Disingenuous. That’s 21 states and 42 senators.
Now do representatives, which was originally supposed to match population distribution.
Alaska and Hawaii.
Alaska and Hawaii what?
From context I assume you mean they have a different number of senators? One? None?
You counted 21, but that didn’t include Alaska and Hawaii. That’s how OP got 23 states / 46 senators.
The Kentucky fried chicken chef guy is absolutely SLAYING those short shorts and boots 🔥🤩
Edit: apparently I already made this joke and forgot about it lmao
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 not really happy with our democracy. It always feels like our say stops at the ballot box, we need more direct democracy.
Eight years ago I would have agreed. But, I think we’ve demonstrated the short comings of putting authority for our most important policies in the hands of your average citizen.
I don’t have a better answer, mind you. Hopefully someone way further right on the “average citizen” bell curve has better ideas.
If we required an IQ test and general knowledge test equally of all parties and eliminated all those who don’t know anything about what’s going on and those 10% or more below average we would have a better run country save for the Republicans revolting and committing acts of terrorism.
If we divided the country all the rurals would have the option of moving to Trumpistan
Where did we put authority for our most important policies in the hands of average citizens?
The German system is what the US would have been if they would have regularly updated their constitution.
It was largely modelled after the US, with bugfixes applied. It definitely has issues but isn’t remotely as fucked as a partisan 2-party system.
But then the poor would run the country instead of a handful of unimaginably rich individuals! What kind of democracy would THAT be?
We don’t know but it was guaranteed to be different.
But look at the US popular vote. Even with different representation of the populace, this election would still have been fucked. We do need massive reform of the US voting structure, but this is not the biggest thing. Getting rid of first past the post in favor of at least ranked choice would make a much bigger difference.
That would open the door for a true left wing party to actually have a voice.
Ranked voting is a very good thing all countries should implement.
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.
No, it would be fair if California and the 20 other states had the same say. Laws should be by people, for people. Every person should have the same voting power and political representation. In a democracy, people vote, not land, or “states”, or anything else. People.
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 your argument in good faith.
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
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.
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.
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.
I like city-states, they’re my favorite part of fantasy novels.
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!
Exactly. Eliminate the Senate, and you have Panem: An urban Capitol district unilaterally controlling the rural satellite districts.
I’ll add, it’s incredibly dumb that the house is capped at 435 seats. There just is no way 435 people can represent the entirety of the nations population. Given advances in communication technology, there’s also no reason to keep it there. They really should be increasing the size of the house dramatically and no longer have a cap. The size of the house should grow, or shrink, with the size of the population.
No you don’t, because the House still favors small rural states after we froze the number.
If the House was proportional there’d be like 150 more representatives.
You take the population the smallest state because everyone gets at least 1, Wyoming at 580k, divide by population, 335 million.
And you get 578 Representatives.
Currently we have 435.
Leading to someone in Wyoming having like 9 times the House representation compared to a person in Cali if I’m remembering that right.
No you don’t, because the House still favors small rural states after we froze the number.
That is only partially accurate. Mathematically, the ideal congressional district will have 761,169 people.
States smaller than x=761,169 are overrepresented. Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska are the only states that meet this criteria. Wyoming has 584,057 people for its at-large district. Wyoming residents have about 1.3 times the house representation as a person in California.
You also need to consider that Single-district states between 761,170 and 1,522,338 (2x) are underrepresented. They have more than enough people for a single district, but not quite enough people to warrant a second district. These are North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware. South Dakota has 919,318 people. A South Dakota resident has 0.83 the representation in the house that a California resident has.
Similarly, 2-district states smaller than 1,522,338 are are overrepresented. These are Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, and Rhode Island.
2-district states larger than 1,522,338 are underrepresented. These are Idaho and West Virginia.
The way the math works out, the larger the state, the less the deviation between actual and optimal representation. Interestingly, California is slightly overrepresented relative to the ideal district size.
