The government governs by the consent of its citizens. It is never acceptable for the government to ignore the opinions of its citizens, and anyone in government claiming otherwise should be removed.
I utterly reject your claim that we should just acquiesce in the face of such malignancy.
Sure, but we have (ideally/optimistically) a representative democracy, and not a direct government-by-the-people. That means that we nominate people we trust, and surrender some of our direct decision-making and opinion-influence authority to them when we vote for them. There are slightly more direct ballot measures and such at more local/municipal/state levels, but even those often take the form of "statement of purpose/priority"-type resolutions that the public expresses support for, and their elected representatives translate them into policy, or delegate that translation, et cetera.
You say that like Trump ran on a platform of deregulating internet service providers, as opposed to populist rage.
If anything, this election cycle demonstrates that the executive holds far too much power, that it can act with impunity at the behest of lobbyists on issues unrelated to, and in conflict with, the issues which drove voters to elect it.
>And the current President, who appoints the FCC chairperson, lost the popular election by 3 million votes.
There is no "popular election" in the American system. Consent is, and has always been, given by proxy through the electoral college, as defined in the US Constitution. If you want to invalidate Trump's authority because of that, you have to invalidate every election prior as well, and claim that the US government has never governed with the consent of the people.
Mind you, I don't like Trump at all, but to imply that his authority is any less legitimate than prior Presidents would be specious, it's not his fault if the system that grants him power isn't designed to enforce popular will, it's the electorate's fault for not having changed it.
Or, to quote the legal scholar Ice-T, don't hate the player, hate the game.
It is true the EC elected Trump, but the popular vote is often used to demonstrate a mandate based on the will of the people i.e. "The people have spoken and this is their decision." Well in November the people spoke and the man in the White House was not their decision. It was the decision of the electoral college. A system, btw, which was designed to give majority slave owning states a greater say in Presidential elections.
We are not saying Donald Trump should not be President (for this reason), we are saying his agenda does not reflect the will of the people, and he certainly did not campaign on repealing net neutrality, so its hard to argue this issue was already decided by the voters. What he did campaign on was "drain the swamp". A Verizon crony working to dismantle consumer protections in favor of Verizon seems like exactly the opposite of that.
True. Another way of saying this is 64% of voters cast a vote for someone other than the President. This is reflected in his historically low approval ratings [1], and public opinions on both the healthcare push [2] and the current tax reform push [3].
But if we assume for a moment that the election was a mandate for the President to implement his agenda, we have to also note he isn't implementing the agenda on which he ran. He promised a wall paid for by Mexico, and several times has asked Congress to appropriate money for the wall. He promised he would not touch entitlements, and supported GOP measures to slash medicaid. He promised to drain the swamp and appointed interests to his cabinet with an agenda contrary to the agencies they represent. He promised to release his tax returns if elected and then claimed his election meant the voters decided he didn't have to. He promised to get tough on China and then capitulated to them over a cake dessert. This whole "mandate" idea, if we are going to accept it, should only be a mandate to implement the agenda on which the candidate campaigned. It cannot be used as a carte blanche for an elected official to turn around and do whatever they want.
To be clear, I'm not saying how a President governs and how a President campaigns should be identical. There's room for improvisation and changing ideas. But the fact a President was elected cannot be used as a justification for every action his/her administration takes.
Less than 50% voted for either candidate. Without ranked-choice voting we don't actually know whether Hillary or Trump was preferred by the majority of voters.
(It's also quite possible that if we had a ranked-choice system instead of the two party system, someone other than those two would have won.)
And if there was a popular election, then there's no guarantee the result would be the same. Under the current system, the candidates focus their campaign on the voters with the most influence ("swing states"). Maximizing popular vote would require different methods.
Sadly, Ice-T, used a false dichotomy. We can hate the player and the game. And often should.
But you define the game too narrowly. The technical mechanism of the election to the presidency is indeed currently via the electoral college. That's one game.
One deeper game is mandate. If an election result is strong, the victor is seen as having a mandate to strongly pursue their agenda. See, for example, Bush's claim that his 3 million vote margin gave him political capital that he could spend as he pleased. [1]
A still-deeper game is around the rules of the system. We ended up with electors chosen by the states as a dodge around the problems created by slavery [2], and because framers weren't sure the general populace would have sufficient education and information to choose the president. But that didn't work well in practice, so after assorted changes mid-1800s we ended up with what we have now, pseudo-direct elections implemented through the existing system of electors. [3]
That's an obvious compromise chosen because nobody wanted to go to all the work of switching to fully direct elections. But we've had two failures this century. If Trump is a sufficiently bad president, I'm sure we'll change this. (E.g., imagine him starting a pointless war with North Korea that ends up with Seattle getting nuked. People would be very eager to Do Something, and the states could fix this without any federal changes.)
This is driven by a deeper level still. American government is "government of the people, by the people, for the people". We hire temp workers to take care of the details for us. Trump's job isn't to represent Trump. It's to represent us. All of us. And, I'd argue, the best part of all of us.
To the extent he fails at that, it's his fault and ours.
Sure. But the US right has become deeply partisan over the last couple of decades. As an example, 2008 was the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression. I was sure that would be big enough to shock them out of the usual D vs R game and into making the same sorts of broad, lasting reforms that have come out of previous crises. In retrospect, I was totally wrong.
