Don't worry the House balances it*
*Until they froze the House because they couldn't fit anymore chairs...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
We pay more in taxes than the welfare states, have less representation... Seems like there was something in US History about taxation without representation.
Secede. That'll teach 'em.
Honestly of all the states, California probably has the best chance at seceding successfully.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if California's GDP has surpassed that of the UK, which would make it the fifth largest economy in the world if it were to secede.
A quick Google search says you are correct
It's a government by rich owners for rich owners and it's working as designed
Don't forget, those senators translate to electoral college votes.
Them plus the house reps, which are artificially capped at a low number, again benefitting the low population states
This is an example of why the House of Representatives also exists.
Except CA isn't fairly represented in the House either. CA would need 68 representatives just to have the same representation as Wyoming.
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? Just sayin...
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?
No, they don't generate the tax dollars
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?
The house were any given rep represents between 550k and close to a million constituents?
There's no need for a bicameral system. It was a system designed to capitulate to wealthy interests and nothing more.
One person, one vote.
In Germany we have two votes, one for a local representative and one for a party. In itself it's a pretty decent system
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.).
I'm assuming it's working as intended.
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.
It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well
Can we get 25 million volunteers to move proportionally to red states for the next few years?
I moved to a red state. Absolutely awful. Don’t do it. Texas is an irremediable shit hole.
Blame Connecticut. It’s their fault. It would up benefiting the South, but it was Delaware and CT mad about larger states having more a say.
The South actually wanted proportional representation. They were growing faster and had more land.
Representative democracy is unstable and corruptible by design and it can't be anything else.
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