Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/06/americas-minority-rule-senate-revealed-by-one-staggering-number.html
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I don’t know what a Democratically-led White House, Senate, and House can do to correct the imbalance, but they have two years to make it happen.
The best solution would be to require the House and Senate to vote together as one body. There’s nothing that would prohibit such a law, but unfortunately it would be subject to a court fight that would lose in the current SCOTUS.
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the US government should build a massive University or Research Lab in Montana. With only 1MM residents an influx of 100K smart people could net back 2 senate seats. (Yes this is dumb, but equally dumb to giving Montana the same representation as California).
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Because the Senate represents the states, not the populace at large. Built that way.
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And time to fix that mistake.
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Both the Senate and the Electoral College give people in smaller states grossly disproportionate representation in the Federal government.
One could make the argument that letting smaller states have one or the other is a check against a so-called “tyranny of the majority.” Giving them both has effectively created a tyranny of the minority. Screw that. Let’s have at least some semblance of fair representation at the Federal level.
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May be a dumb question, but why do both houses, as a federal body have to follow state lines? Have one of them as proportional representation for the country as a whole. The electoral college systems includes a bias towards the state structure already.
Forgive my ignorance as a foreigner.
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The individual states agreed to join in a union, but maintain local autonomy.
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This is good thinking. It is perfectly within the Senate’s right to create a rule that they have to take up any house law and debate it as is, for example. If you added strong restrictions against gerrymandering it would make Congress more representative.
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That is how it is written up in the constitution. When it was originally written and adopted the state thought of themselves as more separate entities than they might now.
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The House is supposed to be that proportional representation- more populous states have more representatives. However, due to gerrymandering and the structure of the Senate, the latter has vastly more power in the system, as do a minority of Republicans.
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The whole point of the house is for each person to have their local Congressperson to represent them in the federal government. That’s why districts are supposed to be small and compact, so you are close to your representation. Also why each house member wasn’t supposed to represent more than 30,000 people. He was supposed to be the guy you wouldn’t be afraid to write if you needed something done at the federal level.
That’s gone out the window in the modern era. Representatives have more like three quarters of a million people to worry about. A number so large that they end up divorced from local issues. Plus their districts are spread all over the place so there’s no clear population to represent. It’s a load of enclaves spread across the state. It’s arguable that the House of Representative’s original business model simply doesn’t scale to a country with 350 million people in it, but we are being poorly served by pretending that it still works instead of reworking it. Maybe some kind of two tier solution where everybody gets a local rep, but we don’t send all 1,200 to Washington at once.
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The point of the senate was to give proportionally larger representation to less populous states and make congress more conservative (harder to pass drastic changes). Then as now, there were major disagreements whether those are good or bad things.
The US government was designed by a wealthy, powerful, few who were trying to strike a balance between favoring democracy and being scared that would mean the loss of some of their power. The result is a strange mix of entrenched over-representation of the privileged few (wealthy, white, male, etc) while lauding the ideas of equality and democracy.
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State hood for DC and Peurto Rico.
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Also it was a salve to states with economies based on slavery.
Now that slavery isn’t a thing, the senate is pointless.
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The Senate can tie its own hands however it likes, but it can’t entrench those rules so that they can’t be undone on a moment’s notice.
So even assuming that an “up or down vote on House bills no matter what” rule was a good thing (I’m not convinced), it could be broken whenever a majority wanted it to.
The bottom line is, there’s nothing wrong with the Senate that couldn’t be fixed by completely rewriting Article I of the Constitution. But there’s also very little wrong with the Senate that CAN be fixed any other way, unfortunately.
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Or vaccinations?
I’m all for everyone getting vaccinated ASAP, but it is infuriating that states that have done the most to ensure this tragedy is catastrophic are being rewarded for it.
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Also in the Dakotas and Wyoming. Plus statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
Then we make SCOTUS appointments limited to 7-10 years.
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don’t forget guam, american samoa, and the native nations.
i don’t know the legality but i wonder whether it’s necessary to have a state to have a senator. at the very least, as a collective, federally recognized tribes deserve two. let them rotate around from nation to nation as they see fit.
[ edit ] unlikely solution number 2, have a few dem states break in parts while setting up their constitutions to basically continue as one. most big cities have more people than the dakotas. the state of columbus, or portland, or austin wouldn’t do so bad.
the whole division of what is or isn’t a state ( ex. alaska not pr ) is almost entirely about skin color.
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