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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

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Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#281

Post by wat10000 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #38
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

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.

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…

> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.

Er, why?

I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have something that compensated for the increased power the larger states had due to their population.

But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions. They still have some independent power but it's not a lot. And there's no option to leave the union.

We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power from the current form of the Senate also have disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#282

Post by kyrra »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270
lazide wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#283

Post by petcat »

cthalupa wrote: post #251
petcat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.

They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.

So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#284

Post by SauciestGNU »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #152
brightball wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This wasn't about ending that system, it was about preserving that system and further entrenching it at a more substantial cost to the end users of healthcare, who tend to be some of those least able to afford it.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#285

Post by chimeracoder »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270
lazide wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide

The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.

The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.

Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#286

Post by jdc0589 »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270
lazide wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.

It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#287

Post by hellisothers »

mschuster91 wrote: post #197
iammjm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar thing can be observed in Germany: the most anti-cannabis state is the state that produces the most alcohol (Bavaria)

That's less because Bavaria makes beer, otherwise the wine states would also impede cannabis. The problem is that Söder and his CSU are obviously following the old Nixon attitude of targetting cannabis to hit left-wings [1]: > You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with hero…

In my experience (of friends who drink and/or smoke weed) weed isn’t replacing drinking wine, it’s replacing drinking beer and booze.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#288

Post by pwg »

Y-bar wrote: post #73
potato3732842 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Non-American here). Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population? For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on top of that one seat per 500k citizens?

You have essentially described the current US Senate/House as it was originally set out in the constitution.

One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to each state part.

A second group with the number of seats determined directly by population (the House). This is "the rest set ... according to census data on population".

One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#289

Post by par1970 »

kulahan wrote: post #268
par1970 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing this? (Premise 1) If a country has 350 million people, then the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes. (Premise 2) America has 350 million people. (Conclusion 1) So, the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes in America. (Conclusion 2) So, the Senate is bad for America.

The Senate is not the group meant to represent the people , so why would you think OP is arguing this?

I think OP is arguing that because they literally said "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."

What do you think they are arguing?

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#290

Post by rootusrootus »

cthalupa wrote: post #215
giantg2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair," Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? "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." The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to repre…

The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact…

I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
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