Here we are
Here we are
173 comments
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Don't worry the House balances it*
*Until they froze the House because they couldn't fit anymore chairs...
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I'm not inherently opposed to the Senate as a concept, I think it can serve as an important check/balance, but for it to exist while the house has been capped and stripped of its offsetting powers is completely asinine. I also think that attempting to get anything done in the house with 1,000 members may also be unproductive however. Perhaps capping the house to a reasonable number of representatives while also adjusting voting power to proportionally match the most current census could work. Some representatives may cast 1.3 votes while others may cast .7 votes.
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. I also think that attempting to get anything done in the house with 1,000 members may also be unproductive however
Kind of the opposite.
The less people, the more power each one has.
So if you need a couple votes you add some things people personally want that are completely unrelated to get them on board.
With twice the people, that becomes twice as hard. So the strategy would have to pivot to actual bipartisan legislation and not just cramming bribes and personal enrichments in there till it passes.
The thing about our political system, it's been held together with duct tape so long, there's nothing left but duct tape. We can keep slapping more on there and hoping for the best, at some point we're gonna have to replace it with a system that actually works.
We might have been one of the first democracies, but lots of other countries took what we did and improved on it. It makes no logical sense to insist we stick with a bad system because we have a bad system.
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1,000 members? The original plan was for 1 house member for every 30,000 people, eventually changing to 1 in 50,000:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
Doing that now, on a population of 330,000,000 would give us between 6,600 and 11,000 congress critters.
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China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.
Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People's Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.
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The Wyoming Rule would only increase the size of the house to 574, still a totally manageable number.
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This is where the issue is. The Senate works as intended, it is meant to give the States equal power so a State like California can't just dictate what Delaware does. The House is supposed to represent based on population. The arbitrarily low cap has turned it into a second pseudo-Senate.
The House should have something like 1600 members to properly represent States. Every House seat should represent roughly the same amount of people, but that's not how it works now because of the limit. Two Representatives from different states can represent massively different sized populations.
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You're correct that the senate was designed not to represent people and give the number of states more power. To say that isn't an issue though is pretty fucked up. It was literally done this way to get slave states to sign on, giving them power to protect the institution of slavery.
States are made up. People are not. Only one of these should have power in a democracy. States can have their own laws that effect themselves, but federal policy should be dictated by the will of the people, not the will of arbitrarily drawn borders.
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Freezing the house did more damage than the Senate alone could ever do.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But hear me out.
Nebraska has a unicameral, we have only the Senate. Every district in the state sends a senator and that is the only legislative house.
The number of times a single senator from downtown Omaha has single handedly filibustered a fucking awful bill to prevent the state from fucking itself is more than I'd like to count.
For a while that senator was Ernie Chambers. A man who more than once made national news because a point he was trying to make by doing something crazy was lost in the woods and it just looked like a crazy old guy from Omaha was doing something crazy in the unicameral. Omaha and the state of Nebraska owes that man a lot.
A second house would be a huge barrier to the kind of fuckery they try to get up to in the unicameral.
I know the system isn't perfect, but pulling out a safety net because it's getting in your way sometimes is definitely not the answer you think it is.
Uncap the house, fuck it, make Congressperson a remote job, keep them in their districts. They don't need to be physically present and in fact decentralizing the house might prevent some of the rampant corruption now that lobbyists suddenly have to travel all over the country to issue
bribes.campaign contributions.-
uncap the house... make congressperson a remote job, keep them in their districts.
I can't say that's my ideal solution (as it doesn't involve completely rewriting our constitution), but that's honestly the best solution we have to most of our problems. Completely uncap, remote congress, 1 per 30k. At that point, we'd be pretty close to a real democracy. There's no reason why it couldn't be a remote job. Stay in your fucking district where we can yell at you when you fuck up. In fact, there should be a law about how many days per year they can be out of their district. Live with, work with, know the people you represent. And with that many congressional reps, it'd be hard as hell to bribe enough of them.
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While I'm sure that has done a lot of good.
Unfortunately we're talking about representative democracy, and that's probably the opposite.
By no means am I an expert on Nebraska, but lm pretty sure the majority are conservative and voted for that awful shit.
But setting up a system of government that isn't really a democracy because you think voters are too stupid (in Nebraska you may be right) to vote in their own self interest is literally what got us to where we are nationally today. And what people are brainstorming about how to fix.
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I may be misremembering, but I believe the way things were originally designed was that the Senate was supposed to represent the states, not the people. The house represented the people. That's why the Senate has equal representation (because the states were meant to have equal say), and the house proportionate to population.
