In May 2025, many people express satisfaction with the job Donald Trump is doing as president. This approval is far from universal, but most Republicans embrace it. It is said—I don’t know how widespread this view is—that many have lost faith in American democracy and take comfort in Trump’s autocratic style.

I can sympathize with those who feel that our political system has failed to meet their expectations or to provide what they believe they deserve from their government. Many people see the elements of the American Dream as being out of reach and the government as operating for the benefit of special interests. Our nation has not become what the Founding Fathers anticipated, nor what was intended to follow the reforms of Reconstruction.

If the American Experiment is to survive and prosper, changes are urgently needed. It is time for us to acknowledge that our supposedly democratic institutions are not all that democratic, and to recognize that we need to strengthen our democracy, not cast it aside.

The bedrock of democratic theory is that governance is by the people or by their designated representatives. Americans should be proud that, over time, the United States has indeed tended to become more democratic in this sense. The franchise is no longer limited to propertied white males. Owning real estate, being male, being Caucasian, or being heterosexual is no longer required to vote in American elections. Nevertheless, states have made it harder to register to vote and harder to cast a ballot. They have required forms of identification not everyone has, purged voting rolls without verifying that names removed belong to people who have died or moved out of state, and have otherwise made it more complicated to vote, particularly for racial or sexual minorities. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was intended to prohibit racial discrimination in voting, but the act has been emasculated by the courts and subverted by Republican legislatures. The act could be reinvigorated and expanded in scope if Congress had the will to do so. It should.

 The right to vote should be automatic for every U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older. Registration could be accomplished on election day when a person votes for the first time. If eligibility cannot be determined on election day, a provisional ballot should be cast. The government should be able to verify citizenship and age without further effort by the voter.

It is important that all eligible citizens be allowed to vote, though only in one jurisdiction. Mechanisms are available to identify people who are deceased or who may be registered in more than one place, either because they have moved or, more rarely, because they actually intend to vote more than once. ERIC (The Electronic Registration Information Center) is such a mechanism, but Republican-led states have pulled out of ERIC in recent years for reasons not likely to have been benign. ERIC, or something like it, is needed to build confidence in election integrity in an age in which Republicans have consistently raised doubts about it.

 Republican concerns about non-citizens voting are much overblown. There are already severe penalties for aliens’ voting, and we simply need to publicize that fact at every polling place. Non-voting citizens are actually the bigger problem. They are often people fed up with the status quo and skeptical that it can ever be changed. Their failure to vote can have a significant influence over who is elected. We should widely publicize the need for all citizens to vote. Perhaps we should even adopt the Australian system of making voting compulsory.

Voting should actually mean something, and it may mean very little because of gerrymandering. The evils of gerrymandering have been mitigated in some states by having apportionment done by nonpartisan committees convened for the purpose. But the larger problem is that the U.S. population continues to expand, but the size of the Congress does not. The number of persons in the House of Representatives has been capped since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act in 1929. Each of the 435 members of the House represents more people over time. They therefore become less and less capable of reflecting the will of their constituents. We should expand House membership as the Founders intended. Not only would doing so give citizens more effective representation, but it would also make effective gerrymandering more difficult to achieve.

Our system of elections has problems that deserve a separate discussion. We should eliminate party primaries and vote using ranked choice voting, which elects people more closely reflecting the will of the voters. Too many officials are being elected lacking not only the votes of the majority of the electorate but even a majority of the votes cast. Ideally, election rules should be uniform throughout the country.

The Senate, too, needs an infusion of democracy. Each state gets two senators, but this means that a California senator has many more constituents than does a senator of Wyoming. In other words, California voters have less influence in the Senate than do Wyoming voters or voters is other less populated states. This also means that rural populations have more influence over our laws than more numerous urbanites in the larger states. Of course, the makeup of the Senate represents the compromise between large and small states made when the Constitution was written. In 1787, however, the disparity in state populations was not as great as today, and the compromise was not as damaging to democratic polity as it is now. This situation could be marginally improved by the addition of the District of Columbia as the 51st state. Ideally, the composition of the Senate should be increased by allocating additional senators to states with larger populations. This would require a constitutional amendment not likely to be popular in, say, Wyoming.

