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The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
Number of people per representative should be set based on the state with the lowest population. CA should have 68 reps as they have 68.5 times the population of Wyoming.
Honestly we should set it so Wyoming has like 5 reps and then use that as a baseline. Increase the total number of reps 10 times and make each district manageable for one person to campaign in.
This would negate the problems with the electoral college and make gerrymandering much harder to pull off.
if we’re going to do that why even have districts and just do party list proportional voting to elect a state’s reps instead?
Districts are nice in that you have a local representative beholden to you(ish) that you can bring issues to.
assuming its not gerrymandered by a political party that sees you as an enemy
An extremely large House would not be able to deliberate on laws. I could see ways to make that work, but we should be clear on what’s going to happen.
A pretty good counterargument to this is to look at what the House does now. What passes for deliberation is mere posturing, like MTG saying Fauci should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Deliberation only really needs to be done in committee. Otherwise you just vote.
That’s with the same total number of representatives, or will Congress need to be upgraded?
Yeah, that would mean getting rid of the Reappointment Act of 1929 and implementing the proposed Wyoming Rule
Or they can keep the current amount of reps but weigh the reps vote based on number of constituents they represent. If Alice is representing 50k people and Bob is representing 10k people then Alice’s vote should be weighted 5x times.
I don’t think the Senator limit is okay. For instance, the city of Houston has more population than North and South Dakota combined (4 senators) and gets zero senators (Houston is consistently Democrat and is “represented” by two Republicans that do nothing for them).
That’s the point of the Senate: land gets equal votes
The house is for population, but we fucked it by capping the total number of reps you can have there
Land doesn’t have rights. It’s just gerrymandering by another name. The problem works both ways. The rural fuckheads in California are also unrepresented. Harris County (where Houston is located) is larger than Rhode Island. Where is their representation? Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas? Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio get no representation despite a huge amount of population. Rural Californians get no representation despite outnumbering the Dakotas and Wyoming.
Land doesn’t have rights
I agree, but the point is to have a section of the government where the 50 disparate governments that make up our union have equal say. This tends to get simplified to “land gets 2 votes” because the other part of Congress is population based
Where is their representation
In the house, as I said already. Also, their 2 senators are part of their representation, they’re still part of the state
Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas?
Because the house has a limit on members. The senate is literally equal by design
Your issue seems to be a lack of understanding of how our legislative branch works because your complaints are all root issues of the House of Representatives and not the senate
I agree with your House argument, but I strongly believe that the design of the Senate was a major fuck-up. Senators are far more powerful than representatives, and I get none. A single house member cannot torpedo legislation the way a Senator can. North Dakota (population 780k) gets two. The 4.7M people in Harris County get none. That is a poor design.
and I get none
Only if you’re not an American or live in DC
(population 780k) gets two. The 4.7M people in Harris County get none. That is a poor design
Again the people in Harris county get 2 senators as their state senators represent them. And, again, senators do not represent based on population as that is the job of the house
Senators are far more powerful than representatives
Entirely irrelevant as they represent different things. Your representatives represent a portion of your population while your senators represent your state as a whole. The entire point of separating the state and population representation is to allow more perspectives when legislating: the house gives a perspective from closer to the people, the senate from a broader view
Again, it seems you fundamentally don’t understand the split between house and Senate, why it exists and what it does to our governing system
It’s obvious why the Senate exists historically, and it’s also obvious that it’s inherently undemocratic.
Their two senators don’t represent them at all though. That’s the rub. They’re punished because they live in a colossal state with a bunch of dumb fucks. If you get 260k votes in North Dakota, you are a Senator in a landslide. You get 260k votes in Texas and congrats you managed to lose to Henry the Porpoise who was a write-in candidate.
North Dakotans have disproportionate political power because the system is inherently biased against large states. The result is tyranny of the minority.
If we can’t have some equity in the rules, then we should consolidate the Dakotas, Wyoming,Montana, and Alaska down to one state. The lower 48 of that group especially largely have similar political views. They shouldn’t get 5 times the political power of California or Texas when together they don’t even have half the population.
It’s not that land gets a votes, it’s that the States get votes. The original notion was that the House represents the People and the Senate represents the States. It’s why Senators were originally appointed by each state, but the House was always elected.
