An Example of Why Bicameralism in State Governments is Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

There are 50 state legislatures in America and 99 state legislative chambers. Only Nebraska did the the smart thing and set up a unicameral legislature. The bicameralism of the rest is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Nebraska, Land of Unicameralism

Let me illustrate this with an example from Indiana, a state with which I am fairly familiar. The Indiana General Assembly consists of two chambers, a House and a Senate in a poorly-thought-out imitation of the US Congress. The House has 100 members elected to 2 year terms, the Senate 50 seats (from 50 districts) elected to staggered 4 year terms, i.e. 25 are up for election every 2 years.

Why is this dumb? Because the Indiana State Senate is pointless. It serves no purpose. It is redundant, surplus to requirements, excess, useless, frivolous, and unnecessary.

The US Congress has two chambers because those chambers are meant to represent two different constituencies on two different basis. The Senate was initially (prior to the 17th Amendment) intended to represent state governments, while the house was meant to represent the "the People" (initially defined to mean propertied white men, but nevermind that now). Thus, two chambers were created, whose members would be elected in different ways. Representatives are elected for two-year terms from districts of equal population, while each state sent (or now, directly elects) 2 Senators to serve for staggered six-year terms.

The Indiana General Assembly does not do that. It has one chamber which consists of representatives directly elected from equal population districts and another chamber that also consists of representatives elected from equal population districts. This is dumb.

Adding more chambers creates additional veto points in the political process, gumming up the works and making it harder to get anything done, and adding legislators means more people who want favors or other considerations for their support to which tends to increase wasteful "pork" spending. This is dumb.

Staggering elections makes sense if you're electing multiple representatives from the same district, but if the districts all  have only one representative and serve for 4 year terms then half of the State Senators will be arbitrarily and perpetually "on-cycle" with the Governor, and half off-cycle. This might be desirable, as it allows people could decide to punish a governor in mid-term elections. But since the entire lower house, not just half of it, stands for midterm elections as well as on-cycle gubernatorial elections, the Senate adds nothing in this regard, also. Dumb.

As the sea of stupidity is bottomless, I'm sure I'm missing other dumb arguments, but I feel I've made my case well enough.

Constitutional Totalitarianism (draft, comments welcome)

It should really not be possible to set up a totalitarian dictatorship without violating the letter of the Constitution at some point. But I’m pretty sure you can – given control of the White House and Congress.

Note that it is entirely possible under current law to control the Congress and Presidency with mere pluralities of the vote. Assuming no faithless electors, for instance, its possible to become President with only of ~25% of the electorate.

So, the Party has managed to win control of Congress and the Presidency by the narrowest margins – and immediately sets about engineering permanent 1-party rule.

• The opposition might try to stop you using filibusters, etc. Just eliminate any procedures that may create problems for you and protect the minority – you’re not going to need them.

• Pack the Supreme Court – nothing unconstitutional about that, and this prevents anyone from making inconvenient “violating the spirit of the constitution” appeals.
• Remember the point of this exercise is to do this without actually breaking any laws. Or at least without violating the Constitution – after all, Congress can change the laws.
• Use the “Kansas Plan” to pack the House and Senate.
• Hell, you could stop here, since an aggressive Kansification could allow me to simply amend the constitution however I’d like.

• Use the income tax to seize all income and then use tax code to manage the whole economy
• This is a kludgy workaround compared to GosPlan but it’ll have to do.

• Create some universal, unavoidable felony, and selectively enforce the laws to purge whoever you like
• Like the federal judiciary, legislators, etc.
• E.g. make breathing a felony
• Note that while you can’t directly suppress speech here, you can, by an amazing coincidence, just happen to arrest anyone who criticizes the government too loudly.
• Prosecutorial discretion is actually a tremendous tool of tyranny in the wrong hands. In the Party’s hands, of course, it will only be used for good.

• Since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee a right to vote, simply make it so that only members of the Party are permitted to vote.

The Coming Automation Crisis

The coming automation crisis is not a technological crisis. Rather, it is a crisis of governance in the most basic sense. A fairly recent report from the Mckinsey Global Institute makes this obvious - though they studiously avoid drawing attention to this alarming conclusion.

Overall, MGI anticipates tens of millions of workers will be displaced by automation over the next 10-15 years, depending on the speed of automation. At the high end of their estimates, 73 million US workers (a little less than half of workforce!) would be displaced. Most of those displaced would have to switch occupations entirely. Their middle-of-the-road projection is still dramatic: only quarter of the workforce displaced, and with half of those switching occupation entirely.

The MGI report has plenty of suggestions for policy responses, but the US has essentially no public or private sector apparatus up to the challenge of smoothing this transition. The American government spends the least of any OECD country on labor markets. That money is used for job training and placement, for hiring subsidies and hiring in the public sector, and for unemployment benefits. Of the little money that is spent, only a tenth of that goes to job training – less than half of what Canada spends, and less than a sixth of what Germany spends, and a tenth of the amount France spends. The only tools that that remain are monetary policy and educational policy. 

