Riding The Crazy Train With Ian

There are rational parameters within which discussion may be worthwhile, but they don’t seem to constrain too many otherwise nice folks these days. It was floated that Chief Judge John Roberts, presiding over the impeachment trial in the Senate, could call John Bolton as a witness. The rationale? The Constitution doesn’t say he can’t, and it says he presides, so there.

And some people who want Bolton to testify, which spans a larger group than just those who so desperately want Trump impeached that they’ll believe anything, bought it. Except it’s nonsense talk.

I regret to inform you: This is a delusion, if a pleasant one. The chief justice is not going to arrive on a white steed to save the country from Trump. Indeed, a minimalist approach on Roberts’s part is not only the all-but-certain outcome — it is also the wiser course, better for the court and the country.

More to the point, people will latch onto whatever wild and crazy idea gets released into the wild, no matter how ridiculous and baseless. This is greatly exacerbated by two groups of people, the first having ascribed credibility and the second having attributed credibility. Legal academics and legal pundits. There, in addition, the talking heads with official titles involving the word “former,” as in “former prosecutor,” who validate Rachel Maddow’s smirk, but they come and go so quickly as to be mere shadows.

And we, meaning the groundlings of the law and law-adjacent, spend time and the occasional brain cell trying to make sense of this craziness. But in the scheme of whatabout, few have murdered more brain cells than Ian Millhiser (with Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern* a close second), who wrote for ultra-progressive Thinkprogress before it went under, and was then picked up by the merely uber-progressive Vox.

A few days ago, a student note in Harvard Law Review raised some chuckles as an exercise in wild ideas that the Constitution wouldn’t preclude.

To create a system where every vote counts equally, the Constitution must be amended. To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states. These states — which could be added with a simple congressional majority — would add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments: (1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally; (2) an expansion of the House so that all citizens are represented in equal-sized districts; (3) a replacement of the Electoral College with a popular vote; and (4) a modification of the Constitution’s amendment process that would ensure future amendments are ratified by states representing most Americans.

It is, to be sure, an interesting law school level exercise, and putting the ideological issues of the person who wrote it aside, it reflects some decent effort in finding ways to accomplish outcomes that would seem technically difficult, even if they weren’t politically impossible. The Great State of Georgetown? The Commonwealth of G Street, NE? It’s impressive work for a law student, as off-the-wall as it may be.

Yet, Ian Millhiser didn’t find it cute enough for a chuckle, but worthy of a post at Vox.

American democracy is broken.

We have a president who lost the popular vote, a Senate where the “majority” represents about 15 million fewer people than the “minority,” and a Supreme Court where two justices were nominated by that president and confirmed by that unrepresentative Senate.

An unsigned note, entitled “Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation” and published in the Harvard Law Review, offers an entirely constitutional way out of this dilemma: Add new states — a lot of new states — then use this bloc of states to rewrite the Constitution so that the United States has an election system “where every vote counts equally.”

Ian hasn’t gotten over the fact that Trump won the presidency, which proves the system has failed because otherwise Ian would be either Attorney General or on the Supreme Court sitting next to Merrick Garland. It’s not that Ian actually thinks this idea is doable. Not even Ian is that delusional.

So let’s be frank. The Harvard note’s proposal is ridiculous, but it is no more ridiculous than a system where the nearly 40 million people in California have no more Senate representation than the 578,759 people in Wyoming. As the Harvard note says of its own pitch, “radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live.”

But the fact that this is proffered, given air at all, as a far-out idea of how to fix a broken democracy, is where the crazy trains crashed into one another. We’re indulging in delusion upon delusion, begging the question of whether democracy is broken because one side didn’t get its way, the fault for which is Russia, Comey, Hillary’s gender, everything but the possibility that Americans don’t want their nation to be reinvented into a socialist and social justice Utopia.

This is where young smart voices would have responded, “OK Boomer” if the meme’s 8 second lifespan hadn’t elapsed. Why don’t we open our minds to change, to a kinder, gentler future? Why are we stuck doing things the way they’ve always been done, rather than re-center the world around their intersectional ideology?

