4 ms·

Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of p

Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power. This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.

giantg2 11mo ago
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair," Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? "This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones." The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
- krapp 11mo ago
  What "urban concerns" and "rural concerns" are we talking about, specifically?
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    One in my state is solar panel legislation. You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans. That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation? The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this. It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time. I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
    - hattmall 11mo ago
      But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
      - mothballed 11mo ago
        Oh the power company doesn't care. But counties use satellites to find solar panels or other unpermitted installations. If it's not noticeable via satellite imagery then yeah, probably nothing will happen.
        QuercusMax 11mo ago
        Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
        giantg2 11mo ago
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
- tbrownaw 11mo ago
  > Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? Some people aren't used to thinking of states as relevant sovereign entities.
- cthalupa 11mo ago
  The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well. The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
  - rootusrootus 11mo ago
    I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
    - cthalupa 11mo ago
      Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA. I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
        We could also split states. It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
  - alistairSH 11mo ago
    This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
  If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair. If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other. For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    "If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair." Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's. "For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..." That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
      > We are a democratic republic of states. I made no comment about what "we" are ... The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd. Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions. > The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
- mring33621 11mo ago
  The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
  - giantg2 11mo ago
    Do you have a link to that being a widespread problem after the huntington-hill method was used? For example, Delaware?
    - cthalupa 11mo ago
      Wyoming is an easy example 590,000 / 342,800,000 roughly 0.00172 0.00172 × 435 roughly 0.75 Wyoming would not even qualify for a full seat in the House if it wasn't for minimums at this size house.
hattmall 11mo ago
Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
  Could be true (*) But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else. (*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.

giantg2 11mo ago

"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair," Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? "This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones." The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).

krapp 11mo ago
What "urban concerns" and "rural concerns" are we talking about, specifically?
- mothballed 11mo ago
  One in my state is solar panel legislation. You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans. That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation? The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this. It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time. I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
  - hattmall 11mo ago
    But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      Oh the power company doesn't care. But counties use satellites to find solar panels or other unpermitted installations. If it's not noticeable via satellite imagery then yeah, probably nothing will happen.
      - QuercusMax 11mo ago
        Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
        giantg2 11mo ago
- giantg2 11mo ago
  I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
tbrownaw 11mo ago
> Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? Some people aren't used to thinking of states as relevant sovereign entities.
cthalupa 11mo ago
The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well. The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
- rootusrootus 11mo ago
  I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
  - cthalupa 11mo ago
    Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA. I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      We could also split states. It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
- alistairSH 11mo ago
  This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair. If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other. For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
- giantg2 11mo ago
  "If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair." Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's. "For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..." That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
    > We are a democratic republic of states. I made no comment about what "we" are ... The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd. Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions. > The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
mring33621 11mo ago
The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
- giantg2 11mo ago
  Do you have a link to that being a widespread problem after the huntington-hill method was used? For example, Delaware?
  - cthalupa 11mo ago
    Wyoming is an easy example 590,000 / 342,800,000 roughly 0.00172 0.00172 × 435 roughly 0.75 Wyoming would not even qualify for a full seat in the House if it wasn't for minimums at this size house.

hattmall 11mo ago

Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.

PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago
Could be true (*) But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else. (*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.