Damn! I wish I were smarter!
We're all frustrated with the current state of our country, regardless of our political leanings. Our society is supposed to be a democratic one where everyone is heard, and no one side is supposed to be dictatorial.
The rub there is that we have a majority rule approach. That means that if 51 out of 100 of us, like our Senate, decide to follow one path, the other 49 have to suck it up. That doesn't seem quite right.
Naturally, I want to be with the 51. That makes me a happy guy, and I can drop by my favorite watering hole for happy hour with a smile on my face. But, if I'm in the group of 49, I'm likely to be pissed off and looking for a way to right what I see as wrong.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we can modify our democracy to become a "Consensus Democracy." Before I continue, let me say that reaching a consensus can be maddening. I know. I've been there. Back in the day, at Boeing in the early 1980s, we embarked on what was being called Continuous Quality Improvement (Q.I. for short). Various organizations formed teams among their employees to establish a Quality Circle (QC), where they examined all the processes that produced the desired outcome and attempted to improve those processes.
We had moderators or babysitters - they had an official name, but I've forgotten what that was. Oh, yeah, they were facilitators, another maddening word when trying to explain what the hell it means. It was their job to teach us the tools of Q.I. Among those tools was consensus decision-making. Believe me when I tell you, most of us said something like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
Consensus is a noun that means general agreement or the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned. Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
They explained that we couldn't have a majority vote where 49% of our team were losers. We had to keep talking and working until we had 100% agreement. Again, "You gotta be shitting me!" We are a nation that operates under the principle of majority rule. We always have been. What the hell is this nonsense about having to keep working until everyone agrees? They explained that's how a consensus works.
So, you may not be 100% in agreement, maybe only 80 or 85%. The other 15 or 20% give in from exhaustion or decide they can live with the result the supermajority has come up with.
If you've ever served on a jury, reaching a unanimous decision can set your hair on fire in a New York second, depending on which side of the issue you're on, guilty or not guilty. I've been there, and it is one frigging hard thing to accomplish.
I can tell you that although we claimed to have a consensus in our Quality Circles, it was not unanimous. If we had a QC with ten members, it was not unusual for one or two to grudgingly go along with the majority to move forward. These people often got a little of what they wanted in the compromise, but not everything. You still had a couple of pissed-off folks, but it wasn't nearly half of the group having to capitulate to the other half.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump received 77,302,416 votes (49.8%), while Kamala Harris received 75,012,178 votes (48.3%). That's damn near a 50-50 split. 49.3% of our voters are disenfranchised and feeling rotten about where our country is and where it seems to be headed.
So, the question, it seems to me, is, do we care enough about our country, our Constitution, and our neighbors - even the ones we disagree with - to put in the work needed to restore our democracy to something resembling what the Founders may have envisioned? If so, how the hell could we ever approach a process that embraces a consensus?
Obviously, we can't revote or try to reach a consensus between 152,314,594 voters. That's why we have what is called a representative democracy. Yet, that still is failing us due to the sharp divisions of opinions, priorities, and philosophies.
Okay, let's start with the House of Representatives. That is a fractured body of 500 people ranging from merely biased to completely deranged. How the hell can that mob ever reach a consensus? How would you like to be the Facilitator trying to make that happen?
The Senate, with 100 members, is only a little easier to deal with; nevertheless, the odds of reaching a consensus are still small.
Perhaps we could revise the legislative process by setting up a House or Senate Supreme Legislative Council (HSLC) or (SSLC) made up of members of both or all political parties holding a seat in either legislative body, one for the House and one for the Senate. The membership in the SLCs would be proportional to the membership in each body. Maybe nine for the Senate (no ties) and twenty-one for the House.
If either body is unable to reach a supermajority on a bill, requiring 375 votes in the House or 75 votes in the Senate within a specified timeframe, the bill is referred to the SLC. The SLC must reach a consensus, which you refer to as a compromise, where all members agree on the final language.
The SLC version of the bill would then be returned to the respective legislative body for ratification by a majority vote. The bill would then pass to the President for signature. If vetoed, the standard veto override rules would apply.
The goal is to incorporate more people's perspectives into the decision-making process. One thing I'm certain of is that we must back away from the hard-line belligerence that exists in today's politics. We have to stop using violence to get what we want, or we will end up like one of Trump's shithole countries with armed groups killing each other in the streets and doing battle with our police and military, like Mogadishu or Haiti. Except for a few Rambo nutcases, I don't think most of us want that.
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