U.S MID-TERM ELECTIONS

CONTEXT

The U.S midterm elections will be held on Nov 2, 2022. In this election, every one of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 – slightly more than one-third- of the 100 seats in the Senate will be up for grabs. Alongside the election of these lawmakers in Washington, 39 states, gubernatorial and a range of other local contests will be on cards.

OVERVIEW OF U.S GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE

• S political system is characterized by the doctrine of separation of powers. The U.S borrowed this doctrine from the ideas of French philosopher, Montesquieu, who in 1748 spoke of a division of power to ensure that no single person or group could assume autocratic authority owing to a system of checks and balances between executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.
• In the U.S the three branches –the president, Congress, and the courts led by the Supreme court
• There is a difference in the balance of power between these three arms of the state in the U.S, as compared to parliamentary democracies such as India. In India, the executive draws its very authority to make policy from its majority control of Parliament, and the proximity of this relationship implies that there is no realistic scenario where Parliament may overrule the actions of the Executive, which is the cabinet led by the Prime Minister.
• However, in the U.S, not only is the President empowered to veto legislation passed in Congress but the President's is circumscribed by Congress's power to vote out, by a two-third majority, a Presidential veto of a law that it had passed.
• Further, Congress controls budget appropriations which essentially gives it the levers to control what the White House can and cannot do in terms of policy –effectively setting limits to presidential power yet again.
• Simultaneously, U.S Presidents enjoy a certain amount of autonomy from congress as they are not members of congress as such but are elected indirectly by the people, through the Electoral College.
• On the other hand, U.S courts possess the power to constrain the reach of congressional legislation by, where the situation warrants it, declaring laws passed by congress unconstitutional. They also have the power to declare presidential actions as unconstitutional in scenarios where it is believed that the president has acted beyond the scope of their legitimate authority.
• Thus all three branches of the U.S government enjoy a balance of autonomy and limitations of powers imposed by the other two branches, which establishes a robust system of checks and balances and differentiates the balance of power and functioning of U.S state institutions from those of parliamentary democracies.

POTENTIAL FOR GRIDLOCK

• Under the U.S Constitution, only two senators are allocated to each state regardless of its population, large states such as California have the same number of representatives in the upper house as, for example, Wyoming, which is the U.S's least populous state.
• This means that just to break even in the 100-seat senate, Democrats need to win a far greater proportion of the national vote than the Republicans.
• As analysts have noted, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats won nearly 18 million more senate election votes than the Republicans, but the Republicans still gained two seats, with major policy implications.
• The correction of this small state bias would require political heavy lifting to bring about constitutional amendments that allowed for a greater measure of proportional representation for congress.
• The House of Representatives does reflect the demographic realities of the country, in that congressional districts for the election of its members are based on population size. However, the precise demarcation of each district‘s boundary makes a significant difference to electoral outcomes as within each district a first -past –the –post –rather than proportional voting – system is followed where the majority winner claims the House seat for that district.

CONCERNS SURROUNDING GERRYMANDERING

• While redistricting, the process of redrawing electoral boundaries is an exercise conducted across U.S Congressional and state legislative districts every decade, following the publication of the results of the population census, gerrymandering or making calculated political gains through redistricting is a blight on the functioning of substantive democracy in the U.S
• The movement of Democratic supporters into urban areas and the movement of Republicans to rural areas with far lower population density is a well-established long-term demographic distribution of voters over time, Republican party lawmakers have discovered political gains in including or excluding cities in a district with a relatively larger proportion of rural voters depending on the density of Democratic residents.
• The deep concerns surrounding gerrymandering came to the fore after the 2020 census results were announced in August 2021 a delayed outcome owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its wake, in several "swing states”, or states that have historically switched between voting Republican and Democrat, including Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio, Republican state legislators have managed to gerrymander electoral districts to create “supermajorities “where none existed before, posing a challenge to the legitimate authority of the Democratic Governor of the state in question.
• In such a scenario, short of moving the courts on redistricting methodologies, the political process leaves Democrats with few options to impact policymaking. Thus undermining the representation of the people by their government.
• As noted earlier, the U.S congress is virtually gridlocked on major policy issues, leaving vital questions in areas such as reproductive rights, gun control, and healthcare reform in the hands of state authorities to implement.