Trying to fix our original system of government and update it for modern day iis like trying to turn a race horse into a Formula 1 racecar…
If you spend enough money and take enough time you could conceivably say you did it.
But why the fuck wouldn’t you just switch to a racecar when the racehorse couldn’t run anymore?
Why put the horse thru all that when you’re going to have to spend all that time with a freak combination as your only mode of transportation?
In this analogy it’s not just weeks or months, we’re talking decades and generations. Arguably centuries.
Hell, the first time universal healthcare was part of a presidential platform was Teddy Roosevelt literally a century ago.
We were born in the time of the geriatric racehorse pulling the racecar like a cart, and we need to decide if we’re gonna keep going for slow change, or just get it over with.
Cuz damn near anything we could be doing right now would give us better results. Especially since our parents are in the driver’s seat of the racecar since they can’t walk on their own and keep slamming the brakes because they have dementia and think it’s funny.
Trying to fix our original system of government and update it for modern day iis like trying to turn a race horse into a Formula 1 racecar…
Democracy is government by consent of the governed. That means if you want to govern Wyoming and Montana, you have to get a majority of Wyoming and Montana residents to agree to your plan. And if every decision is going to be made by California, regardless of their local opposition, why the hell would they agree to be unilaterally ruled from afar? Why wouldn’t they maintain their own sovereignty and independence from you, and govern themselves?
California certainly has no problem establishing laws for itself that the rest of the country broadly reject.
That means if you want to govern Wyoming and Montana, you have to get a majority of Wyoming and Montana residents to agree to your plan.
The vast majority of human history disagrees…
Hell, modern events disagree, like 35% of the country voted for trump, most Americans disagree with their plans, it’s just the only other option was still pretty shitty
like 35% of the country voted for trump, most Americans disagree with their plans
The numbers can’t really be interpreted that way. The best one could say about those who didn’t vote at all is that they had no preference for the outcome.
The vast majority of human history disagrees…
The vast majority of human history involved dictatorial regimes imposing their will on the unwilling. Democracy is a fairly recent development.
You certainly can establish a government without the consent of the governed, but you cannot reasonably describe such a government as “democratic”.
Replying here again to take the discussion a different direction… What if instead of each representative casting a single vote, they instead acted as a proxy, and cast one vote for each member of the district they represent? The Wyoming representative at large would cast 584,057 votes on every issue in the house. The Delaware representative would cast 989,948 votes. Vermont, 643,077 votes in the house.
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.
Dare I say… defederate? *smugface*
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
Of course, the US has had tons of taxation without representation, I have no idea what else you could be referring too.
Can we get 25 million volunteers to move proportionally to red states for the next few years?
Lol if enough democrats moved to texas and flipped it blue, we would never have a republican president again.
I moved to a red state. Absolutely awful. Don’t do it. Texas is an irremediable shit hole.
Move to the parts where it isn’t (Austin, Houston).
I live in Austin, TX. Let me tell you, before moving here, I’d lived on two continents, three countries, ten US states, and this region of the world is by far the worst place I’ve ever lived… I can’t even rank how horrible it is because the second worst place is so much better by comparison.
Then what’s stopping your from leaving?
West Virginia checking in
Half a million movers per month would both wreck California and rural states real quick.
Also Cali would turn red quickly. I don’t think our voter numbers show the true story. There are a lot of MAGA crazies in CA. I just doubt they bother voting atm because they know it’s pointless.
So a win win.
rage rage rage
I’m assuming it’s working as intended.
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 benefit Southern slave states and sparsely populated rural states? Check.
We have the technology to implement some direct democracy and get away from all this “represntitive democracy” that doesnt work so well. Let people vote on the actual issues and we’ll get progressive policies pretty quickly, we wont get into wars, we’ll spend much less on defense, and the corporatists wont be able to buy influence as easily.
i honestly don’t believe that any of this would be true. Unless you went the libertarian route and pretend that the people know better than the government at all levels. Maybe i’m just cynical. But there’s a federal government for a reason so.
so you dont beleive in democracy, sounds like.