Because the original vision under the Constitution was a much weaker federal government and states being mostly independent, but that ship long ago sailed and bolted on a rocket booster after the civil war.
The point of the Senate was to get states to ratify the constitution. That’s it. Smaller states didn’t want to agree to join a union where they gave up power to a federal government dominated by the larger states.
The Senate should really be abolished, and the # of representatives should be doubled to temper the impacts of gerrymandering. If smaller states want more power against larger states, they can work together with other smaller states to form a voting bloc in the house.
If the senate is abolished, states that joined on the basis of the senate should secede
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Language. Do better.
Please elaborate on how their take can be construed to: make slow; delay the development or progress of (an action, process, etc.); hinder or impede.
100% agree with this we limited congress to the size of a building for some stupid reason
Second conversation. Why are some states large and others big shouldn’t we chop them up more?
Massively agree on the states issue. The original idea was a bunch of little countries that only shared a handful of federal powers. That concept has completely fallen apart and now we’re just an extremely poorly organized country with wildly different sized regions.
We either need to break every state into roughly the same size or we need to start merging too small states together until we have a collection of California sized states to manage.
For many people ‘their state’ has little meaning to them beyond sports teams and food trends. They have extremely low interest or engagement in state politics which is a major problem.
But this is an impossible dream, so we’re pretty much stuck with this horrible arrangement.
Not enough chairs
Specifically it fucks over CA and benefits states small enough they only get one Representative. Most of the rest aren’t too bad.
If we can’t expand the House, we could always chop CA into multiple states which also eases the gripes about the Senate some too. And maybe merge the Dakotas and create “Montoming” on the other end.
Somebody said states would secede if the coasts decided everything. Anybody ever researched this?
Is Texas a coast state? because they’re the second largest state
They have a coastline but they’re mad it’s not the Gulf of 'Merica.
They don’t love all of it, just 3/5ths.
I wonder what percentage of the population gets 3/5ths jokes. 60%?
Oklahoma seems to be flipped around to show her underground side?
Dirty
Alabama as well
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
There weren’t many slaveowners in urban areas.
The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.
The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.
You’re not wrong (cherry picking a little though), and I get that there is more nuance and some exceptions to the generalization. But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States. Enough that one would be justified in at least wondering if there was a correlation.
But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States.
Only in the last forty years. These used to be staunchly Dixiecrat territories prior to the Southern Strategy.
But I might point you to a different map.
A huge part of the D/R switch under Nixon/Reagan came through Gulf Coast O&G tyremoveds. That’s what gets us Wyoming and W. Virginia as bright red. It’s why Pennsylvania - home of the Gettysburg address along with some of the fiercest abolitionist activists and civil rights organizations - into the purple category.
The degree to which the country has become a Petro-State has revolutionized politics domestically.
So long as that industry endures, the GOP-aligned land barons are going to have all the money they need for revanchist political projects.
Neat! That certainly does explain a lot!
Isolation breeds xenophobia
Urban areas tend towards D, rural tends toward R. Smaller population states have smaller, less populous urban areas, thus the discrepancy.
Why? My theory is that smaller communities can force out opposition, so they tend to have more uniform ideas (trends towards tradition) whereas larger communities have to compromise to make a healthy community, meaning more diversity of ideas and more empathy towards traditionally counter-culture groups.
because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.
rural areas correlate with less educated populations
Huntsville, Alabama is one of the reddest corners of the reddest states in the country. It has the highest per capita populations of rocket scientists in the world.
Look up the definition of the word “outlier” and then get back to us.
Look up the definition of the word “outlier”
Is it an outlier or a counterfactual?
I could also point at the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation. No shortage of conservative intellectuals in these circle. Plenty of conservatives in business schools, law schools, and medical colleges. And as red states try to purge their academic institutions of “marxist” liberals, we’re seeing a rising tide of conservatives as university faculty, staff, and senior administrators - virtually all with graduate level degrees.
On the flip side, the SEIU is full of liberal democrats despite their members rarely having more than a high school diploma. The service sector is flush with low-education liberal voters. The vocational trades are flush with liberal voters. As are agricultural workers, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.
