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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Canadian here.
Does each state get the same number of seats regardless of the population of that state?
Only half of congress works that way, the other half distributes representatives based on population.
More specifically:
The each state gets two seats in the senate, no matter how many people in it. In the house of representatives, each state gets a proportional number based on population, with a minimum of one, and those districts should have a roughly equal population within each state. Due to the cap on representatives and the minimum of one though, it can end up with an uneven number of people represented by each elected official when you compare between states.
If they control the legislature of the state though, they can also control the redistricting process that decides where the boundaries are for the federal house of representative districts and thus can gerrymander things. See this for an explanation of how one can produce districts that don't resemble the underlying population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
Huh? Could you explain further?
Here, our districts will adhere to provincial boundaries, but they aim to have equal population, with redistribution every 10 years. Less populated provinces will have fewer seats.
I’m assuming it’s not that way?
US Congress is broken into bodies. The Senate and the House of Representatives.
Senate is 2 people per state. So Wyoming’s 0.6m people get the same representation as California’s 40m people.
The House is proportional to population size. There are 435 seats in the House, and those seats get allocated to states based on their population size. Bigger states get more seats. They’re allocated using this formula:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington%E2%80%93Hill_method
Big states often get grumpy that the senate allows a minority to obstruct what the majority in the nation wants. That said, the senate allocation rules were established this way to encourage smaller states join the union. It was a way to ensure that small states didn’t get completely steamrolled by states that has different populations and needs.
The Congressional districts also aren't evenly distributed, meaning if you live in a densely populated city, your vote means less than if you live in a rural area. I haven't bothered looking at actual population stats, so maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
You're not wrong. I think districts have to be roughly equal population within a state. But California needs like 17 more spots for their votes to equal Wyoming's votes for the House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule
You are correct, and it is exacerbated by the cap on representatives. You will never really get it 100% perfect due to the land mass of the US, but uncapping it and making it proportional would go a long way.
Minor correction: the Senate is 2 per state, so Wyoming's 1 state has the same representation as California's 1 state. The Senate is (supposed to be) the voice of the States in the Federal Government. The Senate wasn't even supposed to be elected by popular vote, they were appointed/elected by their state governments until the 17th amendment. The change made senators into super-representatives, which changed power dynamics. Arguments can be made here for whether this was ultimately better or worse.
The House of Representatives IS the voice of the people, and should be proportional to population size (but was artificially capped because the Feds complained it was getting too big so now Wyoming has more representational power per person than California). This needs to change because it's only going to get worse going forward.
With this breakdown, the Federal Government's interests, State's interests, and the People's interests balance each other. These three bodies have vastly different focuses.
The US is far more like the EU than it is like Britain or Canada, being a Republic of aligned States. We have a body representing the states themselves (the Senate, and each state is equal and gets 2 Senators), a body representing the People in those states (the House of Representatives, which has been capped for total size and is no longer equally proportional but serves the same purpose), and a body representing the entire Union (the Executive branch - the President, Vice President, Cabinet, etc.).
To be fair the house is fairly close to equally representative.
That's not correct, first of all, and secondly, there are 435 of them for about 335 million of us, so it's representative of fuckall.
A large majority (>75%) of states are within 6% of the average of 750k people per representative, seems pretty even to me.
Yes and no. The US system is a bastardized version of the British system but with States replacing nobility. So the UK has a House of Lords which corresponds to the US Senate, and a House of Commons that corresponds to the US Congress. The number of congressional representatives each state gets is based on population as in theory Congress represents the people of each state. The Senate in contrast has a fixed number of representatives per state and in theory represents the will of the state. The whole thing gets a little muddled because senators are still elected by the people of the state, but since they aren't based on population so you can play shenanigans like what's being discussed in this thread.
Realistically the Senate should be abolished, it's entire reason for existing is fundamentally flawed.
Congress is the collective name for the legislative branch consisting of the Senate which is the American equivalent of the House of Lords and the House of Representatives which corresponds to the House of Commons.
It made more sense when the United States was first being set up and the union was more like the European union, but it quickly became a full-fledged country government and makes zero sense now.
"Well, that's just like, your opinion man". The constitution is still set up that way, and powers not explicitly granted to the Federal Government are the dominion of the States. We are still more like the EU than other "full-fledged" countries. You may not like that, but I would bet that just as many people feel differently as those that agree with you. It would also take the adoption of a new constitution to do that, and the odds of the Country remaining united through a complete constitution change compared to breaking up into several independent countries doesn't seem high right now.
I agree that the us is still on that spectrum between a union and a standard country, but I think it's closer to a standard country than a union, but it's a spectrum, and as you say, where it falls on that spectrum is an opinion.
The Senate should go back to being elected by the State Government instead of by the people, the change to this brought by the 17th caused this muddling. The balance of powers with the 3 chambers should work, but making the 2nd chamber just a superior version of the 3rd throws everything slightly out of alignment.
