The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s with the same total number of representatives, or will Congress need to be upgraded?
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?
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.
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.
Wait hold on, Californian’s wouldn’t go for it, but splitting them up into two blue states and one red state grabs 4 new Democrat senators (maybe) and 2 republican ones, allows California Republicans the chance to build the state they say they dream about, and gives the rest of the rural US a NEW California to bitch about
I like this
If we no longer have a nice even 50 we can do all kinds of crazy shit like allow representation for US territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands and Washington DC. We could break Texas up too. End up with like 80 states. But noooo we can’t change the flag, we have 50 states forever.
Somebody said states would secede if the coasts decided everything. Anybody ever researched this?
