this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
In the house, as I said already. Also, their 2 senators are part of their representation, they're still part of the state
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.
Only if you're not an American or live in DC
Again the people in Harris county get 2 senators as their state senators represent them. And, again, senators do not represent based on population as that is the job of the house
Entirely irrelevant as they represent different things. Your representatives represent a portion of your population while your senators represent your state as a whole. The entire point of separating the state and population representation is to allow more perspectives when legislating: the house gives a perspective from closer to the people, the senate from a broader view
Again, it seems you fundamentally don't understand the split between house and Senate, why it exists and what it does to our governing system
It’s obvious why the Senate exists historically, and it’s also obvious that it’s inherently undemocratic.
I mean historically it existed mostly because states had much more autonomy and power, much like a city state or country. Until at least Lincoln that part of the system had a good logic to it. If they only went off of proportional representation they could basically ignore small states needs. In order to get states to agree to join the union, they had to build a country that would give all states a serious seat at the table.
The main reason people on the left hate it so much now is that it currently hurts us, but it's very much an equity vs equality argument. The system was set up to be equitable even if it isn't equal. Something the left typically supports and this meme touches on. I think the higher priority fix is the house, as it no longer even does what it was designed to do.
The Permanent Apportionment Act needs to be repealed ASAP, that would solve a surprising number of the flaws in our democracy. The Wyoming Rule is a good start, but half a million constituents each seems a bit spread thin. I say 3 Rep minimum and scale from there instead.
It's exhausting trying to discuss shit online with people with such a terrible understanding of the topic at hand
Senators are voted for and represent their entire state. They're the representatives of the state's general populace in a representative democracy
No shit it's exhausting. I agree with you, but you keep calling anyone who disagrees with you dumb.
They clearly understand and disagree. The part where you said land votes is an oversimplification was the last good comment in your chain.
One human = one vote
Anything else is undemocratic and I think it’s morally reprehensible to support a system that values any one person above another for any reason.
We're never gone get 1h1v, not exactly, but this dude is literally sitting here defending a system in which a vast portion of voters - not just.voters but people in general - are unrepresented.
Representative democracy is better. My reps should have more time to research every topic than I do. Their job is to be more informed.
My job is to spot check on the stuff I understand.
Their votes should be worth more than mine. And we should have a system where sometimes representatives vote against their constituents wishes because the rep has more information available to them, or is just more educated than their constituents on the topic.
Representative democracy can still exist with 1 person = 1 vote. You could do a proportional election and weight the delegates’ votes by the number of voters they represent.
No he gets it, clearly, you are the one who (equally clearly) does not.
The Senate is a broken system. The system you keepdescribing is a good system in theory, but it's not that way in reality. It's literally like a gerrymander.wiz program for a computer - designed to make gerrymandering simple.
He even said he recognized your point about uncapping the house, but still went on to say the Senate, too, is broken - and for some reason you're not understanding that.
Their two senators don't represent them at all though. That's the rub. They're punished because they live in a colossal state with a bunch of dumb fucks. If you get 260k votes in North Dakota, you are a Senator in a landslide. You get 260k votes in Texas and congrats you managed to lose to Henry the Porpoise who was a write-in candidate.
North Dakotans have disproportionate political power because the system is inherently biased against large states. The result is tyranny of the minority.
If we can't have some equity in the rules, then we should consolidate the Dakotas, Wyoming,Montana, and Alaska down to one state. The lower 48 of that group especially largely have similar political views. They shouldn't get 5 times the political power of California or Texas when together they don't even have half the population.
You are saying that politicians from one party cannot represent constituents from another party, meaning that a percentage of the population in every level doesn't have representation at any given time. If only a person from your particular party affiliation (ideally with perfectly synchronous beliefs about everything) can represent you on the city council, and again as the mayor, governor, etc, then partisanship can only accelerate and dissolution of the union is inevitable.
I would also like to point out that our government was designed for tyranny of the minority and tyranny of the majority acting as counterbalances. You are also conflating North Dakotans with North Dakota. The priorities and mindset of the State are and should be different than the individual, and the Fed is and should be different from both of those. This is supposed to balance disparate needs of all the groups and people, and the reason for all 3 to have their own "representation".
We could just as easily break up the populous states into multiple smaller ones, then they would get the same benefits as the Dakotas or Wyoming. People could also move to those states and get the same benefits, but neither of these are desirable as there are benefits to the population density both for states like California and the people that live there. Rural vs urban needs have been in conflict for thousands of years and probably aren't going to be solved any time soon.
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.
The point of the Senate was to get states to ratify the constitution. That's it. Smaller states didn't want to agree to join a union where they gave up power to a federal government dominated by the larger states.
The Senate should really be abolished, and the # of representatives should be doubled to temper the impacts of gerrymandering. If smaller states want more power against larger states, they can work together with other smaller states to form a voting bloc in the house.
If the senate is abolished, states that joined on the basis of the senate should secede
Language. Do better.
Please elaborate on how their take can be construed to: make slow; delay the development or progress of (an action, process, etc.); hinder or impede.
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
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.
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.
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.