It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well
Extremely low IQ meme considering this is the intended purpose of the senate.
Disagreeing with the intention of some 1700s guys is extremely low IQ?
The meme assumes this was somehow not be design. The entire function of the Senate is to counterbalance that in the same meme, California has more representatives in Congress overall + more electors.
Yes because it completely ignores the House of Representatives. It’s an ignorant post made by an idiot and defended by idiots
The senate and the house are intentionally different and serve different purposes
Ya, like how the Senate confirms judicial appointments, thus controlling two branches with the tyranny of the minority.
I always thought it’d be interesting if one senator were elected only by the most populous municipality in each state.
Republicans would just create a mega-municipality of all the rural voters.
Don’t worry the House balances it*
*Until they froze the House because they couldn’t fit anymore chairs…
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.
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 also agree with this idea.
On top of that, if it’s a remote job and they’re not all congregated in one room, harder to have a Jan. 6 type moment. Better for national security.
Jesus Christ, I’d honestly forgotten about the uncap the house movement, but it reminds me of all the shit we’re missing out on. We’d be a different country. Imagine knowing your congressperson personally? Seeing them at the grocery store. Being able to to speak to them. Hell, imagine from their point of view, being able to run for election and only having to worry about 30k voters/constituents, and tailoring campaigns to the areas you represent. Id they did it, I’d run, even in my conservative ass area, because at that point you can appeal to voters based on the things that actually plague their communities, instead of bullshit scare tactics and nationwide/statewide issues. I’m surrounded by MAGA morons, but in campaigns that small, you could win this area with a campaign based on legal weed, road construction and a push to make sure the factories around here can stay in business.
This is such a problem here (at least for me) in Canada that even my city councillors only care about talking with the rich and forget reaching out to anyone else. I don’t know how they plan to dictate proper policy when you don’t talk to constituents who aren’t stuffing your pockets.
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.
The Wyoming Rule would only increase the size of the house to 574, still a totally manageable number.
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.
also, with 3k MPs, that’s one for every… half a million people.
that would give most countries a government small enough to fit in a classroom.
It isn’t a big concern as none of them represent any constituents in any meaningful way. Their job is to smile, wave, and clap. And wear an ethnic costume if you’re a designated token minority. Each member of the National People’s Congress represents zero citizens.
of course it doesn’t really matter in that particular case. i was more thinking about how it would work in a country with an actually functioning government.
If we allow the least populous state, Wyoming, to have three representatives, then that gives about 192,000 constituents per representative. So the House of Representatives would have about 1,720 members. Some substantial remodelling of the Capitol may have to be done. This would be enough people to fill a concert hall, but that’s not undoable.
Fill the standing body by collecting nominations. Each member can nominate exactly one member to the standing body. A member who collects exactly ten nominations will sit in the standing body. This means the standing body has 172 members.
A praesidium would be elected by the standing body’s political groups consisting of a president and several vice-presidents. In a proposed American system, they would probably have the title “speaker” and “deputy speaker”. In China, the praesidium consists of 178 people which is far too many. Nine is a more manageable number—one speaker and eight deputy speakers. The praesidium is an administrative body responsible for scheduling votes and establishing the rules of debate. It’s likely that the standing body is the only place where legislation can be introduced and debated, and then it is presented to the larger body for ratification.
The speaker is the presiding officer of the entire assembly, but the members of the praesidium can rotate presiding over the standing body. This is intended to ensure the political neutrality of the praesidium (useless in China’s case because everyone is a Communist but probably more effective in a hypothetical American adaptation).
In China, the standing body is plenipotentiary (has full legislative powers) when the entire Congress is not in session. This could also be the case under the American adaptation but the US Congress is almost always in session anyway. The standing body is in permanent session.
In essence, this creates a tricameral legislature.