The last time the Republicans won the popular vote for a non-incumbent president was George H. W. Bush in 1988. Whatever the intellectual merits of EC reform, there's just no way right now they'll give up the advantage the EC system gives them. Right now a Wyoming voter's opinion counts for 3.7 times what mine as a Californian does in the presidential race. (It also counts 67x what mine does in the Senate.)
So unless the Republican party collapses (which is not unlikely), it will take something bigger than the 2008 bust to get people willing to change the EC.
Nope, he just got 3 million votes less - but the way the voting system works is that absolute number of votes doesn't count, how they're distributed in states count.
The current President didn't design this system, and the opponent could just as well have benefited by it (and previous presidents had).
Lacking direct democracy, it's not even necessarily a bad system in itself (whatever one believes for the current president). It might even be more representative of the average American than the popular vote (if e.g. the majority of the 3 million votes are concentrated in a particular state or two. IIRC the President got something like 50 million votes?
Imagine an exaggerated (but possible) case where 3 states push 50 million votes for one side, and the 49 rest of them push 47 million votes for the other side between them. Would you say that would be a good result, to have a president that has a majority that is based on 3 out of 52 states?
It might not have been as bad in the elections, but a huge part of those 3 million votes where mostly from one state, not distributed more or less evenly across the country. Which is the kind of issue the idea behind the election system wanted to avoid.
I really wish people would stop using the "he/she won/lost by 3 million popularity votes" line. Something I don't think people realize: 3 million people isn't that many.
Considering there are ~325M American citizens, ~231M are eligible to vote, with ~63M and ~66M actual votes going to the Donald and Hilldog respectfully, the margin between the two runners is pretty small. The Donald collected 27.2% of eligible votes, and Hilldog collected 28.5%. At best, Hillary won popular vote by less than two percent of the available votes, which even though it's a victory, it's still very very close.
> It's more than the population of some countries and 20 US states.
That last part (the margin of victory was tiny relative to some state populations) provides valuable insight into how broken the Electoral College is as a selection system.
(I don't mean that small-in-population states are solely responsible for electoral skew, but they're a good example of the problem.)
Pretty much, elections have consequences and interpretations of federal regulations is the quintessential example of that. There are means by which the other branches could restrain or affect these interpretations, but I have a hard time believing most voters didn’t or couldn’t ascertain the intentions of most candidates regarding net neutrality this past election cycle.
When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Every person who has voted for a president has voted against their own policy positions, often hundreds or thousands of their own policy positions. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN).
It is of course ridiculous to suggest that people voted for Trump hoping he would destroy a free and open Internet; we have clear and incontrovertible evidence that the vast, vast majority of citizens (90%? 80%? I think it depends on which poll you take) hates what he is doing. The president has a good-faith responsibility to represent the citizens and when they come down on an issue like this which was non existent or tangential to his campaign so fervently it's most certainly a betrayal of that consent.
When he tries to build a wall? Sure, he definitely has consent there. On NN? Not a chance. He does have power though.
>When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN).
I don’t disagree with you on this at all, but again I think it boils down to ‘elections have consequences’. I don’t think that just because an issue was judged not as critical by voters (and therefore given relatively short shrift) means the interpretation is any less valid. That’s the function of the powerful executive branch made around the time of the new deal-ww2 era reforms, to manage complex federal issues. Just because I disagree with the decision and think most other Americans do as well doesn’t mean I think the president shouldn’t have the ability to make politically unpopular decisions.
Elections do have consequences, sure, but they are far from the end-all and be-all in determining what happens in government. Elected officials should be continuously responsive to their citizen's best interests, not only every 2-6 years at election time. And, likewise, we as citizens have the responsibility to deliver our input continuously, not just to pull the lever at the ballot box every 2-6 years. In addition to voting, I go to protests, I attend local government city council meetings, I contact my representatives on occasion when they're dealing with issues that I care strongly about, and I also file comments with the FCC every time net neutrality comes up.
Saying "elections have consequences" is not an excuse to ignore all non-ballot citizen input.
Politicians who govern by poll typically find they have accomplished nothing and yet managed to piss people off anyway.. there’s a line between ignoring voters and instituting needed reforms, and its easier for Pai to argue the latter when this is the policy platform republicans campaigned on. It’s tough for me to believe a party shouldn’t carry out the legislative agenda it campaigned on whenever the opposing party didn’t like it.
I think if people voted consistently in the midterms that would solve many problems, but alas that is relatively rare, much less the level of involvement you describe.
Sure, I agree. But I don't think it's fair to say he has the consent of the governed; rather that our system does not support that notion in any meaningful way. He is using his power against the will of the people explicitly.
The entire job of contemporary elected officials is to use their power against the interests of the people, in order to enact their sponsors' agendas. The booster speeches kowtowing to non-profitable public interests are nothing but wool being pulled over our eyes.
There was plenty of propaganda targeted at pro-trump pro-neutrality types designed to make them confused about where Trump and Obama stood on the issue. A common talking point I saw was that Tom Wheeler had secretly been anti-neutrality.
One bit of input is clearly insufficient to express any actual opinion, so this idea that the citizens act through the ballot box is a reversal of the actual effect. Rather, the ballot box is how consent is manufactured - "I voted for this, therefore I must support it".
Try making the argument for net neutrality with some Trump groupies and you'll soon find the simplistic attitude that whatever is happening must be good because it's going against those entrenched insiders at the FCC. Permanent revolution, indeed.
I utterly reject your claim that we should just acquiesce in the face of such malignancy.