Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Donald Trump has already nominated conservative Amy Coney Barrett as her replacement — a move that means the Supreme Court is about to, as John Oliver puts it, “lurch to the right for the foreseeable future.”
During Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, the host takes a look at exactly how we got to this point, from the grim efforts of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell to the very fabric of the U.S. Senate and the presidency itself, which Oliver says “aren’t nearly as reflective of the American people” as Republican Senators would like us to believe.
The reason? The Electoral College (“with its winner-takes-all approach”) and the way it and the Senate both grant “disproportionate power to less populous states, which tend to be rural and more Conservative.”
Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, for instance, with their largely Black and Hispanic populations, don’t even have representation in the Senate. “America is constantly shifting, and granting D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood, or ending the Electoral College, would actually make our system more Democratic, rather than less,” concludes Oliver. “Because the unavoidable truth here is the system is already rigged. And it’s rigged in a way that has allowed a party without popular support to drastically reshape an entire branch of government for the foreseeable future, by appealing almost exclusively to white voters in some of the least populous regions of the country.
“That is not a mandate, and it’s not democracy — it’s a fucking travesty.”