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That is correct. The state legislatures generally (if not always) picked the senators, but due to huge state corruption, it was almost always political qui pro quo, and some states even going full terms without selecting sla sentaor. This led to the 17th amendment (which you'll here rednecks and/or white supremacists asposing, because states' rights.)
Edit to add: Wikipedia knows it better than I do.
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Appreciate the extra details and the link!
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This is correct, and this part of the system works fine. What should have happened though is a population break point where a state has to break up if they exceed a certain population. CA should be at least 3 states. New York needs a split as well, probably a few others. There is no way a state can serve its population well when the population is measured in the tens of millions.
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I agree in theory, but big cities are where things get muddy.
When a single city (e.g. New York City, population ~8 million just to use the biggest example) has a population larger than entire states, how do you "split" the state of New York? If the city itself, excluding any of the surrounding "metro area", was its own state, it would be the 13th most populous in the US and also the smallest by area.
Do we carve up each of the boroughs as a separate state, and give New York City 10 senators? It would be more proportional representation for the people of NYC, but also their close proximity and interdependence would very much align their priorities and make them a formidable voting bloc. And even then, you could still fit 4 Vermonts worth of people into Brooklyn alone. How much would we need to cut to make it equitable? Or do we work the other way as well and tell Vermont it no longer gets to be its own state because there aren't enough people?
For states like California, which still have large cities but not quite to the extreme of New York, how do we divide things fairly? Do we take a ruler and cut it into neat thirds, trying to leave some cities as the nucleus of each new state? Or do we end up with the state of California (area mostly unchanged), the state of Los Angeles, and the state of The Bay Area?
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Recipe for outright disaster as duplication of shit gets way out of control. We have too much already.
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Exactly. Eliminate the Senate, and you have Panem: An urban Capitol district unilaterally controlling the rural satellite districts.
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I'll add, it's incredibly dumb that the house is capped at 435 seats. There just is no way 435 people can represent the entirety of the nations population. Given advances in communication technology, there's also no reason to keep it there. They really should be increasing the size of the house dramatically and no longer have a cap. The size of the house should grow, or shrink, with the size of the population.
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No you don't, because the House still favors small rural states after we froze the number.
If the House was proportional there'd be like 150 more representatives.
You take the population the smallest state because everyone gets at least 1, Wyoming at 580k, divide by population, 335 million.
And you get 578 Representatives.
Currently we have 435.
Leading to someone in Wyoming having like 9 times the House representation compared to a person in Cali if I'm remembering that right.
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They came up with the best thing they could agree on at the time. They did not intend on it to become sacred, untouchable, and without the ability to change with the times, and sometimes we have changed it. Just not quite enough times.
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It may be one of those myths, but I remember that one of the founders initially were proposing the constitution to be rewritten every 10 years.
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19 years, in a letter from Jefferson to Madison.
To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 6 September 1789
He thought that firstly no document or law could be forever relevant, so it needed revisioning occasionally, and the 19 years seems to tie into the idea of each generation taking a new look and either accepting existing laws as still good or making changes.
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The French Revolution created an easier method for reforming The Republic and rewriting their constitution.
They enshrined the revolutionary aspects of revolution instead of its leaders.
That said the Federalists got part of the idea from ancient Lycia on having proportional representation and then added in keeping it in check by another chamber with equal footing.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230906-the-ancient-civilisation-that-inspired-us-democracy
It is a good idea. But we need more Congresspersons to lower the people each congressperson represents. It was ~95,000 in 1940 ... in 2020 it is closer to 750,000 per congresscritter.
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They came up with the best thing they could
Bad people with bad motives create bad systems of control.
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That's easy to say centuries in the future where so much has changed. What would you have suggested given their experience and history to that point? Be careful, because what seems like a morally just and simple proposal would have been accepted a lot differently then. The "bad" motives were to find a common ground for very different colony populations, and it had to start somewhere. And they tried something that hadn't ever been tried, so don't condemn them too quickly.
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We pay more in taxes than the welfare states, have less representation... Seems like there was something in US History about taxation without representation.
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It's a government by rich owners for rich owners and it's working as designed
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I mean, that's most governments
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And none of you poors can do anything about it.
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Don't forget, those senators translate to electoral college votes.
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Them plus the house reps, which are artificially capped at a low number, again benefitting the low population states
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Diddnt they cap the amount of house of representatives?
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This is an example of why the House of Representatives also exists.
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Except CA isn't fairly represented in the House either. CA would need 68 representatives just to have the same representation as Wyoming.
And say, shouldn't the states that have a huge economy and bring in more tax dollars have more of a say than the red welfare states that suck up those tax dollars? Just sayin...
