6 ms·

Just one nitpick: the anti-democratic nature of the Senate (and the Electoral college, while we're at it) is very much seen as a problem by a lot of people liv

by Frondo 8y ago

Just one nitpick: the anti-democratic nature of the Senate (and the Electoral college, while we're at it) is very much seen as a problem by a lot of people living outside the sparsely populated rural states; For those of us living in urban areas, we're simply vastly underrepresented in federal government, and quite a few of us don't like it.

jki275 8y ago
So you want to reduce the representation from the "fly-over states" so that all elections and all federal government decisions are decided by California and New York? That's not going to work very well, and would lead to the secession of about 90% of the states, and then you'd find out that your urban paradises depend absolutely on the rest of the country to exist. The founding fathers set up a pretty good system, and they specifically did not set up a democracy for a whole bunch of relatively obvious reasons. Straight democracy doesn't work.
- smw 8y ago
  I think the math suggests that the rest of the country depends on the 'urban paradises' to fund it, at this point. Sure, less populous states grow food, but if they broke off, it seems likely they'd want to sell that excess food for something like market value, no?
  - jki275 8y ago
    Maybe. Or maybe they'd decide to sell all their food elsewhere and you'd have food riots in your urban paradises. But the contention is evidently that we need to remove their representation in federal government because people don't understand how the federal government was set up.
- chuckkir 8y ago
  Actually, according to the original plan, the House of Representatives should have grown so that each member represents a roughly equal number of constituents (excepting very small population states which still get one). At some point it was capped at 435 (I presume for space reasons) and the disparity of representation has increased since. So it seems that more power has been transferred to rural states than the founders had originally envisioned.
  - jki275 8y ago
    The rural states' power in federal government is largely imaginary. In many elections, they have gone overwhelmingly for the losing candidate. If you look at a county by county map of the last election and then realize that the winner of the election actually lost the popular vote even after taking something like 85% of the counties in the US and you can still make the argument that the population centers should have more representation it's really just a naked left wing power grab at that point -- and likely an argument made by someone who has never really lived in rural America and doesn't understand it. Yes, you have more people in the population centers. They're generally a very homogenous group by political thought, and vote almost as a left wing bloc in most cases. You're simply arguing that the left should be more powerful than it is. Nobody cries about the electoral college until a Republican wins. Nobody cries about representation when the left is in power. There are things that are wrong in the US political system, but the electoral college and the house representation aren't those things. They're the best of the bad solutions to keeping away from a tyranny.
    - jedberg 8y ago
      That’s because out of the five times that the electoral college winner was not the popular winner, four times it was a Republican who won and the fifth time the Republicans didn’t exist yet (but the winner was the more conservative candidate). And also, the majority of this country votes democrat in every election since 2000, but because of gerrymandering the house retains a Republican majority. If the house matched the breakdown of national popular votes for house reps, it would be significantly Democrat.
      - jki275 8y ago
        The Dems gerrymander just as much as the Rs do. You're using a tiny fraction of history to discuss this, and even within that tiny fraction your numbers are incorrect as the the dems held the majority from 2007 to 2011 and only lost it in the backlash from the health care debacle. Also the national popular vote is totally irrelevant to the house membership. It's not set up that way.
    - 8y ago
- Silfen 8y ago
  You should extend more generosity to the point GP makes. You can believe in adjusting the system so that representation is more equal without doing away with the protections for small states. For example, you can greatly increase the size of the House. It's the original first amendment! http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/its-time-to-increase-the-size-of-the-house/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/its-ti...
  - jki275 8y ago
    The house already adequately represents the people, that's how it was designed. Expanding the house doesn't change representation.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The house already adequately represents the people By what standard? > that's how it was designed. That may have been the design goal, but it's debatable whether the original design met the goal, and key elements of the original design (the original representation ratio) were not fixed in the Constitution or preserved over time. > Expanding the house doesn't change representation. It changes both the equality of representation (reducing quantization artifacts) and the proximity of Representatives to the represented, both of which are key elements of representation.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      The house doesn't represent the people in the sense that the party that got a significant majority of the votes has a significant minority of the seats because of gerrymandering.
