constitution... for the simple reason that there are, in fact, more Democrats in the country, and there should be more Democrats in the Senate and it should be possible to amend the Constitution if a majority of Americans want it. I'm envisioning net 15+ new states, some of which would be comprised of what are now only counties, such as Los Angeles County, which has far more people than several currently existing states, or even cities, such as Seattle Metro, Portland Metro, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, East Bay, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, Buffalo... we have to get creative with traditional geography secondary to achieving a balance of political power with population as the only criterion that really matters. Once this is accomplished, Constitutional amendments to end gerrymandering, ensure rights of privacy, enshrine Constitutional principles of equity and regulatory capacity to protect the environment, end the electoral college, etc. should be enacted immediately.
If this sounds crazy to you... "oh, we could never do that," then you are with the feckless core of the current Democratic party, and the sad truth is that we have lost these battles time and again and are about to be frozen out of power FOREVER if we don't rise to the challenge. The Republicans did both the court and the state thing once before... in the 1880s they added a whole bunch of low population states in the great plains for precisely the same sort of reasons. Now, it's our turn to remake America so that its governance actually reflects its people.
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