Our president is an out-of-control megalomaniac. MAGA has become MEGA, though really it always was. The people in the president’s first administration tried to channel his disruptive energy into conventional styles of political behavior. They kept “grown-ups in the room.” This second administration seems to be pursuing a different tack. They get out of the way everywhere they decide the megalomania doesn’t really matter. OK, knock down the East Wing. Rename the Kennedy Center after yourself. Close it down even. Bomb drug boats? Don’t mind if you do.
But someone blocks the megalomania when it would actually drive America over the cliff. Often it seems to be Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and associates in the business world. More than once it’s been anonymous bond traders. Sometimes it might be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The examples? Backing off on the Liberation Day tariffs. On Greenland. On bombing Iran (for now). On ICE and CPB tactics and abuses. These aren’t TACO — aren’t “Trump always chickens out” moments. Sometimes someone gets in the way of the megalomania.
The MEGA Movement is also directing ferocious energy toward knocking down our constitutional order. It has proven impeachment useless. It has won immunity for the president and rhetorically transferred that sense of immunity to a wide swathe of the executive branch. It is rewriting the history of the January 6 insurrection. It is in a battle with Congress for control over the purse.
Now it has turned its attention to the remaining fence: the powers reserved to the states and to the people through elections and control over the election system.
Last week, Republicans in Congress introduced the MEGA bill. They call it the Make Elections Great Again Act. I call it the Megalomania bill. This bill moves forward an agenda that the president had tried advancing as an executive order to extend further federal control over state election systems.
Perhaps the most important provision of the MEGA bill is a ban on the use of ranked-choice voting for federal elections. Both Alaska and Maine already use RCV for federal elections, and one reason they do that is to ensure that the people as a whole — not a small partisan base — determine who represents them in office.
Because when the people as a whole control elections, and when a majority winner is required, the election system cannot be anywhere nearly so easily captured by corrupt or hyperpartisan interests, as has occurred across the many states without RCV.
Grassroots advocates who work on RCV have always understood that their measure was a counterweight to the forces of corruption. No surprise, then, that the forces of corruption are now taking aim at RCV. They understand its power, too.
But this isn’t a fight between a megalomaniac President and another branch of government. This is a fight between the president and the people.
Good news: The people are ready.
Here is Meredith Sumpter, CEO of FairVote, with a message to all Americans about why we need to stand up for our power to choose an election system that puts power back in our hands:
FairVote Reacts to the MEGA Bill
(https://youtube.com/shorts/PADGis1EpmE?si=4J-Tswd2BJFdUQJO)
Hey friends, I'm grateful to see all this engagement! I haven't had a chance to read through all your comments yet, but I will sit down this weekend and do so. I know we're all thinking hard about questions of design and how to find mechanisms fit for the purpose of protecting all of us from arbitrary power in 21st century conditions.
Doesn’t the First Amendment bar Congress from outlawing ranked-choice voting in state elections for national offices? The First Amendment clearly established and emphasized that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Voting is a particular kind of speech. It’s also a particularly powerful and particularly protected kind of speech. The right to vote is so important that it is mentioned more often in our Constitution than any other right. It’s addressed expressly and specifically in Amendments XIV, XV, XIX, XXIV and XXVI.
The right to vote also is secured by requiring elections within certain periods. Article I requires that every two years the entire House and 1/3 of the Senate be elected. Article II requires that the president and vice president be elected every 4 years.
The right to vote also is addressed more generally, albeit by a different name, in Amendment I ("the freedom of speech"). The right to vote also is addressed expressly, albeit by a different name, in the powerful and famous second sentence of our 1776 Declaration of Independence: “to secure [our] Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”
Twelve years earlier, Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws” emphasized the reason for the foregoing. "In a democracy the people are in some respects the sovereign, and in others the subject" (of the laws). "The freedom of every citizen constitutes a part of the public liberty; and, in a democratical state, is even a part of the sovereignty [of the people]." "[T]he enjoyment of liberty, and even its support and preservation, consists in every man’s being allowed to speak his thoughts and to lay open his sentiments."
The "exercise of sovereignty" by citizens is most clearly "by their suffrages, which [is an expression of citizens’ sovereign] will: [by voting and other exercises of the freedom of expression] the sovereign’s will is the sovereign himself. The laws, therefore, which establish the right of suffrage, are fundamental to this government" so it is "important to regulate, in a republic, in what manner, by whom, to whom, and concerning what, suffrages are to be given."