End MAGA Next Year With Necessary Small-D Democratic Reforms

By Tim O’Brien

The Trumpster Republicans’ greedy money-grab big bill that takes health care from millions of people to hand vast riches to the already wealthy, among other harms, is only the latest in a string of acts of the bigoted, fascist, militaristic, greedy, corrupt, Project 2025, MAGA administration under the rule of President Donald Trump and MAGA. It is bad – very bad.

Of course, I am far from the only one who thinks so. The massive, nationwide “No Kings” rallies in June and polling show that there is real and growing opposition to Trumpism and MAGA. But what is next? If all that the movement against Trump is just about being against something, as it has been before, that opposition will eventually fizzle… again …and we will remain living in a country sliding still further down the road to a hell dominated by the politics of the greedy and the bigoted.

At this moment, we need to have a concrete idea of what is next. In other words, what are people of good conscience for? I think there are specific demands that must be made of politicians who may stand to be elected next year in what very well could be a Democratic wave election, and, perhaps in 2028.

First, we need to end the problem of the presidency. The biggest problem with this president is that he and his entire Project 2025 administration have exposed, by trying to exploit, a dirty little secret about our constitutional system of separation of powers, as it is practiced. Specifically, that is does not actually work. We might all grow up learning that it is a great system and a model for the world that preserves democracy because of our three branches of government that can block each other, but that is, for most part, a fiction. The truth is that the only real restraint on the power of the presidency is the self-restrain of the president, personally. And it only took one president without that restraint to expose just how weak that system is.

The cat is out of the bag on that dirty little secret, now, and I am very concerned that our future will have characters even worse than Trump, who will exploit the nearly unlimited powers of the imperial presidency to do even worse than Trump. I can think of several specific such people, who may very well succeed Trump as president, who would do just that.

Even more immediately, we also have to consider the damage that Trump and his administration might cause, if allowed to remain running the country for a full four years.

I think we should think bigger than in the past. There should be fundamental changes in how decision-making will work under our existing Constitution.

What I am proposing is this demand of the national Democratic Party: If the Democrats win the majority in the House of Representatives, they should enact a simple House procedural rule that requires that the cabinet of the United States – the collection of cabinet secretaries who run the federal agencies – have a standing vote of confidence from the House, or, if they do not, that no budget legislation (except to fund Social Security and Medicare benefits) be in order in the House. So, without a vote of confidence in place for the cabinet, there would be no future allocations of money for Trump to run the federal government.

The House Democrats should then immediately demand that their own choices for various cabinet positions be nominated by the president – that members of Trump’s cabinet (and other offices) be tossed out and replaced with Democrats who will end Trump’s reign over most of the federal government during the last two years of Trump’s term.

Yes, I am proposing a parliamentary system.

This would require no changes in our Constitution. In fact, the Constitution actually says that all budget appropriation legislation start in the House of Representatives. Many people may not know this, but control of budgetary power is how the British Parliament, the model for the modern nation-state legislature, like our Congress, came into existence and then took power (albeit gradually) away from kings and gave it to the people. And our House of Representatives could use this same leverage to create a parliamentary government system in our country, with a simple majority vote, with no veto possible from the president. Even the United States Senate could not stop this.

Of course, the Senate has a direct vote on who sits on the cabinet. With the House demanding to choose cabinet members, the Senate could use their constitutional “advice and consent” power to do more than just give consent to the president’s nominees for the different positions. They could advise the president specifically who they will give their consent to appointing. If the Democrats win the Senate in 2026, that is exactly what they should do.

Thus, in late 2026 to early 2027, President Trump would have to be sitting down with Congressional Democrats to make a deal on who is going to be running the federal government and what policies in different departments it is going to be following. Choosing who would actually run the US government from 2027 to 2029 would have to be a negotiation between the House, Senate and President – and if Trump refused, he would have to figure out how to run the government with no money.

Best of all, the prospect that the House of Representative could, at any time, pass a vote of no-confidence would go farther to provide a real check and balance against the excesses, not just of President Trump, but of any president. That would go a long way to impose an actual check and balance, in place of the fictional one we have now – a sword of Damocles over not just this, but future presidents, as well, that would be a far more real threat than impeachment. This would be just in time to pull our country back from fascism and toward democracy. It would help create a more rational and democratic system for our future.

