The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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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.
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
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That's with the same total number of representatives, or will Congress need to be upgraded?
Yeah, that would mean getting rid of the Reappointment Act of 1929 and implementing the proposed Wyoming Rule
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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
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.
Land doesn't have rights
I agree, but the point is to have a section of the government where the 50 disparate governments that make up our union have equal say. This tends to get simplified to "land gets 2 votes" because the other part of Congress is population based
Where is their representation
In the house, as I said already. Also, their 2 senators are part of their representation, they're still part of the state
Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas?
Because the house has a limit on members. The senate is literally equal by design
Your issue seems to be a lack of understanding of how our legislative branch works because your complaints are all root issues of the House of Representatives and not the senate
I agree with your House argument, but I strongly believe that the design of the Senate was a major fuck-up. Senators are far more powerful than representatives, and I get none. A single house member cannot torpedo legislation the way a Senator can. North Dakota (population 780k) gets two. The 4.7M people in Harris County get none. That is a poor design.
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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?
Massively agree on the states issue. The original idea was a bunch of little countries that only shared a handful of federal powers. That concept has completely fallen apart and now we're just an extremely poorly organized country with wildly different sized regions.
We either need to break every state into roughly the same size or we need to start merging too small states together until we have a collection of California sized states to manage.
For many people 'their state' has little meaning to them beyond sports teams and food trends. They have extremely low interest or engagement in state politics which is a major problem.
But this is an impossible dream, so we're pretty much stuck with this horrible arrangement.
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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.
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Somebody said states would secede if the coasts decided everything. Anybody ever researched this?
Is Texas a coast state? because they're the second largest state
They have a coastline but they're mad it's not the Gulf of 'Merica.
Oklahoma seems to be flipped around to show her underground side?
Dirty
Alabama as well
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.
Neat! That certainly does explain a lot!
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.
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There's a lot of knowledge drain in republican states. People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state, for 1. Being closer to like minded people 2. Lots of jobs and opportunities exist purely in cities
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
And then nobody wants to move back. At best you've got some purple cities like Austin starting to shift blue, but even then. I was in Austin for a few days this spring. I was infatuated. Started looking at home listings. Then I realized I'd be living in Texas. Who the hell wants that?
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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?
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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.
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.
I think the Senate would be fine if it was in charge of a Veto instead of having to also pass the legislation, also if it had a lot more senators to some multiple of 3 at a minimum.
IE doing nothing is just letting everything pass automatically and that cooling pan shit is something senate leaders have to pursue actively with (qualified) majority support.
My ideal procedure. House passes a law, Senate vetoes it with a majority meeting or beating the passing margin of the law in the house, but also representing a majority of all americans, house can override the veto by meeting or beating the population margin the senate's Veto represented.
You may note that there is no president involved in this process. That is because I believe the independent executive is an inherent threat to democracy and that it should be subject to complete erasure and power division to save the republic.
More senators gives more power to the smaller states.
The whole idea is ass-backwards anyway. Assigning representation based on lines that were cooked up centuries ago over reasons that are mostly lost to time. It was a compromise to appease the southern Democratic Republicans who feared proportional representation meant they would get trampled on.
And maybe they would. But maybe that also just means that they should. They were worried about tyranny of the majority (i.e. democracy), and now we have tyranny of the minority.
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