      - jki275 8y ago
        It's an interesting argument, but the house isn't a monolith that represents the entire US as a bloc - it's a regional thing that represents individual regions, and actually the vast majority of those areas in the US do not belong to the minority party. Overall popular vote is not how we elect the house. You can argue about gerrymandering all day long, both sides do it and have done it since the beginning.
- bllguo 8y ago
  an absurd strawman. To you there's no way to increase representation from more populous states without letting decisions be dominated by CA and NY? Can we argue in good faith here? Pretty sure the rest of the country depends on states like CA and NY as well. It is hardly a one-way street. There are many objective criticisms of the system. Like election methods, for instance. I personally think it's ridiculous to suggest that our understanding of governance and political systems hasn't increased enough to substantially improve the US. It's been 300 years. I would point to the amendment system as evidence that the founding fathers knew they hadn't made a perfect system. I would point to the fact that they explicitly warned against political parties to show that the system is not at all what they intended. And lastly I want to say that this deification of the founding fathers is a big part of the problem.
  - jki275 8y ago
    So get an amendment passed. Just remember, you have to get 2/3 of the states -- including all your fly-over states.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      You need 2/3 of the states for a convention. But you need 3/4 of the states to ratify. Thing is, though, Constitution is just a piece of paper, if enough people - or states - believe that it is. Small states need to understand that the power that they wield is theirs only because the large states agree to abide by this arrangement. If that power is abused too much, the deal might just be altered - and in any such alteration, the larger and more powerful states will call the shots.
      - jki275 8y ago
        But they won't, and that's the beauty of the way it was set up. Every state still gets two votes in the Senate, and you can't change that without an amendment. The majority of the small states still have to sign off on "altering the deal" for it to pass. The Constitution is far more than a piece of paper, it's the foundation of all law in the US.
- jedberg 8y ago
  Just as a point of fact, the 100 largest cities in the US only represent about 20% of the total population. So no it wouldn’t just be big cities deciding everything.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eiaoa 8y ago
> Just one nitpick: the anti-democratic nature of the Senate (and the Electoral college, while we're at it) is very much seen as a problem by a lot of people living outside the sparsely populated rural states; It really depends on how you conceptualize it: there isn't much of an issue if you think of the Senate as a body that represents states as sovereign political entities not population. IIRC, Senators were originally elected by state legislatures, which made that role clearer. If the Senate is to be reorganized to be proportional to population, some other "anti-democratic" compromise will need to be implemented to prevent small states from becoming neglected backwaters. The current comprise means neither small nor large states can ram through legislation that neglects the other's interests. But to be honest, the cleaner solution to the problem is more federalism: increase the power of state governments over their own state, and correspondingly decrease the scope of the federal government over areas that aren't truly national concerns. The sacrifice there is that many groups would have to abandon their dreams of national dominance and satisfy themselves with regional influence.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > It really depends on how you conceptualize it: there isn't much of an issue if you think of the Senate as a body that represents states as sovereign political entities not population. That doesn't remove the problen, it just clarifies that it is a fundamental design problem and not a problem with an implementation details. > If the Senate is to be reorganized to be proportional to population That's a bad solution. A better solution is just to transfer it's quasi-executive powers to the House, and it's quasi-judicial powers either to the House or the Supreme Court (if the House, then some consideration may need to be done of how charging works for impeachment, but that's not an insurmountable problem), and perhaps reduce it's legislative powers as has been done with the similarly problematic British House of Lords. Or (and this can be combined with the above) rearrange it so that both seats from a state are in the same class (elected simultaneously), and instead of FPTP mandate a two-seat, preference ballot, proportional method like STV for Senate elections. Besides, you can't restructure the Senate to make it proportional to population (at least without unanimity among the states), as that is literally the one thing that an Amendment cannot do. (There used to be another, but that was time-limited.) > The current comprise means neither small nor large states can ram through legislation that neglects the other's interests. Small states are slightly overrepresented in the House, radically overrepresented in the Senate and in judging electoral votes, and overrepresented at a level between those two in the Electoral College. There's no real compromise or two-sided balance there.