This isn’t a good litmus test for determining ideological bias.
Huntsville imported 1000+ Nazi scientists to work on rockets in the 50’s. That may explain the outlier.
Excellent point.
Huntsville, Alabama is not rural. It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama. I’m not claiming that there are not intelligent people who are full of hate that support Republican policies, nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans. The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama.
Then why does it have a Republican mayor? Urban + Educated should equal Democrat, right?
The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
I would argue that it isn’t simply rural areas that trend Republican but mineral rich areas with exceptionally large wealth gaps that tend to have powerful GOP fundraising operations.
Your example describes about one percent of rural America. How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy? Where are these powerful GOP fundraising operations, because the party has been pretty notoriously hemorhaging campaign funds for awhile now.
While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S. In fact, they don’t apply at all, because our economy is structured very differently to those countries.
How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy?
The Nevada service sector is the heart of the Democratic vote in that state, just as one data point. Similarly, if you go out to California or New York, you’ll find far more service sector democrats than white collar professionals. And where do you think all those Mississippi Democrats are coming from if not the agricultural industry? Millions of African American and Latino ag workers turn out for the Ds every year.
While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S.
Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Texas - show me a mineral rich state and I’ll show you a right-wing mega-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire or four) bankrolling the bulk of the conservative political scene.
The US is a hodgepodge of municipal and state authoritarian regimes and has been practically since its founding. With the exception of the Lincoln-era Abolitionist movement, it took us until the Great Depression to get a popular brand of politics meaningfully decoupled from some sponsored industry. Even then, its flaky and hesitant and prone to being co-opted.
But you’re fooling yourself if you think we haven’t brought our imperialist practices home to the core. Every dirty trick and bloody fist you’ve seen employed abroad has a parallel back home - often with an individual or organization that tried it first in one place before importing or exporting it to another.
Then why does it have a Republican mayor
Come on man. They literally said:
nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans
in the comment you’re replying to
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cough Project Paperclip cough
There’s a lot of knowledge drain in republican states. People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state, for 1. Being closer to like minded people 2. Lots of jobs and opportunities exist purely in cities
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
And then nobody wants to move back. At best you’ve got some purple cities like Austin starting to shift blue, but even then. I was in Austin for a few days this spring. I was infatuated. Started looking at home listings. Then I realized I’d be living in Texas. Who the hell wants that?
People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state
That’s as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old “Blueberries in the Tomato Soup” effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.
If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That’s one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.
Texas is gerrymandered to shit, and employs pretty nasty voter suppression tactics in populous (see: blue) counties by having very few polling stations per capita in those areas and making it a crime to give water/food to people waiting in line to vote. Big Texas cities are blue for the most part (maybe a few exceptions in the DFW area)
If you look at pretty much any of the cities within Texas on the latest map, you can see that they consolidate the core of the city into one or two solid blobs, then split the rest out to be diluted by rural areas. See Dallas/Tarrant County, Travis County, Bexar County, and Harris County for the most obvious cases of these.
https://redistricting.capitol.texas.gov/docs/88th_Senate_Tabloid_2024_05_20.pdf
On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.
On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.
The State Senate is absolutely gerrymandered to shit, without a doubt. But from a gross popular perspective, Texas consistently turns out a healthy majority of conservative voters. We saw this play out after 2018, when Abbott’s campaign staff took to their own aggressive GOTV operations (along with assorted nasty tricks in blue urban centers). The GOP was turning out north of 6M Republican voters in 2020 and north of 4.4M in 2022. This is substantially more than the 2.6M they were managing going back to 2014 and before.
Beto’s thesis for winning in 2018 was interesting, and drastically increasing the Dem base in the years since has been great for municipal Dems. But the idea that Texas is a blue state given the 10-15 pt margins Republicans continue to win with in years with double the turnout of historical races really requires you to ignore all the Central and West Texas right-wingers who have been showing up in droves over the last ten years.
Yeah. And the problem is that that won’t change unless blue people move outside the cities and into the rural areas. And most have absolutely no desire to do so. Those that do, have no desire to be politically isolated.
You’re telling me that the solution to systemic voter suppression is a massive urban exodus to spread out the voting population until it’s homogenous?
