I think the Senate would be fine if it was in charge of a Veto instead of having to also pass the legislation, also if it had a lot more senators to some multiple of 3 at a minimum.
IE doing nothing is just letting everything pass automatically and that cooling pan shit is something senate leaders have to pursue actively with (qualified) majority support.
My ideal procedure. House passes a law, Senate vetoes it with a majority meeting or beating the passing margin of the law in the house, but also representing a majority of all americans, house can override the veto by meeting or beating the population margin the senate's Veto represented.
You may note that there is no president involved in this process. That is because I believe the independent executive is an inherent threat to democracy and that it should be subject to complete erasure and power division to save the republic.
The senator limit would be ok, if not for the hard limit on representatives, which fucks over once again states with high population.
Somebody said states would secede if the coasts decided everything. Anybody ever researched this?
100% agree with this we limited congress to the size of a building for some stupid reason
Second conversation. Why are some states large and others big shouldn't we chop them up more?
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Number of people per representative should be set based on the state with the lowest population. CA should have 68 reps as they have 68.5 times the population of Wyoming.
Honestly we should set it so Wyoming has like 5 reps and then use that as a baseline. Increase the total number of reps 10 times and make each district manageable for one person to campaign in.
This would negate the problems with the electoral college and make gerrymandering much harder to pull off.
That's with the same total number of representatives, or will Congress need to be upgraded?
Yeah, that would mean getting rid of the Reappointment Act of 1929 and implementing the proposed Wyoming Rule
I don't think the Senator limit is okay. For instance, the city of Houston has more population than North and South Dakota combined (4 senators) and gets zero senators (Houston is consistently Democrat and is "represented" by two Republicans that do nothing for them).
That's the point of the Senate: land gets equal votes
The house is for population, but we fucked it by capping the total number of reps you can have there
Land doesn't have rights. It's just gerrymandering by another name. The problem works both ways. The rural fuckheads in California are also unrepresented. Harris County (where Houston is located) is larger than Rhode Island. Where is their representation? Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas? Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio get no representation despite a huge amount of population. Rural Californians get no representation despite outnumbering the Dakotas and Wyoming.
Land doesn't have rights
I agree, but the point is to have a section of the government where the 50 disparate governments that make up our union have equal say. This tends to get simplified to "land gets 2 votes" because the other part of Congress is population based
Where is their representation
In the house, as I said already. Also, their 2 senators are part of their representation, they're still part of the state
Why do the Dakotas (4 senators for virtually no population) get more political power than California or Texas?
Because the house has a limit on members. The senate is literally equal by design
Your issue seems to be a lack of understanding of how our legislative branch works because your complaints are all root issues of the House of Representatives and not the senate
I agree with your House argument, but I strongly believe that the design of the Senate was a major fuck-up. Senators are far more powerful than representatives, and I get none. A single house member cannot torpedo legislation the way a Senator can. North Dakota (population 780k) gets two. The 4.7M people in Harris County get none. That is a poor design.
and I get none
Only if you're not an American or live in DC
(population 780k) gets two. The 4.7M people in Harris County get none. That is a poor design
Again the people in Harris county get 2 senators as their state senators represent them. And, again, senators do not represent based on population as that is the job of the house
Senators are far more powerful than representatives
Entirely irrelevant as they represent different things. Your representatives represent a portion of your population while your senators represent your state as a whole. The entire point of separating the state and population representation is to allow more perspectives when legislating: the house gives a perspective from closer to the people, the senate from a broader view
Again, it seems you fundamentally don't understand the split between house and Senate, why it exists and what it does to our governing system
It’s obvious why the Senate exists historically, and it’s also obvious that it’s inherently undemocratic.
Californians are welcome to try to split into multiple states if they would like more Senators.
Really? Please explain. Like, I get the DEI joke, but the fact all these little states are red isn't some law of the Universe. They have been blue and can be again.
Unless I'm missing some deeper joke? Apparently I am unless the down votes are just circlejerking.
EDIT: Maybe you all think the Senate should be determined by population? If so, that's what the House is for. Uncap it.
This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.
Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?
Urban areas tend towards D, rural tends toward R. Smaller population states have smaller, less populous urban areas, thus the discrepancy.
Why? My theory is that smaller communities can force out opposition, so they tend to have more uniform ideas (trends towards tradition) whereas larger communities have to compromise to make a healthy community, meaning more diversity of ideas and more empathy towards traditionally counter-culture groups.
The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.
The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.