by Frondo 8y ago

jki275 8y ago

So you want to reduce the representation from the "fly-over states" so that all elections and all federal government decisions are decided by California and New York? That's not going to work very well, and would lead to the secession of about 90% of the states, and then you'd find out that your urban paradises depend absolutely on the rest of the country to exist. The founding fathers set up a pretty good system, and they specifically did not set up a democracy for a whole bunch of relatively obvious reasons. Straight democracy doesn't work.

smw 8y ago
I think the math suggests that the rest of the country depends on the 'urban paradises' to fund it, at this point. Sure, less populous states grow food, but if they broke off, it seems likely they'd want to sell that excess food for something like market value, no?
- jki275 8y ago
  Maybe. Or maybe they'd decide to sell all their food elsewhere and you'd have food riots in your urban paradises. But the contention is evidently that we need to remove their representation in federal government because people don't understand how the federal government was set up.
chuckkir 8y ago
Actually, according to the original plan, the House of Representatives should have grown so that each member represents a roughly equal number of constituents (excepting very small population states which still get one). At some point it was capped at 435 (I presume for space reasons) and the disparity of representation has increased since. So it seems that more power has been transferred to rural states than the founders had originally envisioned.
- jki275 8y ago
  The rural states' power in federal government is largely imaginary. In many elections, they have gone overwhelmingly for the losing candidate. If you look at a county by county map of the last election and then realize that the winner of the election actually lost the popular vote even after taking something like 85% of the counties in the US and you can still make the argument that the population centers should have more representation it's really just a naked left wing power grab at that point -- and likely an argument made by someone who has never really lived in rural America and doesn't understand it. Yes, you have more people in the population centers. They're generally a very homogenous group by political thought, and vote almost as a left wing bloc in most cases. You're simply arguing that the left should be more powerful than it is. Nobody cries about the electoral college until a Republican wins. Nobody cries about representation when the left is in power. There are things that are wrong in the US political system, but the electoral college and the house representation aren't those things. They're the best of the bad solutions to keeping away from a tyranny.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    That’s because out of the five times that the electoral college winner was not the popular winner, four times it was a Republican who won and the fifth time the Republicans didn’t exist yet (but the winner was the more conservative candidate). And also, the majority of this country votes democrat in every election since 2000, but because of gerrymandering the house retains a Republican majority. If the house matched the breakdown of national popular votes for house reps, it would be significantly Democrat.
    - jki275 8y ago
      The Dems gerrymander just as much as the Rs do. You're using a tiny fraction of history to discuss this, and even within that tiny fraction your numbers are incorrect as the the dems held the majority from 2007 to 2011 and only lost it in the backlash from the health care debacle. Also the national popular vote is totally irrelevant to the house membership. It's not set up that way.
  - 8y ago
Silfen 8y ago
You should extend more generosity to the point GP makes. You can believe in adjusting the system so that representation is more equal without doing away with the protections for small states. For example, you can greatly increase the size of the House. It's the original first amendment! http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/its-time-to-increase-the-size-of-the-house/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/its-ti...
- jki275 8y ago
  The house already adequately represents the people, that's how it was designed. Expanding the house doesn't change representation.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The house already adequately represents the people By what standard? > that's how it was designed. That may have been the design goal, but it's debatable whether the original design met the goal, and key elements of the original design (the original representation ratio) were not fixed in the Constitution or preserved over time. > Expanding the house doesn't change representation. It changes both the equality of representation (reducing quantization artifacts) and the proximity of Representatives to the represented, both of which are key elements of representation.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    The house doesn't represent the people in the sense that the party that got a significant majority of the votes has a significant minority of the seats because of gerrymandering.
    - jki275 8y ago
      It's an interesting argument, but the house isn't a monolith that represents the entire US as a bloc - it's a regional thing that represents individual regions, and actually the vast majority of those areas in the US do not belong to the minority party. Overall popular vote is not how we elect the house. You can argue about gerrymandering all day long, both sides do it and have done it since the beginning.
bllguo 8y ago
an absurd strawman. To you there's no way to increase representation from more populous states without letting decisions be dominated by CA and NY? Can we argue in good faith here? Pretty sure the rest of the country depends on states like CA and NY as well. It is hardly a one-way street. There are many objective criticisms of the system. Like election methods, for instance. I personally think it's ridiculous to suggest that our understanding of governance and political systems hasn't increased enough to substantially improve the US. It's been 300 years. I would point to the amendment system as evidence that the founding fathers knew they hadn't made a perfect system. I would point to the fact that they explicitly warned against political parties to show that the system is not at all what they intended. And lastly I want to say that this deification of the founding fathers is a big part of the problem.
- jki275 8y ago
  So get an amendment passed. Just remember, you have to get 2/3 of the states -- including all your fly-over states.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    You need 2/3 of the states for a convention. But you need 3/4 of the states to ratify. Thing is, though, Constitution is just a piece of paper, if enough people - or states - believe that it is. Small states need to understand that the power that they wield is theirs only because the large states agree to abide by this arrangement. If that power is abused too much, the deal might just be altered - and in any such alteration, the larger and more powerful states will call the shots.
    - jki275 8y ago
      But they won't, and that's the beauty of the way it was set up. Every state still gets two votes in the Senate, and you can't change that without an amendment. The majority of the small states still have to sign off on "altering the deal" for it to pass. The Constitution is far more than a piece of paper, it's the foundation of all law in the US.
jedberg 8y ago
Just as a point of fact, the 100 largest cities in the US only represent about 20% of the total population. So no it wouldn’t just be big cities deciding everything.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eiaoa 8y ago

