this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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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.
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.
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.
also, with 3k MPs, that's one for every... half a million people.
that would give most countries a government small enough to fit in a classroom.
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.
If America gets a chance to rebuild it will probably make some changes to be more democratic.
Well, the good news is regardless of what you thought of accelerationists plans a couple weeks ago...
We're all about to find out if they were right or not.
So we got that going for us.