The states don't need or deserve representatives, let the people make the decisions. State governors and senates already have enough power, letting them have a say at the federal level is just asking for more trouble. The US does not need more of a nobility or ruling elite than we already have. It's bad enough we have the ultra wealthy and corporations running roughshod over people's rights just with the power of their wealth, no reason to make that job easier for them.
That makes sense if the states were just administrative zones like the Canadian provinces and territories, all fully subsumed and beholden under the Federal Government. We are not. We are a closely connected economic and political union of individual states collected into a Republic, all of which work together and compete with different ideas. All powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government are each State's to decide and manage. This allows States to try different things and see what works best, from tax strategy, to universal healthcare (Romneycare), to UBI.
The people have their focus on what is best for them personally. This encompasses differing things from worldwide events to their neighborhood, but it is still a narrow scope. City/county leadership is focused on how best to keep their city/county running for maximum benefit of their population. States have the same focus over all the cities and counties therein.
We only have a ruling elite because people tend to vote for the incumbents, and we have no term limits except for the Presidency. It is also relatively stupid to put everything to a mass democratic vote, especially for things that should be decided by experts. Water rights, mineral rights, pollution controls, regulations, revenue allocation, etc.
That is like saying that the division leadership in a company shouldn't have a voice in decision making alongside the union and board of directors, just let the union make the decisions. You don't need input from finance and design/engineering and human resources and warehousing and production and quality control, the people in those departments all elected their union representatives so we don't need input from those department leads.
State leadership would still have control of their state. As you point out powers not given to the federal government belong to the states, but as it stands now if the public wants something they need the blessing of the states to get it which is entirely too much power. It allows tiny states to kill attempts by larger states to enact policies because even though the larger state would have more than enough votes to get something through Congress, the Senate treats all states as the same, despite some states representing a tiny fraction of the population. It literally allows a tiny group of elites to override the will of the people.
This is not even remotely true. They focus on what will first not cause them to lose elections, and second on what will most benefit themselves. Thanks to a finely honed playbook of dirty tricks there's very little these days that will actually cost politicians elections leaving them free to maximize their personal profit.
That might hold water if experts were deciding those things, but they aren't. Instead those decisions are being made by the highest bidders. Eliminating the Senate wouldn't entirely fix that problem but it would help at least a little. A congressional representative is much more concerned with the needs of his constituents than a senator is and its much harder and more expensive to bribe a majority of Congress than it is to buy a majority of the Senate.
The US is no longer a loose republic, states are tightly bound to the federal government. The US was forced into that position because a bunch of assholes threw a hissy fit when other people said they didn't think they should be allowed to own slaves. They hadn't even been told they couldn't, just that it looked like things were headed that way. So because a bunch of the states demonstrated they couldn't behave like decent human beings and instead acted like bigots (and still seem to be acting like bigots to this day) the federal government had to step in. The US isn't quite a democracy, but it's closer to being one than it is to being a republic, and it's about time people realized that.
The Senate makes no sense because it's a relic of the pre-civil war government that serves no useful purpose anymore. The current state of dysfunction in the US is ample demonstration of that. The fact that we have a political party whose entire policy for a decade now has amounted to stripping rights from various groups of people and blocking or reversing literally every piece of legislation supported by the other party (even to the extent of blocking their own legislation if the other party supports it), and that they've been successful at that despite a significant majority of the public opposing them is even more evidence of why the Senate has to go.
Ok yeah I’m just trying to understand how the whole gerrymandering thing happens. I haven’t heard of it being a problem here. When I look at our electoral districts they seem to be fairly straight lines, and if not, it’s because of geographical borders, like rivers or whatever.
Thanks for the explanation!
Actually, the Senate can't be gerrymandered because they serve the entire state and state lines don't change. The problem is that it's unequal by design.
Gerrymandering happens when redistricting gets taken over by a party and they for example make themselves a district where they comfortably win by 70% and in another district the other party wins by 90%. Had they been non manipulated then they would have lost both by 60%.
The Senate is gerrymandering if you have an unnecessary number of Dakotas, which we do.
51% Repub states end up with 2 Repub senators instead of a bipartisan pair and that's not gerrymandering? This whole damn country is a gerrymander.
It's unfair, but by definition that's not what gerrymandering is. There are different ways to create an unfair system, that doesn't mean all those ways are gerrymandering.
On top of that, states with much less people in them (e.g. Idaho) “count more” in Presidential elections due to a historical wrench in the machinery put there to serve slave owners. It’s called “The electoral college” but it’s really “let’s keep slaves college”.
Yeah they kept that in place after the slave states fought to destroy America and were defeated. Which, in retrospect, was really stupid.
Exciting!
The country had a clown doing reconstruction after the Civil War when what should have happened was hanging the traitors and letting Sherman raze his way to the sea and back a few times.
Oh well, at least surely we will not again make the same mistake of coddling the leaders of insurrections.
Senate, yes. 2 senators per state.
House of Representatives, no. That pie is cut up by population size. Larger populations get more representation.