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The problem is self interest and legalized bribery: "The coal industry has been shrinking in West Virginia for decades. But Manchin himself made nearly $500,00

The problem is self interest and legalized bribery: "The coal industry has been shrinking in West Virginia for decades. But Manchin himself made nearly $500,000 last year from investments in the state's coal sector. He also raised $400,000 in campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies in the third quarter of this year, as he questioned the need for the CEPP. Manchin is the top recipient in Congress of donations from the oil and gas industry." On top of this, I think we have a huge problem with the Senate. The representation is terribly skewed, giving far too much weight to rural people. We need to break up the big states or something.

svachalek 5y ago
Giving representation to land never made sense in the first place, it's a 200 year old compromise over forgotten politics. Just make it proportional. Maybe 10 states share a senator, California and Texas get more.
solarhoma 5y ago
‘There are less of you therefore you do not mean as much.’ This has been applied in the past with terrible consequences. The founding fathers developed the House and Senate to avoid a majority dictatorship.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The founding fathers developed the House and Senate to avoid a majority dictatorship. How does lowering the support threshold for total political control, as long as the faction seeking control is disproportionately distributed in smaller (and/or more effective at disenfranchising those outside the faction) states do that? It doesn't. It just makes dominance of a particular interest group, even with a majority, harder, while making dominance of the diametrically opposed group, even if it only has a minority, easier. (If the representational skew of the different bodies was opposite, it might do what you suggest, but both houses (and the electoral college) are, by design, biased in the same direction with different strengths.
  - dllthomas 5y ago
    Yeah, the rhetoric supporting the current system often sloppily suggests we should somehow prefer tyranny of a minority. We shouldn't. The check on tyranny of the majority, beyond notional defense of rights, is that the representation of the House vs the Senate differ from each other and so agreement between them (and especially a durable agreement between them) probably means more than "mere" majority support. Obviously that property can't be preserved while also making both bodies representative. It would be nice, however, if they were centered around "representative", differing in opposite directions rather than differing in overweighting the same voters a little vs a lot. I've toyed around with that a little but don't have a concrete proposal (... much less one that would get anywhere).
    - credit_guy 5y ago
      Great points. I don't have a concrete proposal either, but can I throw some ideas? Among the 3 branches of the Government, the judicial one is the only technocratic one. We can try to replace the Senate with another technocratic body, some sort of "Council of Elders". I'm not sure how you'd determine the qualifications, so my idea is far from fully baked. The opposite direction would be a lottery. Juries are a form of democracy based on lottery. For example, if the House proposes a bill, instead of the Senate having to agree on it, one could subject it to some type of "trial", where you'd have a "Constitutional" judge presiding, and a jury. The judge might be a Supreme Court justice, and would have to explain various aspects of the Constitution to the jury. There would be advocates (maybe from the House?) that represent both the case for and against the law, but finally the determination whether the law should be allowed to be sent to the President for signing should be done by the jury. Obviously this proposal has between zero and nil chances of ever becoming reality, but I think at least in theory it's not really absurd.
      - dllthomas 5y ago
        I think that some variation on sortition could be interesting, although I note that it doesn't compensate for other biases away from "perfectly representative", being itself perfectly representative. As an example of the sort of compensation I meant, a potential proposal (which I'm not actually making but which gives the sense of what I mean) would be to leave the Senate alone but give each State representation in the House such that the total number of representatives across both chambers is (as close as practical to) proportional. This would mean the Senate would be undemocratic in its current direction, but the house would be undemocratic in precisely the opposite direction (in terms of the weights of individual votes, not necessarily in terms of policy), while the President would be chosen (approximately) democratically and overall the system shouldn't lean one way or the other.
rektide 5y ago
Manchin is making me so sad & the ongoing urbanization of the world blowing the power balance ever more out of whack, ever more in favor of the smaller-places, is a miserable political death spiral.

svachalek 5y ago

Giving representation to land never made sense in the first place, it's a 200 year old compromise over forgotten politics. Just make it proportional. Maybe 10 states share a senator, California and Texas get more.

solarhoma 5y ago

‘There are less of you therefore you do not mean as much.’ This has been applied in the past with terrible consequences. The founding fathers developed the House and Senate to avoid a majority dictatorship.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> The founding fathers developed the House and Senate to avoid a majority dictatorship. How does lowering the support threshold for total political control, as long as the faction seeking control is disproportionately distributed in smaller (and/or more effective at disenfranchising those outside the faction) states do that? It doesn't. It just makes dominance of a particular interest group, even with a majority, harder, while making dominance of the diametrically opposed group, even if it only has a minority, easier. (If the representational skew of the different bodies was opposite, it might do what you suggest, but both houses (and the electoral college) are, by design, biased in the same direction with different strengths.
- dllthomas 5y ago
  Yeah, the rhetoric supporting the current system often sloppily suggests we should somehow prefer tyranny of a minority. We shouldn't. The check on tyranny of the majority, beyond notional defense of rights, is that the representation of the House vs the Senate differ from each other and so agreement between them (and especially a durable agreement between them) probably means more than "mere" majority support. Obviously that property can't be preserved while also making both bodies representative. It would be nice, however, if they were centered around "representative", differing in opposite directions rather than differing in overweighting the same voters a little vs a lot. I've toyed around with that a little but don't have a concrete proposal (... much less one that would get anywhere).
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    Great points. I don't have a concrete proposal either, but can I throw some ideas? Among the 3 branches of the Government, the judicial one is the only technocratic one. We can try to replace the Senate with another technocratic body, some sort of "Council of Elders". I'm not sure how you'd determine the qualifications, so my idea is far from fully baked. The opposite direction would be a lottery. Juries are a form of democracy based on lottery. For example, if the House proposes a bill, instead of the Senate having to agree on it, one could subject it to some type of "trial", where you'd have a "Constitutional" judge presiding, and a jury. The judge might be a Supreme Court justice, and would have to explain various aspects of the Constitution to the jury. There would be advocates (maybe from the House?) that represent both the case for and against the law, but finally the determination whether the law should be allowed to be sent to the President for signing should be done by the jury. Obviously this proposal has between zero and nil chances of ever becoming reality, but I think at least in theory it's not really absurd.
    - dllthomas 5y ago
      I think that some variation on sortition could be interesting, although I note that it doesn't compensate for other biases away from "perfectly representative", being itself perfectly representative. As an example of the sort of compensation I meant, a potential proposal (which I'm not actually making but which gives the sense of what I mean) would be to leave the Senate alone but give each State representation in the House such that the total number of representatives across both chambers is (as close as practical to) proportional. This would mean the Senate would be undemocratic in its current direction, but the house would be undemocratic in precisely the opposite direction (in terms of the weights of individual votes, not necessarily in terms of policy), while the President would be chosen (approximately) democratically and overall the system shouldn't lean one way or the other.

rektide 5y ago

Manchin is making me so sad & the ongoing urbanization of the world blowing the power balance ever more out of whack, ever more in favor of the smaller-places, is a miserable political death spiral.