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Think Our Political System Can’t Get Any More Dysfunctional And Partisan? Wrong! After The Next Election It May Get Much, Much Worse
Like many other Americans, I’ve been thinking that a strong third party party candidate for president would be a good development given the likely unappealing choices offered by the two major parties. After a bit of research, however, I’ve come to a very different conclusion. A strong third party choice in 2012 could well prove an absolute, utter disaster for this country.
In 1992 Ross Perot garnered almost 19 percent of the popular vote. Because of our strange electoral system, he nonetheless received no electoral votes. Bill Clinton, with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, easily ended with more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
In 1992, polls were showing that just a bit more than 30 percent of the voting public was dissatisfied with the way government was running and the people running it. Polls today are showing more than 80 percent feel that way. So…
So it’s possible, indeed likely, that a popular third party entrant in the 2012 presidential sweepstakes might actually garner some electoral votes by winning pluralities in some winner-take-all states. Not enough to pass the magic 270 needed to get elected. But enough to keep either of the two major party contenders from reaching the 270 winning line.
What happens then? You may have heard that in that case the selection of a president is made in the House of Representatives. It is, but not in the way you may think. Here’s how it would happen according to a government website: “If no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each State delegation has one vote.”
Focus on that last sentence. The Republicans currently have a lopsided majority in the House. That majority doesn’t matter here, however. Each state delegation has one vote here, tiny Rhode Island has the same electoral power as California or Texas.
Do Democrats control a majority of state delegations by the number of reps from every state? Do Republicans? It may not matter because the law doesn’t say exactly that this is how each delegation must vote. Maybe state delegations will be guided by the governor of that state. Maybe reps who lost the election of 2012 and won’t be serving in the next sedsion of congress will not feel bound to vote for the candidate of their own party. Maybe the third party candidate got a plurality in some states and their reps feel bound to back this person. Maybe…maybe…maybe…
Suppose the House can’t muster a majority (26 state delegations) to select a president because a spirit of needed compromise is absent. (Would that surprise you?) Who gets to select a president (and vice-president) then?
The Senate. Here’s the way this is explained on a government site: “The Senate would elect the Vice President from the 2 Vice Presidential candidates with the most electoral votes. Each Senator would cast one vote for Vice President. [And] If the House of Representatives fails to elect a President by Inauguration Day, the Vice-President Elect serves as acting President until the deadlock is resolved in the House.”
So maybe you could end up with a Republican president chosen by the House and a Democratic vice-president chosen by the Senate. A veep who could cast the deciding vote if the Senate is a 50-50 tie, which could well be the outcome of the coming election. And who says a supposedly Democrat-controlled Senate would chose a Democratic president anyway. Joe Lieberman and a few other Democratic senators who aren’t up for reelection may have other ideas. You want your next president selected by Joe?
Remember also, that no matter how any of this plays out, no matter who is chosen for what post, there will be law suits by losers that end up in the Supreme Court. And wouldn’t that be fun to go through again.
It worth keeping in mind here the likely state of the U.S. government and economy going into the 2012 elections. The government is paralyzed over spending and taxing issues that the next election (we are told) is supposed to resolve.
Resolved by the 2012 election? As the above suggests, this election could make present dysfunction and crippling partisanship look like a group hug.
So I’m offering a personal retraction here. I’ve been calling for a strong third party candidate for the 21012 presidential race to emerge. Indeed, there’s an online campaign shaping up that in fact may make this happen, even without such a candidate emerging the usual way.
Please, please, please don’t let this happen. Obama isn’t a very good president. The Republican alternative is likely to be an even worse option. But a third party candidate who wins enough electoral votes to keep ether of these poor offerings from our two major parties from getting the magic 270 electoral votes, opens possibilities our system may not be able to recover from for decades..
More from this writer at wallstreetpoet.com
11 Responses to “Think Our Political System Can’t Get Any More Dysfunctional And Partisan? Wrong! After The Next Election It May Get Much, Much Worse”
Agreed. And after we get a president in 2012 maybe we can look at doing away with the absurdities caused by the electoral college system and just go with a popular vote? I gotta say as a CA resident it would be nice to hit the voting booths after work without the issue already be decided. Plus I’m sure everyone in my state who is a republican would like to have a vote that actually counts again in a presidential election.
Reps will take the WH in 2016…it wont be close enough for a 3rd party candidate to make a difference.
just my very long range prediction.
I voted for Perot and regretted it. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a big enough third party, you may suffer the results of unintended consequences. At present it appears to be a protest type of vote, which is OK if that is understood and intended.