But doing this is not enough.

We must also demand that the number of members of the House of Representatives be greatly increased. This would require a change in federal law, but Democrats must do this as soon as they hold the presidency, Senate and House at the same time – perhaps in 2029.

There are a few reasons why.

First, doing this is important for making the branch of Congress that is supposed to represent us by population closer to the people they represent. Right now, each member of Congress represents in excess of 700,000 people. For context, the lowest number of people per member of Congress allowed in the Constitution is 30,000. The number of Representatives must be increased enough that the number of people per district is closer to 30,000 than 700,000 – a lot closer.

In our modern age, when members of Congress could do their business better, more efficiently and more openly using online tools, it matters much more whether our US Representatives can know their constituents, be closer to the incomes of the people they represent and be the representatives of government by, of and for the people, than to defend silly arguments about keeping the House at 435 members so they all can fit in the room in which they have historically met.

Having a larger House of Representatives would provide greater opportunity for more diversity in the House, and it would make it far harder for Congressional districts to be gerrymandered from racist or partisan motives. It would not stop gerrymandering, but it would make it far more difficult, and it would make it easier for people of all walks of life to contemplate representing their communities in the Congress of the United States.

In addition, smaller constituencies would help, not solve, by any means, but help to decrease the problem of money in politics by making elections for US Representative less expensive – making elections for Congress closer to the people and less controlled by the wealthy who purchase election outcomes of their choosing.

Then there is the effect of increasing the size of the House on the electoral college.

Of course, each state gets a presidential electoral vote for each of their two Senators and then one for each Representative – a minimum of three, no matter how few people live in a state. This waters down the votes cast for president in other states and distorts presidential elections against democracy.

By increasing the number of US Representatives, that same constitutional math means that the number of presidential electors per state goes up, and, therefore, those two bonus votes per state will provide less of an undemocratic advantage to voters in small states. The more US Representatives there are, the closer the distribution of electoral votes will be to the actual distribution of population among the states. With that, we will probably see few, if any examples, of a candidate winning the presidency over a candidate who received more votes from people.

Finally (at least for now) I would return to the question of money in politics – the means by which the rich buy elections out from under everyday people.

No more should we allow Democratic Party politicians to get away with promising to propose half-measures for campaign finance reform, such as Constitutional amendments that they know full well will never be approved. We need them, again, as soon as Democrats hold the House, Senate and presidency, the clamp down on money in politics by legislation.

At the core of those money in politics reforms should be a strict and very, very low limit on how much any person can spend to influence politics and government. There should be no exceptions to what counts as campaign donations. No distinction between campaign contributions and policy influence. Of course, corporate campaign spending must be against the law again. And there should be no “independent expenditures”, super PACs or any other similar loophole. Only human beings should ever be allowed to spend money on politics. And there should be a real system of publicly financed campaigns at the national level.

Rather than fruitlessly trying to amend the Constitution to keep the United States Supreme Court from overruling this election spending reform, this campaign finance reform law should be protected by using the provisions of the Constitution that already allow Congress, by law, to ban the courts from overruling a legislatively approved law. If there is ever something for which those constitutional provisions should be used, clamping down on the power of the rich and the corporations they control to buy elections is it.

It is true these are all structural reforms, reforms to how our political and governmental systems should work, rather than what the government’s policies should be. To be sure, I have strong opinions on very specific policy objectives that I very much want to see addressed.

At the same time, though, I think we, as a country, would be wise to consider that the quality of the policies that are to be carried out going forward will be better for everyday people if the decision-making systems in politics and government are more “small-d” democratic. I would agree that those reforms (and others) provide no guarantee against plutocracy or bigotry dividing and exploiting us, but I would offer that real “small-d” democracy is the table settling for collaboration between all of us, from different walks of life, to come together to build a better future in which we can all share and that we can feel good about passing on to future generations.

We are about to celebrate Independence Day, 2025. Next year, 2026, will be the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Let’s ensure that we have a small-d democratic United States of America long after that anniversary.