this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I would add, "abolish gerrymandering," at the top of that list. I'm not entirely sure how, "merge Senate into the House," would work, but I think that's probably a bad idea.
Some people complain about the the Senate because it gives each state 2 Senators, so less populace states have outsized power, but that's kinda the point. It may not seem very fair, but neither is the 5 most populace states voting to strip mine the Midwest, which is the kind of thing the Senate is meant to be a bulwark against. The Senate does put too much power in the hands of too few, but I think a better way to fix that would be to take away the Senate's power to confirm appointments and shorten Senate terms, not abolishing it or, "merging it into the House," (though again, I'm not entirely sure what that would entail, so maybe it would work).
this is the easiest one to fix. Stop letting the current party draw voting districts.
Have a government bureaucratic department do it, like in civilized countries. Have rules for it, and have it be accountable to the DOJ (or similar).
I would go with computer generated district lines based on population, with some sort of non-partisan or bipartisan zoning committee to review and approve them, but there are tons of workable solutions. The problem is both parties benefit from gerrymandering, so there's no political will to fix it. The solution is simple, but not easy.
You're never going to eliminate gerrymandering without switching to proportional representation. I prefer to use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, which is just Approval Voting with extra steps.
My two suggestions for OP are:
Simplify and focus the list. It's too long and touches too many different topics. Also, when you do have a full list with every topic, separate them by category.
As stated above, use Approval Voting and Proportional Representation.
This is very interesting, but I'm struggling to see how it would work within our current system of single-district representatives. Would Congressional Districts be abolished, and each state pick their allocated Congressmen through Approval Voting? I also don't see what benefits Approval Voting has over Rank Choice Voting other than simplicity.
There's plenty of ways to do it. The simplest would be to quintuple the size of the house and elect five winners to every district. Literally nothing else would have to change. Five member districts are considered the smallest that are functionally immune to gerrymandering efforts.
A more reasonable suggestion is to start implementing these reforms on the state and local level, where referendums are possible and you have an easier time building a big enough organization to actually get shit done.
As for Approval vs RCV, the simplest answer is that they usually agree on the results [all the way down the line]https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/super-tuesday-deep-voting-methods-dive/), but approval is simpler and easier in every respect. Both systems tend to produce a candidate support graph that looks like exponential decay in real life. The complicated answer gets into voting theory/math and all sorts of technical criterion. While I think those arguments are valid, most poling and real world data seem to show that basically anything other than "choose one" is good enough, so I prefer the method that is easiest to explain to voters and hardest for candidates to claim shenanigans.
Interesting, I've never heard about this system before, it definitely sounds interesting. I think this will be my next rabbit hole, thanks for sharing!
Doesn't removing electoral college remove the need for zones?
Or is that a problem on local county levels as well?
The electoral college is a mostly separate problem. The biggest problem caused by gerrymandering is partisan divides in the House of Representatives. Congressional Districts are drawn to keep districts as red or blue as possible, so Congress gets made up by extremists. If districts were drawn fairly, politicians would need to appeal to a broader community, and their positions would be more nuanced. Gerrymandering essentially lets the politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.
Ohh, right, yes, parties and polarisation that only benefits politicians. I always need some time to fully remember what I know about the USA political system.
I would have agreed on the Senate 20 years ago. But it has so clearly become the stick with which about 15 percent of the country beats the entire rest of the country.
At some point you have to call it as an abusive body.
Yes, but I think that's more of a problem with our politics rather than the senate. The Republicans have gone to political extremes that just aren't popular with the majority of the country, so they struggle to pass legislation that their base would approve of through the House. Instead, they adopted a culture of obstruction in the Senate, because blocking legislation is all they can do. There are ways that their ability can obstruct can be limited, like abolishing the filibuster, but changing the culture of extremism is the only long-term solution.
Ending gerrymandering is probably the biggest institutional fix towards that goal. Right now, Congressional Districts are basically giant echo chambers that amplify the most extreme voices. Breaking down those chambers and forcing politicians to appeal to a plurality of random voters should bring rhetoric down to sane levels, and that should apply to both the House and the Senate.
I know how it got that way but it's not going to change even with the filibuster removed. It needs to go. It was a great idea when we were more decentralized and we knew less about democracy. But we can replace it with a national proportionally representative body and leave the House as the geographical representative.
Hmm...that's definitely an interesting idea, but it still gives the highly populated states unchecked power over the smaller states. Either way, if the house remains the same, then gerrymandering will still need to end.
The idea of larger and smaller states is effectively dead. We're a centralized country and the only thing going on right now is the states that have made life too shitty for people to stay are holding the rest of the country hostage.
It was a great idea in 1792. But not in 1992.
I don't think that's true at all. I'm not one of those, "states rights," guys that believes that every state should decide who gets basic human rights, but I do think there are tons of ways larger states could use their outsized power against smaller states. The one that comes to mind is nuclear waste storage, which was a huge fight in the 80s that required a lot of negotiation. Imagine if New York, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Florida just got together with and decided Montana just had to manage it all.
Also, considering the western states have a much higher percentage of federal land than eastern states, their communities are much more likely to get screwed by the federal government. If I lived in Utah, where the vast majority of the land in my state is under federal control, I would certainly want more than 3 out of 435 Representatives in the federal government.
You're forgetting that under this proposal we balance the House of Representatives with a national proportional representation legislature. And we can certainly uncap the house of representatives. So the "small" states can easily form a caucus in either chamber.
That said. Nuclear storage is actually a great issue to bring up. We're going to need to store it somewhere and that place needs very specific things. Using the Senate as a NIMBY method so hard it doesn't get stored anywhere is the perfect example of the dysfunction inherent in the Senate.
I mean, that's not really how I'd describe the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and you're not really addressing how this body would lessen the impact of NIMBYism. It seems like, if anything, it would be easier for largest states to caucus together and dictate what they don't want in their backyards. You're also not addressing why it's fair for states who already control less than 50% of the land within their borders to have even less influence over those lands. It's certainly an interesting proposal, but I still think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the Senate's check on high density states.
That's because the baby is dead. Trying to protect the empty states is a noble idea. But they've engaged in such bad faith we cannot continue to allow it. Instead 3/4 of Americans are forced to bow down to their demands. The majority of which have nothing to do with their land. Guns, healthcare, work safety, Unions, education, and the bedroom are all flipped on their head because of a minority.
You're so worried about a tyranny of the majority, you're letting a tyranny of the minority happen.
Well, I think we're at the point where we have to agree to disagree, but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I'd never heard of some of the ideas you'd brought up before, it certainly given me some new things to look into.
Yeah, thanks for engaging honestly.