You're not wrong (cherry picking a little though), and I get that there is more nuance and some exceptions to the generalization. But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States. Enough that one would be justified in at least wondering if there was a correlation.
But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States.
Only in the last forty years. These used to be staunchly Dixiecrat territories prior to the Southern Strategy.
But I might point you to a different map.
A huge part of the D/R switch under Nixon/Reagan came through Gulf Coast O&G tycoons. That's what gets us Wyoming and W. Virginia as bright red. It's why Pennsylvania - home of the Gettysburg address along with some of the fiercest abolitionist activists and civil rights organizations - into the purple category.
The degree to which the country has become a Petro-State has revolutionized politics domestically.
So long as that industry endures, the GOP-aligned land barons are going to have all the money they need for revanchist political projects.
because rural areas correlate with less educated populations, and people who have less education tend to vote Republican.
rural areas correlate with less educated populations
Huntsville, Alabama is one of the reddest corners of the reddest states in the country. It has the highest per capita populations of rocket scientists in the world.
Huntsville, Alabama is not rural. It's the most highly populated city in Alabama. I'm not claiming that there are not intelligent people who are full of hate that support Republican policies, nor am I claiming there are no cities which support Republicans. The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama.
Then why does it have a Republican mayor? Urban + Educated should equal Democrat, right?
The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.
I would argue that it isn't simply rural areas that trend Republican but mineral rich areas with exceptionally large wealth gaps that tend to have powerful GOP fundraising operations.
Your example describes about one percent of rural America. How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy? Where are these powerful GOP fundraising operations, because the party has been pretty notoriously hemorhaging campaign funds for awhile now.
While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S. In fact, they don't apply at all, because our economy is structured very differently to those countries.
How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy?
The Nevada service sector is the heart of the Democratic vote in that state, just as one data point. Similarly, if you go out to California or New York, you'll find far more service sector democrats than white collar professionals. And where do you think all those Mississippi Democrats are coming from if not the agricultural industry? Millions of African American and Latino ag workers turn out for the Ds every year.
While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S.
Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Texas - show me a mineral rich state and I'll show you a right-wing mega-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire or four) bankrolling the bulk of the conservative political scene.
The US is a hodgepodge of municipal and state authoritarian regimes and has been practically since its founding. With the exception of the Lincoln-era Abolitionist movement, it took us until the Great Depression to get a popular brand of politics meaningfully decoupled from some sponsored industry. Even then, its flaky and hesitant and prone to being co-opted.
But you're fooling yourself if you think we haven't brought our imperialist practices home to the core. Every dirty trick and bloody fist you've seen employed abroad has a parallel back home - often with an individual or organization that tried it first in one place before importing or exporting it to another.
Look up the definition of the word “outlier”
Is it an outlier or a counterfactual?
I could also point at the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation. No shortage of conservative intellectuals in these circle. Plenty of conservatives in business schools, law schools, and medical colleges. And as red states try to purge their academic institutions of "marxist" liberals, we're seeing a rising tide of conservatives as university faculty, staff, and senior administrators - virtually all with graduate level degrees.
On the flip side, the SEIU is full of liberal democrats despite their members rarely having more than a high school diploma. The service sector is flush with low-education liberal voters. The vocational trades are flush with liberal voters. As are agricultural workers, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.
This isn't a good litmus test for determining ideological bias.
Huntsville imported 1000+ Nazi scientists to work on rockets in the 50's. That may explain the outlier.
There's a lot of knowledge drain in republican states. People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state, for 1. Being closer to like minded people 2. Lots of jobs and opportunities exist purely in cities
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state
That's as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old "Blueberries in the Tomato Soup" effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.
Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue
Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.
If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That's one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.
Texas is gerrymandered to shit, and employs pretty nasty voter suppression tactics in populous (see: blue) counties by having very few polling stations per capita in those areas and making it a crime to give water/food to people waiting in line to vote. Big Texas cities are blue for the most part (maybe a few exceptions in the DFW area)
If you look at pretty much any of the cities within Texas on the latest map, you can see that they consolidate the core of the city into one or two solid blobs, then split the rest out to be diluted by rural areas. See Dallas/Tarrant County, Travis County, Bexar County, and Harris County for the most obvious cases of these.
https://redistricting.capitol.texas.gov/docs/88th_Senate_Tabloid_2024_05_20.pdf
On a population level, Texas is basically a blue state held hostage by a red state administration.
They also love socialism, as the vast majority take more from the Federal government than they pay in.