Another article from a partisan supporter of one of the parties, to those those who are sick of our partisan system, trying to convince us that we should support one of the two parties in order to keep the “wrong” party from winning. This is just more of the same old “lesser of two evils” argument designed to get us to over look the fact that both parties are “evil”. The fact is that as long as we buy into this, things will never change.
It is interesting to get two in a row. I kinda think it might be dawning on even the most partisan just who sick people are of both parties.
Is the Paralysis ACTUALLY bad for the country, though? I submit to thee, that maybe we NEED MORE Gridlock, not less, to freeze things in place and allow the system to catch up with, and adapt to, the damage already caused by too much activism in the early 2000′s and in the 2009-2010 period, both situations where you had a pliant relationship between the Executive and the Legislative branches that allowed things to be rammed home that would’ve died early if the relationship had been less cordial. I’m being half serious here, but that half asks if things like Tea Parties and Occupy would have happened, if not for one side or the other getting their way and having their way with the rest of us?
In recent history, our best presidents of the last forty years have had to work against congresses that were hostile to them-Reagan vs. Democrats, Clinton vs. Republicans, and the worst presidencies had pliant, agreeable relationships with the legislative branch that allowed idiotic and abusive elements to be passed into law without a backward glance.
I suspect that Carter would have been a BETTER president if he were not saddled with fellow Dems running the Congress (both sides would’ve had to be more careful about what they did and why), Bush II wouldn’t have got PATRIOT ACT without single-party control, Neither bush, nor Obama would’ve saddled us with the massive debt of not one, but TWO, CONSECUTIVE, Debt-boosting budget buster bailout bills.
I think we the people are far better off if Congress and the President have to fight one another to pass any legislation, esp. if Congress lacks the ability to override a VETO by party-line vote. Our freedoms and our finances are better guarded if our leaders lack the ability to grant easy favours.
“Is the Paralysis ACTUALLY bad for the country, though?”
Well, it is bad when we come close to a default because we can’t get stuffed passed. OTOH, when either party gets in a position where they force stuff through, that’s scary too. So the two party system has blessed us with a situation where we need paralysis to control partisanship, but we need to overcome paralysis to get needed stuff done.
CS, some gridlock may be good to slow down things and overdoing others, but, as a former fan of the two political parties balancing each other out, I regret that the present political climate has the elements of scorched earth warfare.
@dduck: Scorched earth warfare is much nice than what we have going on in Washington, imho. I have been a fan of mixed party control for a very long time. However, we now have a serious problem in one of our elected bodies. The senate can not even VOTE on anything without a super-majority. That is beyond silly. The filibuster used to be used only in time of dire need. Furthermore, those who were against the filibuster had the cajones to force the naysayers to actually conduct their business. In other words, if 41 or more senators voted against voting (in favor of more talk) the others made them continue to talk!
I want to see C-Span filled with Republican senators who are bleary-eyed and half off their rockers trying to read out of the dictionary (or whatever they choose to continue speaking on). I especially want this because the Republicans in the House of Representatives keep on touting that they passed a budget. Well, yeah! ‘Cuz you don’t have to get 60% of the house to agree to vote on it in order to vote on it.
Gridlock may seem like a good idea at times, but it has not shown itself to be economically sound. The wheeling and dealing in the back rooms with riders and pork are usually created because of gridlock. That is the problem with Washington, not the solution.
I remember under the Bush administration the Democrats had demonstrations _in_favor_ of the filibuster (which such slogans as “this is what democracy looks like”). (And of course the Republicans were also neatly lined up on the opposite side they are on now.)
The inability of either party to stick to any principal beyond short term advantage makes it hard to see either as more than a bunch of partisan hacks.
I don’t care who put it in, supported it, used it, bastardized it, whatever, I want the 60 vote rule thrown out. I know that it will initially hurt the Reps more, but let the dice fly.
I think it’s good to make them fight each other, and I think scorched earth arguments are just fine. The Country’s credit rating is as bad as it is, because they already spent us into massive debts beyond the economy’s ability to soak-it was, indeed, ALREADY a bad credit situation, and passing a resolution to pretend it isn’t, well…
is pretending.
we need to be governed in the REAL world, not the Land of Make-Believe as it is demonstrated in the halls of Congress.
so, Gridlock there? was good. Nobody got what they wanted, and in the end, they had to ‘barely manage’ something into place, which is just fine, and if it had only happened a LOT earlier (like, say, in 1987 when the S&L’s were failing), maybe we wouldn’t be IN this mess today.