There are some other powers that China’s Standing Committee has that the American version wouldn’t. Under the Communist principle of unified power, the Standing Committee also has the power to interpret the constitution. This is incompatible with the Western concept of separation of powers so it would be left out.
the US? what part of “functioning” did you miss?
(/s, obviously)
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.
. 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.
If America gets a chance to rebuild it will probably make some changes to be more democratic.
Well, the good news is regardless of what you thought of accelerationists plans a couple weeks ago…
We’re all about to find out if they were right or not.
So we got that going for us.
Yup. We get to be the data points in an experiment to test a hypothesis that has no historical data to support it and whose majority of subjects have not consented to participate in.
that has no historical data to support it and whose majority of subjects have not consented to participate in.
What?
America is already the result of accelerationism…
What do you think the Boston Tea party was?
England seized smuggled tea, it would have put smugglers out of business.
Smugglers threw legal tea off British ships in response. Now the colonies had to choose expensive legal tea or expensive smuggled tea.
And that was used as a way to make people made at the King, when if the smugglers hadn’t of destroyed the legal tea, colonist would be paying the same price they always had, except instead of a small group of smugglers, the taxes went to the government that ensured the colonists safety (somewhat).
Our country is fucking built on accelerationism, there’s tons of historical data from here and all over, like France obviously.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.
And what countries not ruled by a wealthy oligarchy as well as providing sustained increased levels of equality and justice to all peoples compared to before have resulted from accelerationism? The US has never not been a slave state, unlike other nations that did not see violent revolutions or wars of independence.
In addition, tea, while a staple at the time, is a bit incomparable to freedom from violent repression, self-determination, and general human right to live, all of which and more have been offered up, without regard for the people who will involuntarily see great harms because of it. It’s the ideological equivalent of “Some of you are going to die but that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make.”
It really bears repeating that destruction of non-essential foodstuffs is not anywhere near equivalent to willingly sacrificing the lives and well-being of vulnerable populations. Even if the Boston Tea Party can be concretely tied to US independence, there is no evidence to suggest that increased levels of negative pressure would correlate to increased levels of resistance or embrace of revolutionary ideals. Especially in a populace conditioned to be anti-revolutionary.
Don’t get me wrong, at this point the train is already in motion so, I hope that the accelerationists’ unproven ideas pan out with minimal human suffering. But, with the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples, as well as women and LGBTGQ+ already being fed into the hopper of the Genocide-Machine-That-Will-Totally-Result-In-A-Better-World-Trust-Me™, I’m not confident that it’s holds any more plausibility than other “Pie in the Sky when you die” ideas offered by major religions. Add the impending acceleration of damage to the biosphere and I must say that I’m pretty pessimistic about the future of the human species and suspect that accelerationism will only make the end of the species more filled with unnecessary misery and suffering.
The silver lining though, is that it is extremely unlikely that humans can end all life - there are too many resilient little beasties on the planet that can survive everything short of atomization of all matter on Earth.
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.
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.
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.
They came up with the best thing they could
Bad people with bad motives create bad systems of control.
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.
Why don’t the more populous states, the larger of the two groups, simply eat the small states?
Because there this thing called the military and they swore an oath to uphold the constitution that that includes this odd electoral system.
🤷♂️
I mean there is a way to non-violently over throw this system. Just get people who vote democratic to move to red states while keeping at least 51% majority in their original state. Then vote in democrats, take over their state government. If coordinated correctly, we can take over 3/4 of state governments and have 3/4 of the US senate. Gerrymander (political gerrymandering is legal btw) enough districts and also win at least 2/3 of the house.
With all that in control, amend the constitution, repeal the clause that requires each state to have an equal number of senators. Then an amendment to abolish the senate, and giving any of its powers to the house.
I mean while we’re at it, make the house use proportional representation. And maybe even ranked choice voting system.
I know you’re kidding but that’s not allowed per Article IV section 3
