This is an example of why the House of Representatives also exists.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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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...
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.
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?
The house were any given rep represents between 550k and close to a million constituents?
There's no need for a bicameral system. It was a system designed to capitulate to wealthy interests and nothing more.
It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well
Representative democracy is unstable and corruptible by design and it can't be anything else.
I always thought it'd be interesting if one senator were elected only by the most populous municipality in each state.
Don't forget, those senators translate to electoral college votes.
Them plus the house reps, which are artificially capped at a low number, again benefitting the low population states
Diddnt they cap the amount of house of representatives?
Don't worry the House balances it*
*Until they froze the House because they couldn't fit anymore chairs...
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.
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.
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.
. 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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Can we get 25 million volunteers to move proportionally to red states for the next few years?
I moved to a red state. Absolutely awful. Don’t do it. Texas is an irremediable shit hole.
West Virginia checking in
Move to the parts where it isn't (Austin, Houston).
I’m in Austin, TX. I’ve lived on two continents, three countries, ten US states. This region of the world is by far the worst place I’ve ever lived... fellas, I lived in a third world country and Texas is worse. It’s a dystopian shit hole. You can’t go outside. It’s 100 degrees half the year with high humidity. The air is dirty, polluted, full of allergens. People burn garbage everywhere. There is no wildlife. Trash in the street. Everything is dead, except a few biting insects, there’s no living creatures — not even birds. Dogs chained outside in the heat. Nature is dying, yellow and faded, except for the artificial grass — a rare sign of life (until the water runs out). Houston meanwhile is a gridlocked pile of parking lots and dirty overpasses built on a swamp, so whenever it rains it floods (which is comical — why does anyone live here?). Don’t come. There is no hope.
Then what's stopping your from leaving?
Half a million movers per month would both wreck California and rural states real quick.
Also Cali would turn red quickly. I don't think our voter numbers show the true story. There are a lot of MAGA crazies in CA. I just doubt they bother voting atm because they know it's pointless.
That's a bit incomplete.
Those who stay back would find cities, economy, infrastructure and culture crumbling and uprooted. Ghost town culture doesn't exactly inspire hope and confidence.
On the other hand, there would be somewhat of a plague syndrome benefitting those.
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