Political Memes

. 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.

1,000 members? The original plan was for 1 house member for every 30,000 people, eventually changing to 1 in 50,000:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment

Doing that now, on a population of 330,000,000 would give us between 6,600 and 11,000 congress critters.

China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.

Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People's Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.

You're correct that the senate was designed not to represent people and give the number of states more power. To say that isn't an issue though is pretty fucked up. It was literally done this way to get slave states to sign on, giving them power to protect the institution of slavery.

States are made up. People are not. Only one of these should have power in a democracy. States can have their own laws that effect themselves, but federal policy should be dictated by the will of the people, not the will of arbitrarily drawn borders.

uncap the house... make congressperson a remote job, keep them in their districts.

I can't say that's my ideal solution (as it doesn't involve completely rewriting our constitution), but that's honestly the best solution we have to most of our problems. Completely uncap, remote congress, 1 per 30k. At that point, we'd be pretty close to a real democracy. There's no reason why it couldn't be a remote job. Stay in your fucking district where we can yell at you when you fuck up. In fact, there should be a law about how many days per year they can be out of their district. Live with, work with, know the people you represent. And with that many congressional reps, it'd be hard as hell to bribe enough of them.

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?

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.

The French Revolution created an easier method for reforming The Republic and rewriting their constitution.

They enshrined the revolutionary aspects of revolution instead of its leaders.

That said the Federalists got part of the idea from ancient Lycia on having proportional representation and then added in keeping it 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 each congressperson represents. It was ~95,000 in 1940 ... in 2020 it is closer to 750,000 per congresscritter.

Honestly of all the states, California probably has the best chance at seceding successfully.

I disagree with the economy part. Fuck that. Your value isn't described by how much wealth you generate.

Republicans are (or were) hypocritical with their talk of fiscal responsibility while representing states that take in more money than they give back. This should be pointed out if they ever return to that argument. This isn't to say poor people from republican states (or anywhere else) are less valuable though. It's only hypocrisy that's wrong, not trying to help lower income people that's wrong.

And say, shouldn’t the states that have a huge economy and bring in more tax dollars have more of a say than the red welfare states that suck up those tax dollars?

By that logic, a rich person should have more say in government?

shouldn't the states that have a huge economy and bring in more tax dollars have more of a say

Wtf, dude? Can you make something even more american-sounding?

Yet, the local representatives in the pairlaments (Bundestag, Landtag) represent districts of approximately the same population number. Thus, in our first chamber, no vote has more value than another.

But in the Bundesrat, which comes closest to the US senate, states with higher population number do have more representatives than small states, which weakens the inequality of votes, yet still one vote from Bremen (population 700k, 3 representatives) has 13 times as much value as one from NRW (p. 18 mio, 6 rep.).