That’s the solution, instead of I dunno, forcing the Texas government to stop suppressing voters?
Well yeah, do that too. But as long as we’re weighing votes based on land, Texas will remain a red state.
Fixing voter suppression tactics might help federal elections. Probably just Senate, actually. But state office elections…there are far more red counties and towns than there are blue cities and towns. And somehow that matters.
I don’t think senators should be by state, I think senators should hold office for 5 years and every year the entire country should elect 20 senators.
Other things we should do:
Abolish political parties.
Uncap the house, algorithmically determine representative districts with something like the shortest split-line method, and assign between 3 and 5 representatives per district.
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
Make the leaders of the house and senate elected offices.
Abolish political parties.
I’m very curious to know how exactly you want to word this law to acheive the effect you’re dreaming of without it being unenforceable, without it being weaponizeable as a mass voter suppression tool, and without creating a freedom of speech or freedom of assembly violation.
A fair voting system allows people to vote for whatever reason they want. Voters want to win. Banding together to focus and force multiply campaign resources increases chances to win. Political parties are an inevitability in a fair system.
I understand the vibe of your sentiment is to not allow political parties to grow to the overcentralizing control they have today. You’re not particularly concerned about, say, a band of guys who meet up at the pub to figure out who they’re gonna organize a collective vote for. At least I hope not, because the alternative sounds wildly dystopian. But like, what’s the line in the sand between the two? How do you define the difference, legally?
The goal is to make it so self-declared private organizations can’t be an official part of the election process. At the moment, the state holds primaries for political parties, and helps them keep track of who’s in which one which helps maintain the duopoly.
I’m sympathetic to the concept, but I think that the advantages that organized parties have in terms of coordination (e.g. people with broadly similar values and policy goals choosing one candidate to represent those goals to avoid splitting the vote and seeing someone antithetical to those shared goals elected) are sufficiently strong that you would just see the current primaries replaced immediately by a primary process run completely independent of government oversight and resources. I can’t imagine that being good from a perspective of electoral legitimacy or reducing the influence of money in politics.
avoid splitting the vote
Assume for a second we’re using a cardinal voting system, and not using something outdated and barbaric like first past the post.
Break the powers of the president into multiple different offices.
As long as we’re talking esoteric political ideas, the big one here is to split head of state from head of government. It might not affect the function of government much, because the head of state is largely ceremonial in modern systems, but it’s I think it’s super-important psychologically.
A lot of (most?) people have trouble thinking about the office of the President as an abstract concept separately from the person of the President. Therefore, the President becomes an avatar of the United States, taken to be the living embodiment of our identity as a nation. That’s why so many people freak out about “the destruction of America” when a member of the other party, with values they don’t share, becomes the President, and it makes elections feel like a polarizing, existential referendum.
By contrast, King Charles is the head of state in the UK, while the head of government (the prime minister) comes and goes, and a stable avatar of the nation, largely above politics. They have their share of major problems over there, to be sure, but at least the nation has a shared identity to rally around when needed.
Californians are welcome to try to split into multiple states if they would like more Senators.
Woosh!
Really? Please explain. Like, I get the DEI joke, but the fact all these little states are red isn’t some law of the Universe. They have been blue and can be again.
Unless I’m missing some deeper joke? Apparently I am unless the down votes are just circlejerking.
EDIT: Maybe you all think the Senate should be determined by population? If so, that’s what the House is for. Uncap it.
It’s not that it should be by population. It’s that the idea of the senate itself is outdated.
Now the cities are the source of almost all of America’s wealth, power, education, and population, but they are forced to bend the knee to a tiny portion of the country. The whole system is way out of wack.
Carving up California into more states wouldn’t fix that, as it would still put more power into fewer hands.
I just disagree.
The Senate is where the States have equal representation regardless of size, that’s the point of it. The House is meant to be where California’s population makes the difference, but the cap needs to be removed, imo.
Without a Senate, the most populous states drag everyone else around by sheer weight. That’s not sustainable.
Also, as someone who has experienced life in both rural and urban America, city people have lots of misunderstandings about how people in small communities live and make bad decisions based on those misunderstandings as well. It’s not like country folk have a monopoly on that shit.