Using monetary policy to maintain full employment is problematic for practical reasons and political reasons. The political problem is that central bankers tend to be more concerned with inflation than unemployment - witness the recent preemptive interest rate hikes by the US Fed. God forbid we should wait for robust wage growth before panicking about an inflationary spiral!

Even if by some minor miracle the Fed changed course and pursued a policy of full employment at all costs, the for-profit sector in the United States is not up to dealing with this crisis. MGI highlights a few firms who invest in employee development, but these anecdotes are misleading. Overall the share of workers receiving on-the-job or employer-sponsored training has declined sharply since 1996, and stagnated since 2004. You will note that this period includes part of the 1990s boom, and 2001-2007 boom. This is entirely rational behavior on the part of firms, since a worker who receives valuable training could find work elsewhere. And since firms show no loyalty to their employees, it would be sheer madness to expect workers to show loyalty to their employers,

This leaves only educational institutions and workers themselves. And educational institutions are not ready for this either. For people entering the labor force, the future looks bleak. Only about 36% of Americans age 25-29 have 4-year college degrees or more. For the majority American's associate degrees, high-school degrees, and the nebulous term "some college" are the highest level of educational attainment. For such people, quality high-school vocational programs are invaluable. But MGI’s best guess, since US data are hard to come by, is that less than 6% of Americans in secondary schools are enrolled in a vocational program, which would give those with only a high-school degree a fair chance That’s a smaller share enrolled than Brazil(!), and a tenth(!) of the Swiss level of enrollment. As far as post-secondary education goes, the federal state governments have systematically pulled back on support for public higher education for decades, exacerbating spiraling tuition costs and miring a generation of graduates in debt. What about community colleges, where displaced middle- and low-skill workers will most likely go for retraining? Data here are hard to come by, for the same reasons that data on high schools are hard to come by, but the ability of community colleges to handle the crisis does not look good. Tuition is not trivial, though it varies wildly across states - about $5,000 for in-state public schools. Student debt, graduation rates, and transfers to 4-year schools for community college graduates also looks terrible. About 10 million people are enrolled in community colleges in the US in any given year, with about 2.5 million full-time students. Remember we're talking tens of millions of workers displaced by automation over the period, with half that number needing to switch occupations entirely, requiring extensive retraining. I doubt our current educational system even has the capacity to cope with so many students, let alone provide a good education to all of them.

The MGI report helpfully makes two forecasts; a trend-line forecast where things continue as they are going and a step-up forecast where the government takes active measures to reduce the impact of automation on employment. Only the step-up forecast doesn't result in net job losses.

Read all that and tell me you aren't worried.

This is what I mean when I say the automation crisis is a crisis of governance. No problem described above cannot be addressed, even solved, by straightforward policy responses. Not  government that cannot act, not government that does not know how to act, but government that for structural and ideological reasons - political reasons! - will not act. This is the American Crisis today.

Engineering Permanent Single Party Rule Through Constitutional Loophole Abuse

Or: Why We Should Rewrite the Thing

A thought occurred to me this morning:

Suppose I was a party of utterly amoral and ambitious politicians with no commitment to democracy beyond what was necessary to obtain control of the Presidency, and a majority (but not a supermajority) in both Houses of Congress. How could I use this position to permanently cement complete control over the federal government, without violating the letter of the Constitution? While utterly disregarding its spirit of course...

Here is one plan:
Find a sizable state where your party is overwhelming dominant and the legislature is compliant. Second, divide the state into extremely small jurisdictions which your party is sure to win. Using Kansas, (a fairly small state) as an example, (Pop:2.9 Million) one could divide the state into 29 100,000 member districts each with two Senators and one Representative, giving "formerly Kansas" a fifth of all Senators and a House delegation as big as New York's.

But why stop at 100,000? Why not divide Kansas into 290 10,000 member districts, giving it an absolute majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives. Then "ex-Kansas" can pack the Supreme Court with loyal "ex-Kansans", and amend the Constitution (by calling a convention) without a single vote from anybody else.

This works because the Constitution itself doesn't set a minimum population for statehood. There are some statutory requirements for new states being admitted but those can be changed by Congress, and I'm not sure if those even apply for new states being created in the jurisdictions of existing states.

The point of this exercise is not to recommend a course of action (if you read the introduction and thought that sounded like you...), to lay out any plausible series of events, or to warn you of some secret plot. If such a scheme were attempted it would probably result in civil war, the collapse of the United States, or (least plausibly) rapid coordinated action by existing states to amend the Constitution to specify a minimum population.   Rather it is to show the weakness of the Constitution as written and the vulnerability of our system to "Constitutional Hardball" driven by partisanship uber alles.

If  the commitment to political victory trumps a commitment to majority rule -that basic principle of democracy- then the protections the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution in an attempt to prevent the "tyranny of the majority" can be used instead to create a "tyranny of the minority", i.e. tyranny.