The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
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.
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).
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.
Not enough chairs
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
Oklahoma seems to be flipped around to show her underground side?
Dirty
Alabama as well
They don't love all of it, just 3/5ths.
I wonder what percentage of the population gets 3/5ths jokes. 60%?
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
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.
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?
People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state
That's as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old "Blueberries in the Tomato Soup" effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.
If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That's one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.
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?
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.
Just gonna skip right on past that reduced threshold to overturn the Senate veto, the having to act on everything they want to halt, and the qualified majority bits huh? Also how in the hell does more senators automatically make small states more powerful? Giving more voice to minorities within small states would technically undermine state level bigwigs trying to have a partisan lock on their senate delegations.
Hawaii is a small state, DC would be a small state, Delaware and most of New England are small states. You really want a one off Republican Majority to be able to just smash Hawaiian autonomy and indigenous rights to pieces without any checks or balances?
This model of the Senate is basically a parliamentary takeover of the role of head of state, only more powerful than the king of england in the sense that it'd be able to invoke the right of veto without instantly causing a constitutional crisis and sparking a revolution.
To achieve its originally intended purpose the Senate should only be able to legislate on interstate matters, not be an equal to the house.
I'd say my idea is less about equality and more about difference in purpose.
The Senate in my model only vets legislation, and even then, if they don't do it within a reasonable time frame the law passes anyways, and even if they do take the issue up, it can only act by matching or beating the house's vote to pass the law, and do so with a coalition representing a majority of all americans, so if there's 3 senators per state, one californian senator would count for a third of California's population towards this count, aaaaand just to make certain that we're certain it isn't becoming a cornfield court, while the senate can override by matching the house's voting margin, the house can override by matching the population margin the Senate vetoed with.
It's a veto that a wise senate leader would only try to invoke if they knew it could make it stick, or if they felt what had arrived on desk was so egregious it was worth picking the fight over regardless of certainty. As opposed to right now where the Senate just never does anything because of filibusters. Now just sitting on their hands actively reduces their ability to intercept policy or nominations and the theoretical state of debate only lasts as long as until the bill automatically becomes to law for lack of a veto passing under the described conditions.
Ha, no, they love isolating power to claim more for themselves.
STV: Single Transferrable Vote
We makin it outta the constitution with this one
Californians are welcome to try to split into multiple states if they would like more Senators.
Woosh!
Really? Please explain. Like, I get the DEI joke, but the fact all these little states are red isn't some law of the Universe. They have been blue and can be again.
Unless I'm missing some deeper joke? Apparently I am unless the down votes are just circlejerking.
EDIT: Maybe you all think the Senate should be determined by population? If so, that's what the House is for. Uncap it.