The rules of the Senate and House should be made more democratic. The Senate filibuster should be done away with, something that can be effected by a simple rules change. Yet both major parties fear making Senate voting more democratic and not held hostage by a minority. Additionally, House rules should give more power to the minority party. (We should encourage the development of additional political parties, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Then, there is the bizarre matter of the Electoral College by which we elect our president and vice president and which, wisely, has been copied by no other nation. This undemocratic institution has the distressing habit of allowing the election of leaders who have failed to obtain a majority of the votes cast. It also distorts campaigning, as candidates can safely forego doing so in states either that are certain to give their ticket a majority or to give the other party a majority. A workaround, favored by some, would commit states to give all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. But this is a kluge that emphasizes just how strange our electoral system is. (I’ll ignore for the moment the baroque method by which we count electoral votes.) Of course, enlarging the houses of Congress as I suggested earlier, would make the Electoral College more democratic (or less anti-democratic, anyway). Ideally, a constitutional amendment should allow for the direct election of the president and vice president by popular vote.

Alas, the Constitution and current political divisions make passing constitutional amendments—amendments that the Founding Fathers assumed would be made frequently to create “a more perfect Union”—virtually impossible. The amendment process must be made less onerous, so that important changes to our polity can, in fact, be made. This change to the Constitution is needed to make other urgently needed changes to save the Republic. It is unclear what crisis will be necessary to make constitutional amendments possible again.

Not all changes that would make our political system more democratic require constitutional amendments. The composition of the Supreme Court has been changed many times, and we should enlarge the number of Supreme Court justices, both to facilitate an expanded workload and to prevent the court from being captured, as it is now, by an ideological majority at odds with public sentiment. Replacing lifetime tenure with fixed terms, another idea to improve our democracy, likely would require an amendment.

The Supreme Court has become a major threat to the freedom of Americans. Its elimination of the right to an abortion was the first instance in which a longstanding civil right was nullified by the court. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed Roe v. Wade is only one court decision in which the justices, who are predominantly Roman Catholic, have shown a preference for the radical positions of right-wing Christians and a disregard for the traditional separation of church and state. Either a constitutional amendment or a much different Supreme Court will be needed to restore the right to an abortion and the freedom from having one’s rights curtailed by religious zealots pleading for their “religious freedom.”

The Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court keep making up judicial theories—textualism, originalism, major question doctrine, and so forth—to reach their preferred resolutions to cases. It is up to Congress to rein in these out-of-control jurists. Congress should also impose a code of ethics on the justices, who have staunchly resisted acting ethically.

Perhaps the most acutely needed constitutional amendment would negate the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision that has allowed our elections to be influenced by the extraordinary influx of money from individuals and corporations without having to disclose the source of that money. In 2025, elections are not won; they are bought. A corporate entity, which, for certain legal purposes is a “person” under the law, should be restricted to giving the same amount to political campaigns as natural persons, that is, ordinary citizens. Democracy would also be served were Congress to limit the number and influence of corporate lobbyists and to prevent its members from investing in individual stocks.

The wealthy would not be in a position to buy elections so easily were they not so wealthy to begin with. We should be seriously embarrassed by the wealth gap in this country, combined with the prevalence of poverty. (It is remarkable that the national obsession with eliminating poverty is no longer a conspicuous concern of either major political party.) There is no easy fix for wealth disparity, but we should increase antitrust activity, regulate the financial system more aggressively, and become serious about taxing the rich. Additionally, freedom is meaningless if we are sick. It is high time that we guarantee to all citizens not medical insurance, but actual medical care that is free or nearly so. Other Western democracies do this, and so should we.

The malignant combination of Donald Trump and the Supreme Court has created a whole new class of democracy-killing problems that need to be addressed. I can only enumerate some of them here: the president’s ability unilaterally to alter tariffs; presidential immunity for nearly every crime; failure of the president to spend money appropriated by Congress; presidential interference in departments and institutions through executive orders and other mechanisms and not simply nominating their heads; and, especially, the interference of the president in the Department of Justice. Many laws were enacted in response to Watergate and to the 2008 financial crisis. Many new laws will be needed in response to the second Trump administration assuming, of course, that the Republic survives that administration.

Can we make our country more democratic? This is an open question, but one we had better answer in the affirmative.

— LED, 5/14/2025

 
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