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Defending the Electoral College and the Constitution since 2009
In a recent article in The Center Square, I ask: “Will ‘election reformers’ learn from their failures?” I’m not holding my breath, but often hear a fair question: If not these reforms, then what should we do? The key is understanding what happened to get us here.
- If someone has an idea to make politics less extreme and divisive, they certainly should have a good answer to the question: Why has politics gotten nastier?
- A reformer trying to change the party system should have a thoughtful answer to the question: Why are political parties suddenly so ineffective?
- Anyone proposing reforms for Congress should first explain: Why doesn’t Congress work anymore?
This post is too short to examine all these questions, but there are some obvious answers.
One of these, repealing campaign finance reform, I talked about in my article. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was a failure on its own terms. It didn't stem lobbying or rein in money in politics, and instead it crippled political parties in a way that makes politics less accountable and more extreme. If anyone cares about that, there’s a really easy reform: repeal BCRA.
An answer that is just as clear, but more difficult to address, is the size and scope of government. The more power government has, including how much money it spends, the more it is worthwhile to lobby that government, to spend on politics, and to engage in outright corruption. A very limited government (which is what our federal government would be if the Constitution were merely followed) presents limited opportunities for corruption and fewer reasons to lavish money on candidate and lobbying campaigns.
One way to reduce power and spending at the federal level is to shift it back to the states. This had the added benefit of allowing more Americans to get what they want and, over time, making public policy smarter. I wrote about this in a post on federalism last year.
Short of making government smaller, another way to reduce political frenzy is to make rules simpler. In the 2000 Republican presidential primary, while John McCain was pushing campaign finance reform, Steve Forbes was calling for a flat income tax. Anyone who really wanted to reduce the importance of politics should have supported the latter. Fewer loopholes and distortions in tax and other policy mean fewer things to lobby (and probably fewer ways to manipulate the system overall).
None of this is sexy enough for some reformers. And many reformers come from the political left, which sees government as the ultimate solution to pretty much every problem. They’re incapable of seeing the glaring truth: the big government they want is actually the cause of the problems they claim to want to fix.