STV: Single Transferrable Vote
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.
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.
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.
We makin it outta the constitution with this 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Californians are welcome to try to split into multiple states if they would like more Senators.
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.
