We can’t fight every battle, all at once. But we can win the important fights.

America’s not looking too healthy. We yell at Congress for not acting, but we still can’t get them to move. The courts routinely rule against black-letter law with unsigned and unjustified injunctions. Our political parties are acting like angry monkeys, shrieking and throwing poo. The billionaires steal all our wealth, buy politicians, and decide what we’ll see on the news.

Oh, and the President is an openly corrupt felon, rapist, and (probably) a child abuser.

What’s Broken

Congress

We’ve written about this once or twice before. Frustratingly, Congress can’t resolve the smallest compromise; they can only obstruct. The House is bad, and the Senate is worse. Logically, there are no good reasons why we couldn’t just change the rules to something much better. It sounds easily fixable.

But instead of fixing either house, every new Congress makes it slightly worse. It’s not just bad people. There are systemic problems driving this much dysfunction. And yes, electing better representatives is critical, but that alone isn’t enough.

Political Parties

If you’ve read Three String Raconteur, you know we’re not fond of most Republicans or the Republican Party in general. And we’re nearly as dismissive of the Democratic Party leadership. It’s hard to love feckless, ineffectual cowards who are helpless before the moment we face.

So, you know, there’s that.

The Judiciary

The Supreme Court is ruled by a lawless MAGA supermajority. Republicans have been seeding the judiciary with unqualified and biased judges a lot. They’ve been most effective with the Fifth Circuit, dominated by MAGA ideologues, and the reliably reactionary Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, the sole district judge in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas. With that, they have a pipeline to shoot the worst legal cases straight to the Supreme Court.

The Executive

We already know the low points. The Executive is run by a corrupt, convicted felon, sex abuser, and probable pedophile. Despite being inexpressibly dull, functionally illiterate, sundowning old man, he believes he’s a vibrant and stable genius. He’s filled every critical position with incompetent sycophants who will never tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. (Which is almost everything.)

The biggest problems is that Congress can’t act and the Supreme Court is a rubber-stamp. In that power vacuum, the Executive is running wild, often in defiance of the law, international treaties, and the U.S. Constitution.

The Ultra-Rich

Over many decades, the rich spent lavishly on political candidates in return for eased federal restrictions and oversight. This allowed the rich to rig the markets while subverting the agencies that were built to restrain them. The monopolies we fought so hard to bust are back. Income inequality is at an all-time high. Nobody needs scare-numbers to see how the ultra-rich own everything while we fight over the scraps. And now they even want those scraps, too. A very few billionaires (and soon, trillionaires) own most of our wealth. And instead of excessive wealth hitting limits, more money allows the rich to buy even more influence. It’s a runaway reaction.

The Fourth Estate

We’ve let billionaires and massive corporations buy all our major news media, TV stations, and other news sources. Billionaires and wealthy conglomerates now own the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. They control CNN, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Comcast, Fox News, Discovery, NBC, ABC, CBS, News Corp, and Gannett. Sinclair Media bought enough TV stations to reach about half of all U.S. households. Unsurprisingly, billionaire- and corporate-owned media say things that help their billionaire and corporate owners. Sinclair routinely forces their stations to broadcast corporate editorials without disclosing that they’re not local opinions.

What We Can Do About It

I’ve listed the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary. And the markets, our economy, and our wealth. We’ve even lost the main sources for our ideas and understanding of the world. I know that’s a lot.

We can’t fight all those battles – and every entrenched interest – all at once. We’d lose before we got started. Too many enemies. They’d crush us while convincing 70% of Americans that the billionaires and autocrats were the true heroes of the story.

But we’re not helpless. We have power. Not endless, and we can’t change everything, but we can change some things. We need to focus on the most important things we can do.

I have two suggestions.

Fix Voting

The entrenched two-party system isn’t serving anyone well. Think about the ‘One person, one vote’ system. About half of us will chose the winner, but they’re usually a ‘lesser evil’ candidate. Not our first choice, just the candidate who’s most likely to win. Maybe. The other half of voters? We’re nearly voiceless. The winner probably won’t do what you want, but if you’re candidate lost, you have nothing. And the dirty little secret? Either way, they won’t vote in your interests. They’ve done studies. Voter preference literally has no significant effect on your representative’s vote. What you want doesn’t matter to them. I’m not just disgruntled; you can measure it.

Forget third-party candidates. They are, at most, spoilers, pulling your one, single vote away from someone who might have won.

My answer is Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). It’s easy, your vote is much closer to what you prefer, and we’ll never need runoff elections again. The entrenched powers absolutely hate RCV. They spend a lot of money trying to convince us it’s too complicated for poor, stupid voters.

That’s hogwash, unsurprisingly. Quite a few jurisdictions started using RCV, and guess what? The people there love it. All the predictions that it won’t work are just fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).

The reasons people like RCV is because you can list who you like, in order: first, second, third, etc. If your first choice doesn’t win, your vote still counts. To win, politicians need to appeal to as many voters as possible.

But RCV opens the political world beyond the two entrenched parties. It’s an opportunity for us, but a threat to them. They won’t push for it. If we want RCV, we’ll have to force them to accept it. Let them know, and if there’s a referendum, vote ‘yes.’

Expand the Supreme Court

We have to fix the weirdly racist supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court, and we have to do it quickly. Until we do that, they’ll nullify and frustrate every law or action that threatens the billionaire class. It can’t wait.

I’ve written about this before: expand the court. The other options have merit, but they’re impractical. We can’t impeach Justices, for example. It’s a nice theory, but there are reasons it’s never worked in the real world. Term limits or mandatory retirement ages are attractive, but too long-term. And we’d need to pass a Constitutional amendment. Even ‘Binding ethical rules’ requires a body that can enforce them.

We can expand the Supreme Court by an Act of Congress. That’s not trivial, but it’s possible. The harder question is who chooses the new justices in today’s hyper-partisan environment, but it’s possible.

Conclusion

Those two are my top priorities: Ranked Choice Voting and expanding the Supreme Court. These won’t correct any of the big problems directly. But they can change the reasons we couldn’t fix things before now. They’d make our representative government become more… well, representative. And, if our system wasn’t as broken, we’d limit the corrupting influence of money in our politics.

And wouldn’t that be nice?