The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
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.
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.
That’s with the same total number of representatives, or will Congress need to be upgraded?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Oklahoma seems to be flipped around to show her underground side?
They don’t love all of it, just 3/5ths.
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.
The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.
You’re not wrong (cherry picking a little though), and I get that there is more nuance and some exceptions to the generalization. But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States. Enough that one would be justified in at least wondering if there was a correlation.
Urban areas tend towards D, rural tends toward R. Smaller population states have smaller, less populous urban areas, thus the discrepancy.
Why? My theory is that smaller communities can force out opposition, so they tend to have more uniform ideas (trends towards tradition) whereas larger communities have to compromise to make a healthy community, meaning more diversity of ideas and more empathy towards traditionally counter-culture groups.
because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.
rural areas correlate with less educated populations
Huntsville, Alabama is one of the reddest corners of the reddest states in the country. It has the highest per capita populations of rocket scientists in the world.
Huntsville imported 1000+ Nazi scientists to work on rockets in the 50’s. That may explain the outlier.
Huntsville, Alabama is not rural. It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama. I’m not claiming that there are not intelligent people who are full of hate that support Republican policies, nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans. The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
There’s a lot of knowledge drain in republican states. People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state, for 1. Being closer to like minded people 2. Lots of jobs and opportunities exist purely in cities
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
And then nobody wants to move back. At best you’ve got some purple cities like Austin starting to shift blue, but even then. I was in Austin for a few days this spring. I was infatuated. Started looking at home listings. Then I realized I’d be living in Texas. Who the hell wants that?
People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state
That’s as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old “Blueberries in the Tomato Soup” effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.
If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That’s one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.
Texas is gerrymandered to shit, and employs pretty nasty voter suppression tactics in populous (see: blue) counties by having very few polling stations per capita in those areas and making it a crime to give water/food to people waiting in line to vote. Big Texas cities are blue for the most part (maybe a few exceptions in the DFW area)
If you look at pretty much any of the cities within Texas on the latest map, you can see that they consolidate the core of the city into one or two solid blobs, then split the rest out to be diluted by rural areas. See Dallas/Tarrant County, Travis County, Bexar County, and Harris County for the most obvious cases of these.
https://redistricting.capitol.texas.gov/docs/88th_Senate_Tabloid_2024_05_20.pdf
On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.
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.
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.
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.
