David Brooks's unwillingness to connect the dots

David Brooks has a column  in today’s NYTimes entitled “One Reform to Save America.”  Briefly, he calls for the adoption of the (uncited) FairVote proposal to get rid of single-member congressional districts in favor of multi-member districts elected with proportional representation, plus adoption of the alternative vote to assure that winners in First Past the Post systems will in fact have a plausible claim to have garnered majority support (and, therefore, an incentive to try to attract some centrist support).  From one perspective, neither raises any basic constitutional issues.  States tomorrow could, as Maine has recently done, adopt the alternative transferable vote, and Congress could tomorrow simply vote to repeal the 1842 legislation, reaffirmed in the 1960s, that requires single-member congressional districts.   So two cheers for Brooks, who is clearly correct about the consequences of our…

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