121–130 of 583 posts
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I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
DC?
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"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people" They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones. Hooray for the Senate!
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
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I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers. But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense t…
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
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"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people" They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
(A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-heavy social media.)
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"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does" But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large num…
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power. I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got…
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
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China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population. The US also has state representatives in every state. This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false. Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false. Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
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Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
Senate and House - congress is both bodies. My point was merely the additive scheme you described is how electoral college votes are allocated.
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The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected. When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They…
So the senate is sort of a house of lords?
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.