Don't worry the House balances it*
*Until they froze the House because they couldn't fit anymore chairs...
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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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.
. 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.
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.
...
While I'm sure that has done a lot of good.
Unfortunately we're talking about representative democracy, and that's probably the opposite.
By no means am I an expert on Nebraska, but lm pretty sure the majority are conservative and voted for that awful shit.
But setting up a system of government that isn't really a democracy because you think voters are too stupid (in Nebraska you may be right) to vote in their own self interest is literally what got us to where we are nationally today. And what people are brainstorming about how to fix.
Omaha voted for Harris. We split the vote, though that's not likely to survive this session.
It doesn't fucking work. Nebraska is a unicameral still because the biggest population center leans to the left. The rest of the state would suddenly have to compromise with the people in Omaha. And they don't want to fucking do that. So, when they try to fuck us we have to hope that Megan Hunt or Ernie Chambers is around to put a stop to it. And even then, we still get fucked by the state.
A second house would likely preserve the split electoral vote in Nebraska. Without it, it's a matter of time before they muster up the 33 votes to kill it.
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.
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.
The French Revolution created an easier method for reforming The Republic and rewriting their constitution.
They enshrined the revolutionary aspects of revolution instead its leaders.
That said they got part of of the idea from ancient Lycia on having proportional representation kept 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 the congressperson represents.
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.
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.
Appreciate the extra details and the link!
This is correct, and this part of the system works fine. What should have happened though is a population break point where a state has to break up if they exceed a certain population. CA should be at least 3 states. New York needs a split as well, probably a few others. There is no way a state can serve its population well when the population is measured in the tens of millions.
I agree in theory, but big cities are where things get muddy.
When a single city (e.g. New York City, population ~8 million just to use the biggest example) has a population larger than entire states, how do you "split" the state of New York? If the city itself, excluding any of the surrounding "metro area", was its own state, it would be the 13th most populous in the US and also the smallest by area.
Do we carve up each of the boroughs as a separate state, and give New York City 10 senators? It would be more proportional representation for the people of NYC, but also their close proximity and interdependence would very much align their priorities and make them a formidable voting bloc. And even then, you could still fit 4 Vermonts worth of people into Brooklyn alone. How much would we need to cut to make it equitable? Or do we work the other way as well and tell Vermont it no longer gets to be its own state because there aren't enough people?
For states like California, which still have large cities but not quite to the extreme of New York, how do we divide things fairly? Do we take a ruler and cut it into neat thirds, trying to leave some cities as the nucleus of each new state? Or do we end up with the state of California (area mostly unchanged), the state of Los Angeles, and the state of The Bay Area?
Are we bringing back city-states? We already have city-counties.
Disingenuous. That's 21 states and 42 senators.
Now do representatives, which was originally supposed to match population distribution.
I'm assuming it's working as intended.
To benefit Southern slave states and sparsely populated rural states? Check.
Exactly. It's capitalism. The land is more valuable than the people on it.
(This is my observation, not my personal opinion)
The Senate is. The House is not. The artificial limit of 435 set in 1911 has turned it into a pseudo-Senate and done a lot of harm to this country. With the same population representation as then, we should have around 1600 Representatives now.
A lot of the issues we currently have in Congress simply wouldn't exist with the House operating as it was designed.
To be fair, small states would never agreed to the constution without the senate.
Southern states would not have agreed to the constitution without the 3/5 compromise.
The United States would not exist without these compromises. The constitition is, as CGP Grey calls it, a Compromise-titution.
Don't blame the founding fathers that all these hippies moved to California /s
The hippies were already there. The tech CEOs and Hollywood actors are an invasive species.
To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.
Electorates per capita work better because they give the population of a country an equal amount of electable government. Positioning them as just Californians makes them a lower class citizen of the United States with lesser representation.
It also means that criminals will recognise the power of the Republican states and side with them for effect.
It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states
U wot
to be fair? fuck that. the states represent people, just arguing 'states rights' is disingenuous at this point.
land shouldn't vote, but the way our government currently is functioning, regardless of what our slaveholding 'founding fathers' intended, is an absolute mess.
and I don't accept your argument in good faith.
edit. a word