> Just one nitpick: the anti-democratic nature of the Senate (and the Electoral college, while we're at it) is very much seen as a problem by a lot of people living outside the sparsely populated rural states; It really depends on how you conceptualize it: there isn't much of an issue if you think of the Senate as a body that represents states as sovereign political entities not population. IIRC, Senators were originally elected by state legislatures, which made that role clearer. If the Senate is to be reorganized to be proportional to population, some other "anti-democratic" compromise will need to be implemented to prevent small states from becoming neglected backwaters. The current comprise means neither small nor large states can ram through legislation that neglects the other's interests. But to be honest, the cleaner solution to the problem is more federalism: increase the power of state governments over their own state, and correspondingly decrease the scope of the federal government over areas that aren't truly national concerns. The sacrifice there is that many groups would have to abandon their dreams of national dominance and satisfy themselves with regional influence.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> It really depends on how you conceptualize it: there isn't much of an issue if you think of the Senate as a body that represents states as sovereign political entities not population. That doesn't remove the problen, it just clarifies that it is a fundamental design problem and not a problem with an implementation details. > If the Senate is to be reorganized to be proportional to population That's a bad solution. A better solution is just to transfer it's quasi-executive powers to the House, and it's quasi-judicial powers either to the House or the Supreme Court (if the House, then some consideration may need to be done of how charging works for impeachment, but that's not an insurmountable problem), and perhaps reduce it's legislative powers as has been done with the similarly problematic British House of Lords. Or (and this can be combined with the above) rearrange it so that both seats from a state are in the same class (elected simultaneously), and instead of FPTP mandate a two-seat, preference ballot, proportional method like STV for Senate elections. Besides, you can't restructure the Senate to make it proportional to population (at least without unanimity among the states), as that is literally the one thing that an Amendment cannot do. (There used to be another, but that was time-limited.) > The current comprise means neither small nor large states can ram through legislation that neglects the other's interests. Small states are slightly overrepresented in the House, radically overrepresented in the Senate and in judging electoral votes, and overrepresented at a level between those two in the Electoral College. There's no real compromise or two-sided balance there.