Too Much Democracy?

At a time when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq while attempting to install a Western-style democracy (according, that is, to the White House’s reason du jour for invading and occupying that country), one would think democracy is a good thing.

Apparently not, according to Senator Zell Miller of Georgia. He has a solution to all the peskier aspects of democracy, such as some Senators taking seriously their Constitutional imperative to provide “advice and consent” on judicial nominees. As he put it in a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, “What this Government needs is one of those extreme makeovers they have on television, and I am not referring to some minor nose job or a little botox here and there.”

His solution is blindingly simple: repeal the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which junked the back-room appointment of Senators by state legislatures and opened the process up to popular election. In pursuit of this lofty goal, he introduced S.J. Res. 35, a proposed constitutional amendment to do just that.

So let me get this straight – Miller’s answer to arguments over unfunded mandates, judicial nominations, and a border fence with Mexico (which he blames on “nutty environmentalists”) is less democracy? He claims that an appointed Senate would be free of “special-interest tyranny,” and that “we now have too many Senators who are mere cat’s-paws for the special interests.” Of course, in his world, the state legislatures are beacons of citizen responsiveness, a far cry from the reality of how they actually work.

To give him credit, he knows his proposed amendment is, to put it mildly, a long shot. “I know it doesn't stand a chance of getting even a single cosponsor, much less a single vote beyond my own,” he said.

You have to admit, the notion of keeping the people out of the people’s business does have a distinct appeal. It would be so much easier without all this messy debate, these untidy disagreements, this awkward hindrance to the government’s business that is democracy.

But on further reflection, this may not be quite the act of political buffoonery it appears to be. One of the chief Republican complaints of recent years is that the Senate occasionally refuses to confirm a few of the more odious of President Bush’s judicial nominees. (It should be mentioned that despite all the GOP fuss, Senate Democrats blocked just four nominees, approving 173 more.) So what better way to turn the Senate into a toothless rubber stamp than by turning it into a tool of the state legislatures?

Ever since the 2000 Census, Republicans around the country have put a lot of effort into gerrymandering state legislatures to maximize potential Republican districts and minimize potential Democratic ones, usually by breaking up traditionally Democratic districts so they form parts of several GOP-majority districts instead of combining into a single one. Engineering as many Republican-dominated legislatures as possible means, under Miller’s proposed amendment, a larger number of Republican senators – meaning a Senate far more likely to go along with whatever a Republican President may care to do. If a Democrat gets elected President, the same scheme would guarantee a recalcitrant Senate.

And Miller, by a staggering coincidence, is a rogue Democrat who votes with the Republicans nearly all the time and is in thick with the GOP leadership. Indeed, this year he wrote A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat, in which he bashes his ostensible party for supposed loony leftism.

It seems to be quite a plan. Fortunately, no one has yet gone on record as co-sponsoring it.