As fun as it may be to ridicule crazy ideas, even that wears thin after a while. As Ruth Marcus said about C.J. Roberts, “this is a delusion, if a pleasant one.” Whether you find it pleasant or not, debating delusions isn’t a very good use of time and energy. Yet, this is where we are these days, mired in delusions. It’s time to get off the crazy train. If you want to continue to ride, then you can take a seat next to Ian.

*I learned the other day that Stern blocked me on twitter. I have no clue when this happened or why, as I rarely have cause to see something he twitted. But apparently, he either can’t bear to see my twits or can’t bear to have me see his. Either way, a curious thing for a legal pundit to block a lawyer. Maybe it was something I said?

16 thoughts on “Riding The Crazy Train With Ian

  1. Jim Ryan

    Fairness in voting is something we’ve always had in my household. It’s been ONE pound, ONE vote. This worked especially well except for a small time frame where I was outvoted. When the girls (2) were little, with my wife at about 120 lbs, and I shuttling between either side of 300 lbs – I always had a super-majority. When they were in High School and College it was a little closer, and once they graduated then wife + the girls out weighed me / out voted me. All was not lost as one moved in with her boyfriend and the other got married. So in the house (my house) I now hold an over than 2 to 1 majority.
    I believe that the institution of true “weighted” voting is the only way to go.
    “One Pound One Vote” makes a nice bumper sticker.

    1. SHG Post author

      I don’t think that’s what weighted voting means, although I personally think you may be on to something.

    2. The Real Kurt

      Heinlein proposed something similar, except it was in ounces of gold.

      Personally, I think his idea is a bit better, though your idea has a small amount of merit…

      The Real Kurt

  2. Hunting Guy

    Humm, 127 new states as dysfunctional as California and as crooked as Chicago. Just what we need.

  3. B. McLeod

    Crone was going to sweep the election, and when she didn’t, defecting electors were going to fix that, and when they didn’t, it became an ongoing chain of mad fantasies to the present “impeachment.”

    Meanwhile, I go outside every morning to see that the sky has, indeed, not fallen. The country that was almost certainly going to be destroyed by Trump at every moment over the last three years is somehow still plugging along. There are credibility problems to be sure, and not merely the ones the alarmists would call out.

    1. SHG Post author

      That the sky hasn’t fallen may be more a credit to the resilience of American normalcy than, ahem, anything else.

  4. Noel Erinjeri

    There’s an urban legend that during his citizenship interview, Kurt Godel said there was a flaw in the Constitution that would allow the United States to be turned into a dictatorship. According to the legend, Einstein cut him off before he could give the details.

    I could do it with

    1) a 30 mile by 30 mile tract of land divided into 1 square mile parcels;
    2) 7,200 fanatics;
    3) one compliant state legislature;
    4) a President with imperial ambitions; and
    5) Congressional majorities in both Houses.

    Applications to current affairs are left as an exercise for the reader.

  5. Fubar

    There are rational parameters within which discussion may be worthwhile, but they don’t seem to constrain too many otherwise nice folks these days. It was floated that Chief Judge John Roberts, presiding over the impeachment trial in the Senate, could call John Bolton as a witness.

    I am not presiding over the impeachment trial in the Senate. But I can call John Bolton as a witness, to anything, anywhere, anytime.

    My authority is almost as ancient as the common law:

    Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1:

    GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

    HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man,But will they come when you do call for them?

  6. Christopher Best

    “… it is no more ridiculous than a system where the nearly 40 million people in California have no more Senate representation than the 578,759 people in Wyoming.”

    I swear these people won’t be satisfied until we have another Civil War. Maybe it’s because I grew up in one of them, but I cannot understand for the life of me how these intellectual titans think the “little” states are going to just sit by and allow themselves to be legislated into irrelevance.

    1. LocoYokel

      It’s a deliberate misdirection, that is not the purpose of the Senate and they know it. We really should go back to the Senate being appointed by the individual state legislatures and not direct, popular vote. They are playing on the stupidity of the masses. On the other hand, the fact that the House has not increased its number of representatives to reflect the growing population in almost a hundred years means that it is not really representative anymore, to many people in a district.

  7. NickM

    Massively disproportionate representation in the Senate for residents of different states was not a surprise to the Framers. Delaware had under 60,000 people as of the 1790 Census, while Virginia had almost 750,000 – and far more land available to grow cities. The ratio was already approaching 13 to 1, with the evident ability to rapidly become greater.

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