Step Up

I do hope that you will enjoy next week's 2020 Republican National Convention, after this week's 1996 Republican National Convention. 

Free-marketeering without limit, equally hawkish towards the external and the internal colonies, and socially liberal among bourgeois white folks, but all with a garnish of the more tasteful outward piety of what used to be called mainline Protestantism, or of what might now be called mainline Catholicism. Good luck to next week's circus as it tries to sell this heavy dose of nostalgia to cure insomnia as the looming threat of a coup by Black Lives Matter and by Antifa. 

No one runs for the United States Senate at 29, in order to be sworn it at the constitutional minimum age of 30, except as part of a long-term campaign for the Presidency. Work out when Joe Biden must have decided to make his Senate bid, and you will see that he has been running for President for 50 years.

Ah, the United States Senate. The only reason to have any second chamber is the view that some people's votes should count more than others, but I have given up trying to explain that to anyone. Apparently, there just has to be one. This has nothing to do with federalism. The United Kingdom is still not a federal state. France is not remotely one. Every American state apart from Nebraska has two chambers, as have five Australian states, and as have six Indian states. There are bicameral legislatures in tiny jurisdictions the world over. And all because the common herd cannot quite be trusted.

Well, if we must have one, then let it have 100 members, like the United States Senate. Let 50 Senators be elected from among self-nominees, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. There would be no deposit, or anything like that. Electors and candidates would have to be British citizens resident in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens resident in Great Britain or Northern Ireland. There would be a minimum age of 21 to vote, and of 30 to stand. Any casual vacancy would be filled by the next highest scoring candidate who was willing and able to step up.

And let 50 Senators be elected from among self-nominees, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. There would be no deposit, or anything like that. Electors would have to be resident in the United Kingdom, but there would be no nationality requirement. You can already stand for Parliament from anywhere in the world, so there would neither a nationality requirement nor a residency requirement to be a candidate. There would be a minimum age of 16 to vote, but posthumous sons have always been able to inherit peerages at birth, so there would be no minimum age to stand. Any casual vacancy would be filled by the next highest scoring candidate who was willing and able to step up.