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The broken part of the legislative branch isn't the Senate, it's the House and the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that arbitrarily limited the number of Representatives to 438.
This means that the vote of a person in Wyoming is worth ~6x the vote of someone in California.
People in more populated areas essentially being disenfranchised for being in a more populated area. Something we should be encouraging.
Edit: I've been told it's actually ~65x, not 6x. Don't feel like doing the math right now but you can do it yourself its pretty easy. Either way its' fucked, and if it's actually 65x, that's just INSANELY fucked.
Oh no that's broken as well. But that same kind of disenfranchisement happens in the Senate. Wyoming per your example has ~600k people and California has ~39 million according to Wikipedia but both get 2 Senators. That's what, 65x the population but the same voting power? Then there's also the fact that unless you've got 60 votes in the Senate it doesn't matter what anyone in the House wants it won't even come up for a vote. Which means there's a lot of comparatively empty land that can basically just hold the rest of the country hostage. Point is there's a lot that's broken in the legislative branch.
A couple things. First, you might need to freshen up on your Schoolhouse Rock, because this is not true:
It's been several decades since I've learned civics, but... no. Here's what I recall:
Bills can originate from either the House or the Senate (except budget bills which always come from the House).
If the bill originates and passes in one House, it goes to the other for debate, etc. If the other house passes the bill as is, it goes to the President.
If the other house makes any amendments to the bill that the first house previously passed, it goes back to the first house again for more debate and vote. This happens again and again until we end up with a bill that both houses agree to (one reason for pork barrel spending).
This works this way regardless of which house the bill originates in. Both must agree (in some form) to the final, possibly amended, bill, before it heads to POTUS.
Second, I understand the purpose of the Senate. This is a federalized system (I imagine you understand this given we're both on Lemmy), we are a nation made of smaller nations in many ways as each state can often be wildly different. Lately we've seen some of the pros and cons of such a system, but this is what we are right now at least.
So the idea is a bicameral house, with one that is meant to be a direct representative of the people, proportionate to the number of people in a district, and the other meant to represent each state (i.e. "mini nation").
It's just the way our entire system is structured, including state funding and such. This is federalization.
The House of Representative is meant to represent the will of their constituents (without the Reapportionment Act, could actually be representative), hence the nickname, "the people's House."
Conversely, The Senate exists to represent the will of their state.
These are often different, and occasionally even at odds. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And frankly, the last decade or so has shown me that sometimes we are stupid and need saving from ourselves. If everything ran on only one House that was actually representative, it would be chaos.
How would federal funding be divvied up? Do Congressional Reps need to not only be on top of the needs and demands of their district, but they must also do the same for their state? Do you know how insane that would be? Would states even be able to continue to exist as they currently do without a Senate?
This comment is already too long so I will stop.
I get the idea people have about the Senate, but it is currently completely necessary in our government.
If I was that wrong about the voting power of a Californian, that just reinforces how disproportionate the House is (and therefore the entire federal government becomes dysfunctional).
I think a truly proportionate House to balance out the Senate could actually work pretty well (of course this is without getting into the topic of money in politics which is a whole other can of worms).
The 60 vote thing is true. It's referring to the filibuster and cloture procedures in the Senate.
When a bill comes up for consideration in the Senate, first it gets brought up for debate. A filibuster is when someone usually opposed to the bill makes this debate go on as long as possible to delay a vote on the bill. This process has been shorthanded a lot in recent years so senators merely need to indicate intent to filibuster so that the Senate can still attend to other business such as committee hearings and the whole chamber isn't locked in by the filibuster.
Since the entire GOP is bent on obstructing the Democratic party agenda this means in practice that you need to use Cloture to end the filibuster and bring the bill up for a vote. This is why we see so many things crammed into the Budget Reconciliation bill. It's one of the only bills that can't be filibustered like that. For pretty much all other things if you don't have 60 senators willing to vote for Cloture the bill is dead on arrival.