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I disagree with the economy part. Fuck that. Your value isn't described by how much wealth you generate.
Republicans are (or were) hypocritical with their talk of fiscal responsibility while representing states that take in more money than they give back. This should be pointed out if they ever return to that argument. This isn't to say poor people from republican states (or anywhere else) are less valuable though. It's only hypocrisy that's wrong, not trying to help lower income people that's wrong.
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shouldn't the states that have a huge economy and bring in more tax dollars have more of a say
Wtf, dude? Can you make something even more american-sounding?
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The house were any given rep represents between 550k and close to a million constituents?
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There's no need for a bicameral system. It was a system designed to capitulate to wealthy interests and nothing more.
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Except the House of Representatives had its numbers capped in the early 1900s, breaking its proportionality. Wyoming has 1 rep with a population 584k. California had 52 reps with a population of 38.97M. This makes the ration approximately 1 rep per 750k people. Working people count as nearly 1.5 Californians, for representation in the House, and similarly in the Electoral college.
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One person, one vote.
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In Germany we have two votes, one for a local representative and one for a party. In itself it's a pretty decent system
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Yet, the local representatives in the pairlaments (Bundestag, Landtag) represent districts of approximately the same population number. Thus, in our first chamber, no vote has more value than another.
But in the Bundesrat, which comes closest to the US senate, states with higher population number do have more representatives than small states, which weakens the inequality of votes, yet still one vote from Bremen (population 700k, 3 representatives) has 13 times as much value as one from NRW (p. 18 mio, 6 rep.).
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But then the poor would run the country instead of a handful of unimaginably rich individuals! What kind of democracy would THAT be?
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We don't know but it was guaranteed to be different.
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But look at the US popular vote. Even with different representation of the populace, this election would still have been fucked. We do need massive reform of the US voting structure, but this is not the biggest thing. Getting rid of first past the post in favor of at least ranked choice would make a much bigger difference.
That would open the door for a true left wing party to actually have a voice.
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Ranked voting is a very good thing all countries should implement.
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I'm assuming it's working as intended.
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The Senate is. The House is not. The artificial limit of 435 set in 1911 has turned it into a pseudo-Senate and done a lot of harm to this country. With the same population representation as then, we should have around 1600 Representatives now.
A lot of the issues we currently have in Congress simply wouldn't exist with the House operating as it was designed.
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I end up having this conversation often because I believe the Congress Apportionment Act is where we really went off the rails. With our technology, I believe we could handle 1600 representatives and they wouldn't need to be full-time careers. Would congress ever agree to repeal the act?
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To benefit Southern slave states and sparsely populated rural states? Check.
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Exactly. It's capitalism. The land is more valuable than the people on it.
(This is my observation, not my personal opinion)
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It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well
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Can we get 25 million volunteers to move proportionally to red states for the next few years?
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Half a million movers per month would both wreck California and rural states real quick.
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Lol if enough democrats moved to texas and flipped it blue, we would never have a republican president again.
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They want to pass a law that says you have to get the majority of the majority of counties and they have 256 mostly small rural counties some with less than 100 people in them.
I did the math and you could hold the majority of the majority with as little as 4% of the vote.
If you try to be cute and take over a bunch of small counties the law could just be further amended or you know they could just not find your bodies.
I'm staying in blueland
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Blame Connecticut. It’s their fault. It would up benefiting the South, but it was Delaware and CT mad about larger states having more a say.
The South actually wanted proportional representation. They were growing faster and had more land.
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Representative democracy is unstable and corruptible by design and it can't be anything else.
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It would be somewhat OK if the House was much more powerful relative to the Senate, similar to how the (unelected) Canadian Senate rarely if ever opposes the will of the House.
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And there we have the only reason why the US is as fucked up as it is.
If the US would have an actual democracy, Republicans would never ever ein anything anymore
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I don't even care so much about the Bicameral Compromise; but I do care that the electoral votes apply toward electing the President.
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The reapportionment act of 1929 is screwing us over in the electoral college. The House should have a LOT more representatives, which would make the it more fair.
But more representatives would make it more difficult for big businesses to bribe them, and nobody is going to vote to dilute their personal power, so changing that is a nonstarter.
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To be fair, small states would never agreed to the constution without the senate.
Southern states would not have agreed to the constitution without the 3/5 compromise.
The United States would not exist without these compromises. The constitition is, as CGP Grey calls it, a Compromise-titution.
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Why don't the more populous states, the larger of the two groups, simply eat the small states?
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Because there this thing called the military and they swore an oath to uphold the constitution that that includes this odd electoral system.
