. I also think that attempting to get anything done in the house with 1,000 members may also be unproductive however

Kind of the opposite.

The less people, the more power each one has.

So if you need a couple votes you add some things people personally want that are completely unrelated to get them on board.

With twice the people, that becomes twice as hard. So the strategy would have to pivot to actual bipartisan legislation and not just cramming bribes and personal enrichments in there till it passes.

The thing about our political system, it's been held together with duct tape so long, there's nothing left but duct tape. We can keep slapping more on there and hoping for the best, at some point we're gonna have to replace it with a system that actually works.

We might have been one of the first democracies, but lots of other countries took what we did and improved on it. It makes no logical sense to insist we stick with a bad system because we have a bad system.

1,000 members? The original plan was for 1 house member for every 30,000 people, eventually changing to 1 in 50,000:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...

Doing that now, on a population of 330,000,000 would give us between 6,600 and 11,000 congress critters.

China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.

Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People's Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.

The Wyoming Rule would only increase the size of the house to 574, still a totally manageable number.

You're correct that the senate was designed not to represent people and give the number of states more power. To say that isn't an issue though is pretty fucked up. It was literally done this way to get slave states to sign on, giving them power to protect the institution of slavery.

States are made up. People are not. Only one of these should have power in a democracy. States can have their own laws that effect themselves, but federal policy should be dictated by the will of the people, not the will of arbitrarily drawn borders.

uncap the house... make congressperson a remote job, keep them in their districts.

I can't say that's my ideal solution (as it doesn't involve completely rewriting our constitution), but that's honestly the best solution we have to most of our problems. Completely uncap, remote congress, 1 per 30k. At that point, we'd be pretty close to a real democracy. There's no reason why it couldn't be a remote job. Stay in your fucking district where we can yell at you when you fuck up. In fact, there should be a law about how many days per year they can be out of their district. Live with, work with, know the people you represent. And with that many congressional reps, it'd be hard as hell to bribe enough of them.

...

While I'm sure that has done a lot of good.

Unfortunately we're talking about representative democracy, and that's probably the opposite.

By no means am I an expert on Nebraska, but lm pretty sure the majority are conservative and voted for that awful shit.

But setting up a system of government that isn't really a democracy because you think voters are too stupid (in Nebraska you may be right) to vote in their own self interest is literally what got us to where we are nationally today. And what people are brainstorming about how to fix.

Appreciate the extra details and the link!

Recipe for outright disaster as duplication of shit gets way out of control. We have too much already.

I'll add, it's incredibly dumb that the house is capped at 435 seats. There just is no way 435 people can represent the entirety of the nations population. Given advances in communication technology, there's also no reason to keep it there. They really should be increasing the size of the house dramatically and no longer have a cap. The size of the house should grow, or shrink, with the size of the population.

No you don't, because the House still favors small rural states after we froze the number.

If the House was proportional there'd be like 150 more representatives.

You take the population the smallest state because everyone gets at least 1, Wyoming at 580k, divide by population, 335 million.

And you get 578 Representatives.

Currently we have 435.

Leading to someone in Wyoming having like 9 times the House representation compared to a person in Cali if I'm remembering that right.

19 years, in a letter from Jefferson to Madison.

To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 6 September 1789

He thought that firstly no document or law could be forever relevant, so it needed revisioning occasionally, and the 19 years seems to tie into the idea of each generation taking a new look and either accepting existing laws as still good or making changes.

The French Revolution created an easier method for reforming The Republic and rewriting their constitution.

They enshrined the revolutionary aspects of revolution instead of its leaders.

That said the Federalists got part of the idea from ancient Lycia on having proportional representation and then added in keeping it in check by another chamber with equal footing.

https://www.bbc.com/...

It is a good idea. But we need more Congresspersons to lower the people each congressperson represents. It was ~95,000 in 1940 ... in 2020 it is closer to 750,000 per congresscritter.

That's easy to say centuries in the future where so much has changed. What would you have suggested given their experience and history to that point? Be careful, because what seems like a morally just and simple proposal would have been accepted a lot differently then. The "bad" motives were to find a common ground for very different colony populations, and it had to start somewhere. And they tried something that hadn't ever been tried, so don't condemn them too quickly.

Honestly of all the states, California probably has the best chance at seceding successfully.

Dare I say... defederate? *smugface*

I disagree with the economy part. Fuck that. Your value isn't described by how much wealth you generate.

Republicans are (or were) hypocritical with their talk of fiscal responsibility while representing states that take in more money than they give back. This should be pointed out if they ever return to that argument. This isn't to say poor people from republican states (or anywhere else) are less valuable though. It's only hypocrisy that's wrong, not trying to help lower income people that's wrong.

shouldn't the states that have a huge economy and bring in more tax dollars have more of a say

Wtf, dude? Can you make something even more american-sounding?

CA would need 68 representatives just to have the same representation as Wyoming.

Every state is guaranteed one representative, and then otherwise by population. Wyoming has one representative.

Yet, the local representatives in the pairlaments (Bundestag, Landtag) represent districts of approximately the same population number. Thus, in our first chamber, no vote has more value than another.

But in the Bundesrat, which comes closest to the US senate, states with higher population number do have more representatives than small states, which weakens the inequality of votes, yet still one vote from Bremen (population 700k, 3 representatives) has 13 times as much value as one from NRW (p. 18 mio, 6 rep.).

The German system is what the US would have been if they would have regularly updated their constitution.

We don't know but it was guaranteed to be different.

Ranked voting is a very good thing all countries should implement.

I end up having this conversation often because I believe the Congress Apportionment Act is where we really went off the rails. With our technology, I believe we could handle 1600 representatives and they wouldn't need to be full-time careers. Would congress ever agree to repeal the act?

West Virginia checking in

Move to the parts where it isn't (Austin, Houston).

Also Cali would turn red quickly. I don't think our voter numbers show the true story. There are a lot of MAGA crazies in CA. I just doubt they bother voting atm because they know it's pointless.

California can take 2 for the team.

So a win win.

They want to pass a law that says you have to get the majority of the majority of counties and they have 256 mostly small rural counties some with less than 100 people in them.

I did the math and you could hold the majority of the majority with as little as 4% of the vote.

If you try to be cute and take over a bunch of small counties the law could just be further amended or you know they could just not find your bodies.

I'm staying in blueland

I know you're kidding but that's not allowed per Article IV section 3

Not sure why Hawaii is included in this meme. Hawaii has only had 1 Republican senator since it became a state in 1959.

Alaska and Hawaii what?

From context I assume you mean they have a different number of senators? One? None?

so you dont beleive in democracy, sounds like.

From one perspective, per capita is fair, but from another perspective it isn't. The Constitution actually did a reasonable job of trying to address both cases, it just didn't adequately account for such a huge swing in population and technology. One could argue that that is a failing of the people that came afterwards, since the Constitution also provided mechanisms for modification.

For an example of where it is not fair, consider an agreement between three groups and we all agree to vote on decisions that affect all three of us, say 'how things are taxed' or how often elections are held. Each group gets a vote, and 2 out of 3 wins. If that's the agreement we entered into, my group would expect to get a vote now or a hundred years in the future even if your group grows it shrinks, it's an agreement at the group level. Especially if we made considerations for a different type of vote that does take group membership size into account. It would be pretty shitty for your group to get big and insist that it should make all the decisions for me.

The meme assumes this was somehow not be design. The entire function of the Senate is to counterbalance that in the same meme, California has more representatives in Congress overall + more electors.

Yes because it completely ignores the House of Representatives. It’s an ignorant post made by an idiot and defended by idiots

The senate and the house are intentionally different and serve different purposes