Legislative Processes in the United States

In the United States, political parties are divided along ideological lines and have great potential to alter the course of socio-political history. The so-called “two-party system” has been in effect for many years and try as they might, prospective additional political parties have been unable to meaningfully inject themselves into the American Legislative System. As a result, the Democratic and Republican parties legislate according to socio-political and cultural ideals, advancing the laws that their members believe will be best received by those who voted for them.

When a bill is taken up for consideration by the House of Representatives, it is typically sponsored by a group of congressmen, sometimes consisting of only Republicans, other times of only Democrats and, occasionally, of both representatives from both parties (Rector, 2013). These bills are typically designed to accommodate the interests of their sponsors, who then persuade their House of Representatives colleagues to vote for the bill. Part of this process entails allowing additional representatives to make their own contributions to a given bill, which may render any given bill distinctly different from how it looked when it was first conceived.

Once this “horse-trading” process is completed in the House of Representatives, and if the bill in question gains enough support to pass from the House to the Senate for consideration, the process begins again in the Senate, though with much less fanfare. By this point, a bill’s terms are typically locked into place and the Senate members will then vote on passing the bill often strictly according to party lines; if the bill is largely sponsored by Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Senate is controlled by the Democratic Party, the bill will pass. If the bill was largely sponsored by Republicans and the Senate is Democratically controlled, the bill will likely fail.

Ensuring Adequate and Proportionate Representation

In order to ensure a system of governance that adequately represents citizens proportionate to the extent to which they are entitled to such representation, we must adjust the Electoral College to reflect the reality we wish to bring about. Unless we do this, interest groups will largely control any political agenda, including that of the United States. If we continue to allow the Electoral College to stifle individual speech and the right of the individual to cast a meaningful vote, we will have ceded the electoral right to interest groups.

The Electoral College mandates a certain number of votes for every state in the Union. The College’s votes are largely divided between two of the United States’ largest states, New York and California. Invariably, individuals voting in these states know that their individual votes will not matter because both states’ Electoral College votes will always be counted toward the Democratic candidates’ tally (Klein, 2006). In other words, the political direction leaned toward by most of a state’s population becomes more important than the individual’s act of casting his or her ballot. This system greases the skids for lobbyists and interest groups to shift the political consensus of a given state, effecting wholesale change without engaging the voting populace.

If we are to stem the rising tide of interest groups, lobbyists and, generally, those who have chosen to intervene in the American Democratic process, we must adjust our Electoral College to better reflect the will of the individual or, indeed, to account for it at all. Part of this process should entail stripping Electoral College votes from states with lower voter turnouts and otherwise balancing the Electoral College vote tally to better reflect the populations of individual states and the various ways in which their citizens may contribute to the state of the Union as a whole.

References

Klein, Joe. The fresh face. Time Magazine. 15 Oct. 2006. Accessed Nov. 2013.

Rector, Robert. “How Obama Has Gutted Welfare Reform.” The Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2012. Accessed 26 Nov. 2013.