EDIT: Just want to acknowledge the point I think you’re trying to make about minority (often religiously motivated) groups passing laws that affect huge populations in cities where we have to live with each other. I totally get it, just to be clear.
The house and electoral college need to be tied directly to population. It’s already a clown fest give California 65 reps to Wyoming’s one
I think the Senate would be fine if it was in charge of a Veto instead of having to also pass the legislation, also if it had a lot more senators to some multiple of 3 at a minimum.
IE doing nothing is just letting everything pass automatically and that cooling pan shit is something senate leaders have to pursue actively with (qualified) majority support.
My ideal procedure. House passes a law, Senate vetoes it with a majority meeting or beating the passing margin of the law in the house, but also representing a majority of all americans, house can override the veto by meeting or beating the population margin the senate’s Veto represented.
You may note that there is no president involved in this process. That is because I believe the independent executive is an inherent threat to democracy and that it should be subject to complete erasure and power division to save the republic.
More senators gives more power to the smaller states.
The whole idea is ass-backwards anyway. Assigning representation based on lines that were cooked up centuries ago over reasons that are mostly lost to time. It was a compromise to appease the southern Democratic Republicans who feared proportional representation meant they would get trampled on.
And maybe they would. But maybe that also just means that they should. They were worried about tyranny of the majority (i.e. democracy), and now we have tyranny of the minority.
Just gonna skip right on past that reduced threshold to overturn the Senate veto, the having to act on everything they want to halt, and the qualified majority bits huh? Also how in the hell does more senators automatically make small states more powerful? Giving more voice to minorities within small states would technically undermine state level bigwigs trying to have a partisan lock on their senate delegations.
Hawaii is a small state, DC would be a small state, Delaware and most of New England are small states. You really want a one off Republican Majority to be able to just smash Hawaiian autonomy and indigenous rights to pieces without any checks or balances?
This model of the Senate is basically a parliamentary takeover of the role of head of state, only more powerful than the king of england in the sense that it’d be able to invoke the right of veto without instantly causing a constitutional crisis and sparking a revolution.
Small as in population, not small as in size. Most of the states in New England have a bigger population than Wyoming, SD, ND, etc.
Wyoming has a population of 581,381, with 2 senators and 1 rep. That’s 581k people per rep, 193k people per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 145k:1
Massachusetts has a population of 7 million, with 2 senators and 9 reps. That’s 777k people per rep, 636k per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 1:583k.
More senators would give more power to imaginary lines and not to people.
You want to fix Congress, reapportion the house and abolish the senate, or at least severely neuter it. Way too much power granted to way too few people, especially when you consider the committees and the EC.
The concept is outdated. State boundaries mean diddly when we’ve got instant communication, rapid transportation, and a real loose interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.
ETA: Hawaii, and indigenous rights in particular, are a really terrible example.
Oh man wait till you learn about Hawaii and how it’s autonomy and indigenous people’s rights were smashed to pieces when we made them a state
To achieve its originally intended purpose the Senate should only be able to legislate on interstate matters, not be an equal to the house.
I’d say my idea is less about equality and more about difference in purpose.
The Senate in my model only vets legislation, and even then, if they don’t do it within a reasonable time frame the law passes anyways, and even if they do take the issue up, it can only act by matching or beating the house’s vote to pass the law, and do so with a coalition representing a majority of all americans, so if there’s 3 senators per state, one californian senator would count for a third of California’s population towards this count, aaaaand just to make certain that we’re certain it isn’t becoming a cornfield court, while the senate can override by matching the house’s voting margin, the house can override by matching the population margin the Senate vetoed with.
It’s a veto that a wise senate leader would only try to invoke if they knew it could make it stick, or if they felt what had arrived on desk was so egregious it was worth picking the fight over regardless of certainty. As opposed to right now where the Senate just never does anything because of filibusters. Now just sitting on their hands actively reduces their ability to intercept policy or nominations and the theoretical state of debate only lasts as long as until the bill automatically becomes to law for lack of a veto passing under the described conditions.
Ha, no, they love isolating power to claim more for themselves.
We makin it outta the constitution with this one
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