The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
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Number of people per representative should be set based on the state with the lowest population. CA should have 68 reps as they have 68.5 times the population of Wyoming.
Honestly we should set it so Wyoming has like 5 reps and then use that as a baseline. Increase the total number of reps 10 times and make each district manageable for one person to campaign in.
This would negate the problems with the electoral college and make gerrymandering much harder to pull off.
An extremely large House would not be able to deliberate on laws. I could see ways to make that work, but we should be clear on what's going to happen.
A pretty good counterargument to this is to look at what the House does now. What passes for deliberation is mere posturing, like MTG saying Fauci should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Deliberation only really needs to be done in committee. Otherwise you just vote.
if we're going to do that why even have districts and just do party list proportional voting to elect a state's reps instead?
Districts are nice in that you have a local representative beholden to you(ish) that you can bring issues to.
assuming its not gerrymandered by a political party that sees you as an enemy
Yeah, we thankfully don't have that problem in Canada
Or they can keep the current amount of reps but weigh the reps vote based on number of constituents they represent. If Alice is representing 50k people and Bob is representing 10k people then Alice's vote should be weighted 5x times.
I don't think the Senator limit is okay. For instance, the city of Houston has more population than North and South Dakota combined (4 senators) and gets zero senators (Houston is consistently Democrat and is "represented" by two Republicans that do nothing for them).
That's the point of the Senate: land gets equal votes
The house is for population, but we fucked it by capping the total number of reps you can have there
It's not that land gets a votes, it's that the States get votes. The original notion was that the House represents the People and the Senate represents the States. It's why Senators were originally appointed by each state, but the House was always elected.
Because the original vision under the Constitution was a much weaker federal government and states being mostly independent, but that ship long ago sailed and bolted on a rocket booster after the civil war.
Land doesn't have rights. It's just gerrymandering by another name. The problem works both ways. The rural fuckheads in California are also unrepresented. Harris County (where Houston is located) is larger than Rhode Island. Where is their representation? Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas? Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio get no representation despite a huge amount of population. Rural Californians get no representation despite outnumbering the Dakotas and Wyoming.
Specifically it fucks over CA and benefits states small enough they only get one Representative. Most of the rest aren't too bad.
If we can't expand the House, we could always chop CA into multiple states which also eases the gripes about the Senate some too. And maybe merge the Dakotas and create "Montoming" on the other end.
Wait hold on, Californian's wouldn't go for it, but splitting them up into two blue states and one red state grabs 4 new Democrat senators (maybe) and 2 republican ones, allows California Republicans the chance to build the state they say they dream about, and gives the rest of the rural US a NEW California to bitch about
I like this
If we no longer have a nice even 50 we can do all kinds of crazy shit like allow representation for US territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands and Washington DC. We could break Texas up too. End up with like 80 states. But noooo we can't change the flag, we have 50 states forever.
We could break Texas up too.
Texas can break Texas up any time it wants, into no more than 5 pieces. Part of the act making it a state uniquely gives it this power. It could be fought and argued that to do so would require approval of Congress, but the counter argument is that the bill granting it statehood including that is essentially pre-approval.
100% agree with this we limited congress to the size of a building for some stupid reason
Second conversation. Why are some states large and others big shouldn't we chop them up more?
I don't think senators should be by state, I think senators should hold office for 5 years and every year the entire country should elect 20 senators.
Other things we should do:
Abolish political parties.
Uncap the house, algorithmically determine representative districts with something like the shortest split-line method, and assign between 3 and 5 representatives per district.
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
Make the leaders of the house and senate elected offices.
Abolish political parties.
I'm very curious to know how exactly you want to word this law to acheive the effect you're dreaming of without it being unenforceable, without it being weaponizeable as a mass voter suppression tool, and without creating a freedom of speech or freedom of assembly violation.
A fair voting system allows people to vote for whatever reason they want. Voters want to win. Banding together to focus and force multiply campaign resources increases chances to win. Political parties are an inevitability in a fair system.
I understand the vibe of your sentiment is to not allow political parties to grow to the overcentralizing control they have today. You're not particularly concerned about, say, a band of guys who meet up at the pub to figure out who they're gonna organize a collective vote for. At least I hope not, because the alternative sounds wildly dystopian. But like, what's the line in the sand between the two? How do you define the difference, legally?
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
As long as we're talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it's I think it's super-important psychologically.
A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That's why so many people freak out about "the destruction of America" when a member of the other party, with values they don't share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.
By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.
You still have plenty of people who are anti-monarchy in the UK. We also all know that the king is only a figurehead. It's not really a great solution to be honest.
Hey now, we don't want an actual democracy now do we? Think of the corporations. With all these broken up powers it's going to get really expensive to bribe them all to subvert the will of the people.
Oklahoma seems to be flipped around to show her underground side?
Dirty
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
There weren't many slaveowners in urban areas.
The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.
The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.
You're not wrong (cherry picking a little though), and I get that there is more nuance and some exceptions to the generalization. But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States. Enough that one would be justified in at least wondering if there was a correlation.
But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States.
Only in the last forty years. These used to be staunchly Dixiecrat territories prior to the Southern Strategy.
But I might point you to a different map.
A huge part of the D/R switch under Nixon/Reagan came through Gulf Coast O&G tycoons. That's what gets us Wyoming and W. Virginia as bright red. It's why Pennsylvania - home of the Gettysburg address along with some of the fiercest abolitionist activists and civil rights organizations - into the purple category.
The degree to which the country has become a Petro-State has revolutionized politics domestically.
So long as that industry endures, the GOP-aligned land barons are going to have all the money they need for revanchist political projects.
Isolation breeds xenophobia
Urban areas tend towards D, rural tends toward R. Smaller population states have smaller, less populous urban areas, thus the discrepancy.
Why? My theory is that smaller communities can force out opposition, so they tend to have more uniform ideas (trends towards tradition) whereas larger communities have to compromise to make a healthy community, meaning more diversity of ideas and more empathy towards traditionally counter-culture groups.
because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.