The Only Good Republican...

[ideologyhunter]

There are now 18 states backing the Texas AG's suit to overturn the election result.
106 House Republicans (over half) signed an amicus brief in support.
70% of Republicans poll in agreement that 'massive fraud' was perpetrated against Trump.

How is it possible for Democrats to work with a party that no longer believes in our political system?
SCOTUS may well dismiss the suit, hopefully with a scathing rebuke, not a one-sentence dismissal. Pennsylvania's AG had an apt phrase for the suit: 'a seditious abuse of the judicial process'.
Dismissing the suit won't begin to solve the dystopian dilemma we're in.
I've heard several commentators calling the GOP a cult, but, while it shares the radicalization and fanaticism of a cult, this is now a mass movement, and 'cult' doesn't fit. This is a party that is willing to tear up the democratic system. 'Seditious abuse' does not overstate what we're seeing.
There are exceptions -- the 90 House Republicans who wouldn't sign the brief. A few senators. A few AGs and governors. But when I vote, I assume, unless I see real evidence to the contrary, evidence that they put country ahead of party, that the only good Republicans are ex-Republicans.

 

[barbos]

The only good republicans are the ones who consistently lose elections. Republican party were forced to rely on insane part of society, and now are stuck with it. You need to get rid of 2 party system, so that parties don't have to appeal to at least 50% of active population to be relevant.
Yeah, and fuck all current republicans who have not publicly accepted Biden/Harris win.
They are all worthless scam who are only worried about money.

 

[lpetrich]

I think that we need two things:

• Nonpartisan primaries
• Proportional representation

Having nonpartisan primaries would be good for keeping the parties' bases from dominating the primary contests. The primaries would be followed by a nonpartisan election, either top-two or IRV top-four.

Proportional representation would make gerrymandering unnecessary while avoiding having to draw districts to produce approximately proportional outcomes. This can be done with STV, a multiseat version of IRV, or else a party-list system.

 

[lpetrich]

Proportional representation can be done in two main ways.

One of them is Single Transferable Vote (STV), a multiseat extension of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), often called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). In IRV, one votes preferences: first choice, second choice, third choice, ...

One then counts top preferences and whoever gets a majority is the winner. If no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate with the fewest top-preference votes gets dropped from the count, and this process is repeated with that candidate ignored.

So if the 2020 US Presidential election was done in IRV fashion, I could have voted Howie Hawkins, Joe Biden, Jo Jorgensen. Not many people voted for HH, so he would be dropped, and my vote would be counted as a vote for JB.

STV works similarly, but with winners being dropped as well as losers. If some ballots elected a winner, then they are reweighted so that they contribute less in later rounds of counting. That reweighting makes this method proportional. Alternatively, some of the victory ballots may be dropped from later rounds.

 

[lpetrich]

The other is party-list and related methods.

Party-list proportional representation gets its name from the tradition of parties offering lists of candidates that they want seated.

People vote for parties, not candidates, in this one, and each party gets a number of seats in proportion to how many votes it received. Calculating how many will give a non-integer number in nearly every case, so there are various algorithms for getting integer numbers. Allotting Representatives in the US House is essentially the same problem, since each state's number of Reps is in proportion to its population.

If each party alone chooses who to seat, then it is closed-list PR. In open-list PR, one can also vote for a party member to get priority in seating.

There are some hybrid systems, with some seats being for single-member districts, what we are used to here in the US and in some other places, and other seats being list seats. If only the list seats are made proportional, then it is a parallel system. If all the seats are made proportional, then it is a mixed-member system.

 

[Swammerdami]

We've long known that essentially every Republican Congressman or legislator is a criminal hack, committing treasons in exchange for bribes, but ...

[*]States with GOP attorneys general backing Texas: AL, AR, AZ, FL, IN, KS, LA, MO, MS, MT, ND, NE, OK, SC, SD, TN, UT, WV

... aren't attorneys-general supposed to be the very definition of the Rule of Law?

Nineteen state attorneys-general (Nineteen, with an N!) went on record that they wanted to abandon America's 230-year-old democracy! All to keep a whimpering treasonous sociopath in office. The mind boggles! Departments of "Justice" and American democracy in general will be held in contempt for the rest of our lifetimes.

Do these attorneys-general have families? Will their children have any respect at all for their fathers? (Or mothers? -- How many of these traitors are women?) Do the spouses have to take special medication so they can sleep with their traitor without vomiting?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Can our political chaos be addressed with procedural fixes? Ipetrich's suggestions are both good. I like mandatory voting. (Though GOPsters would try to leverage that into another way to harass Dreamers.)

But procedural fixes might be useless band-aids for the rot that infects America. We need to speak up when our neighbor is a bigot or homophobe. We need to start sending criminals to prison instead of to Congress or to state-houses. We need picket-lines and boycotts.

The political schism in today's America has nothing to do with Left versus Right. It's Truth vs Lies; Humanity vs Hatred; Reason vs Delusion. Kudos to anyone who can remain optimistic after what we've seen in recent years.