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The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long
by whimsicalism 1y ago
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
- jeffbee 1y ago[flagged]
- alessandru 1y agomany non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
- runako 1y agoNot a historian, but some possibilities: - some governments were explicitly modeled on the US system - others were influenced by the US system as they moved from e.g. monarchies - most countries have some sort of caste system that established interests want to preserve
- lovecg 1y agoBicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/44817318.pdf https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThere is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
- jeffbee 1y agoNon-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
- hemp_is_canvas 1y agoI suggest you check out the debate over bicameralism when this was chosen. It was not just slaves stats that wanted a senate.
- bavent 1y agoHaving the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
- CalChris 1y agoFor 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes. Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
- dehrmann 1y agoBut 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.
- dangus 1y agoChina has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population. The US also has state representatives in every state. This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false. Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.
- dehrmann 1y ago> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false. Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
- dangus 1y agoI’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision. There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries. Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line. Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization. And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
- treetalker 1y agoMy pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes. Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible. Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
- redserk 1y agoI can’t imagine the framers of the Constitution envisioned having 50 states, either. 26 Senators is a substantially different shape of legislative body than the current 100.
- petcat 1y agoThere were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
- cthalupa 1y agoThey might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.
- teeray 1y agoLiquid Democracy. If the people can delegate their vote, they should be able to claw it back if enough of them care on some issue.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoThe Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
- tehjoker 1y agoThe senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders. American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites. The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency. To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully. >To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy. Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes. I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't fulminate or make personal attacks on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here, and we've had to ask you several times to try harder to observe them. We eventually have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tlogan 1y agoThings would work if we weren’t so damn tribal and if extremists on both sides weren’t the ones defining the discussion. Here is a video for us: https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA
- potato3732842 1y agoThe senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected. When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
- dehrmann 1y agoSo the senate is sort of a house of lords?
- danudey 1y agoThere are similarities, but not quite. The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent. Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on). The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
- whimsicalism 1y ago> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
- 1y ago
- goatlover 1y agoIt was setup to represent states. The House represents districts of people.
- whimsicalism 1y agoYes, I understand the system and the original reasoning very well, it's explained in detail in the Federalist papers. I'm saying it is a bad one.
- giantg2 1y ago"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people" They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
- whimsicalism 1y agoI understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
- giantg2 1y ago"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does" But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
- whimsicalism 1y ago> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power. I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoThe insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again. That said I bet the Senate exists in 500 years.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThe US will not see its quadricentennial without a new constitution.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago[flagged]
- jandrewrogers 1y agoSenators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people. If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
- cthalupa 1y agoIntended to, but due to the Permanent Apportionment Act, does not do so in actuality. Congress is currently structured so that both chambers provide outsized representation to lower population states. With how the electoral college works, this also provides them with outsized representation in presidential selection, as well. If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not invest so much power into higher population states, then it is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so much power into lower population states as well.
- bityard 1y agoThe two-party political system is the most successful sham that the US's aristocratic class has managed to pull off in the last 100 years. (A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-heavy social media.)
- hnburnsy 1y ago> Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now. "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
- whimsicalism 1y agoExactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
- saltcured 1y agoOpinions on this whole topic seem to revolve around how you conceive of the states in the US. Do you seem them as legitimate and important power structures, or essentially arbitrary boundaries which are relics of the past? To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and administrative functions based on the census, with no municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
- par1970 1y agoAre you arguing this? (Premise 1) If a country has 350 million people, then the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes. (Premise 2) America has 350 million people. (Conclusion 1) So, the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes in America. (Conclusion 2) So, the Senate is bad for America.
- kulahan 1y agoThe Senate is not the group meant to represent the people, so why would you think OP is arguing this?
- par1970 1y agoI think OP is arguing that because they literally said "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body." What do you think they are arguing?
- kulahan 1y agoRight, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people. So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
- par1970 1y agoMaybe we are talking past one another. > Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people. I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. > So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people? He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people."
- theoldgreybeard 1y agoSenators are supposed to be representatives of the State Legislatures, not The People - that's what the House of Representatives is for. The 17th amendment was a huge mistake.
- cthalupa 1y agoAnd so was the Permanent Apportionment Act. Revoke them both and we're much closer to what the founders intended when it comes to Congress.
- mmoustafa 1y agoWe do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress). I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
- lazide 1y agoAs the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.
- wing-_-nuts 1y agoVehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.
- kyrra 1y agoThe problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
- lazide 1y agoThe issue is that post WW2 (and perhaps Great Depression) gave the federal gov’t too much power (and money), resulting in a lot of low level meddling. It’s why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the state (or even lower) level.
- maximilianburke 1y agoI don't think the senate is necessarily the _biggest_ flaw, but it's close. A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100 years. Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThe Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system. The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.
- whimsicalism 1y agoI don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the primary target of where I would support redistributing resources from richer more productive states. Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.
- noelherrick 1y agoAs someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.
- Terr_ 1y agoEqual State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I propose a workaround: Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state. This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission. For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely. This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before. [0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/ https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union
- whimsicalism 1y agoi think we should just swear in every US citizen as a supreme court justice and then have 157,382,103-50,373,281 rulings on whatever issues we want to put to a plebiscite
- adrr 1y agoWasn't the senate just following the ask of 39 state Attorney Generals to close the loop hole on concentrated THC products made from hemp?
- bickfordb 1y agoSince changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
- whimsicalism 1y agoOnly takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at will.
- codyb 1y agoDefinitely time for structural change. Here's my ideas... The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit) - Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas - Ranked choice voting everywhere Maybe the territories get less representation. The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats. There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic. Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
- xdennis 1y ago> The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state. It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them. The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council. The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature. The US democratic system was inspired by this. Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed. --- On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
- cthalupa 1y ago> The House of Representatives represents the people. The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act. The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones. The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones. Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
- AngryData 1y agoI could say the same thing about the House of Reps, which has been frozen since 1929 and represents 3x more people per politician than it did then, is not equally distributed, and holds far more power and rights today than it ever did in the past.