🤷♂️
I mean there is a way to non-violently over throw this system. Just get people who vote democratic to move to red states while keeping at least 51% majority in their original state. Then vote in democrats, take over their state government. If coordinated correctly, we can take over 3/4 of state governments and have 3/4 of the US senate. Gerrymander (political gerrymandering is legal btw) enough districts and also win at least 2/3 of the house.
With all that in control, amend the constitution, repeal the clause that requires each state to have an equal number of senators. Then an amendment to abolish the senate, and giving any of its powers to the house.
I mean while we're at it, make the house use proportional representation. And maybe even ranked choice voting system.
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I know you're kidding but that's not allowed per Article IV section 3
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I always thought it'd be interesting if one senator were elected only by the most populous municipality in each state.
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Republicans would just create a mega-municipality of all the rural voters.
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The Kentucky fried chicken chef guy is absolutely SLAYING those short shorts and boots 🔥🤩
Edit: apparently I already made this joke and forgot about it lmao
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Disingenuous. That's 21 states and 42 senators.
Now do representatives, which was originally supposed to match population distribution.
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Should have stuck with the monarchy they had.
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Brave of the Bri'ish to remind America they exist as we're on the cusp of our own outright Empire phase.
It's not poor countries that speak a different language that empires like to annex first.
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Don't blame the founding fathers that all these hippies moved to California /s
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The hippies were already there. The tech CEOs and Hollywood actors are an invasive species.
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Land doesn't vote, but groups do. The Constitution was written to accommodate both points, the Senate so each state has an equal vote, which is fair in respect to the fact that the Constitution is and agreement between states, and Congress where states with more people get more votes, because that is a legitimate perspective as well. It's not perfect to start with, and it's been modified poorly over time (representation hasn't been kept proportional in Congress), but it is fair to say that each state having an equal vote is one valid point of view, and the founders realized that it wasn't the only valid point of view.
Don't attribute the 'states rights' phrase to me as though I'm on the wrong side of the civil war or something. The country can't be entirely directed by states regardless of population, but the states can't be directed by other states based solely on population either.
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yeah...
It's the senate.
You forgot to look at the house lmao.
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While they benefited from it later at this point Virginia was a population powerhouse, the actual states pushing for this were the small New England states, I think some of them only gave up their giant western claims(google 'long connecticut') in exchange for it.
It was also a compromise. Proto-Federalists wanted a direct democracy determined by population, Proto-Democratic-Republicans wanted each state to get one vote. In the end they split the difference, House was determined by population, Senate by states, and the president by a hybrid system that didn't fully give either what they wanted.
If you went back in time to stop the electoral college you could just as easily get a 'One vote per state for president, 26 votes wins' system instead of a direct democracy.
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We have the technology to implement some direct democracy and get away from all this "represntitive democracy" that doesnt work so well. Let people vote on the actual issues and we'll get progressive policies pretty quickly, we wont get into wars, we'll spend much less on defense, and the corporatists wont be able to buy influence as easily.
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To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.
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to be fair? fuck that. the states represent people, just arguing 'states rights' is disingenuous at this point.
land shouldn't vote, but the way our government currently is functioning, regardless of what our slaveholding 'founding fathers' intended, is an absolute mess.
and I don't accept your argument in good faith.
edit. a word
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Electorates per capita work better because they give the population of a country an equal amount of electable government. Positioning them as just Californians makes them a lower class citizen of the United States with lesser representation.
It also means that criminals will recognise the power of the Republican states and side with them for effect.
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From one perspective, per capita is fair, but from another perspective it isn't. The Constitution actually did a reasonable job of trying to address both cases, it just didn't adequately account for such a huge swing in population and technology. One could argue that that is a failing of the people that came afterwards, since the Constitution also provided mechanisms for modification.
For an example of where it is not fair, consider an agreement between three groups and we all agree to vote on decisions that affect all three of us, say 'how things are taxed' or how often elections are held. Each group gets a vote, and 2 out of 3 wins. If that's the agreement we entered into, my group would expect to get a vote now or a hundred years in the future even if your group grows it shrinks, it's an agreement at the group level. Especially if we made considerations for a different type of vote that does take group membership size into account. It would be pretty shitty for your group to get big and insist that it should make all the decisions for me.
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It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states
U wot
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No, it would be fair if California and the 20 other states had the same say. Laws should be by people, for people. Every person should have the same voting power and political representation. In a democracy, people vote, not land, or "states", or anything else. People.
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Extremely low IQ meme considering this is the intended purpose of the senate.
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Disagreeing with the intention of some 1700s guys is extremely low IQ?
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