Oh my fucking GOD, they already do that shit. The more populated states would still railroad the fuck out of them and disallow those kinds of organizations if we ditched the Senate. It's not about giving them a privelidge, it's about making sure their basic rights to representation are as fairly secured as is possible. That is why we have the two house system Phillipe.
edited 19th Dec '11 10:56:07 PM by AceofSpades
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
> The more populated states would still railroad the fuck out of them and disallow those kinds of organizations if we ditched the Senate.
What ? only advocating abolishing the Senate, not Bill of Rights.
There are no way dissalowing rural voters going to happen. A lot of Americans have family and friend on rural states, even people who spend all his life on Urban area will not tolerate repression of rural voters.
edited 19th Dec '11 11:27:06 PM by PhilippeO
NOT THE BEES
Well that's the thing though. When outnumbered that badly, they basically would be silenced altogether on regionally sensitive issues. Even if not done through selfishness, a simple gulf of understanding between the two settings does a hell of a lot of damage.
It's like if you were put in a room with four other people that you knew were going to vote against you every time. Sure your vote is still counted, but fat lot of good it does.
edited 19th Dec '11 11:37:49 PM by Pykrete
You don't seem to have much of an idea about how politics works, Phillipe. Maybe rural voters don't get marginilized in your country, but they would here due to sheer numbers. The Bill of Rights don't have any teeth that the government and judiciary doesn't let them have. By reducing us to merely the House of Representatives, you reduce our politics to a numbers game. And most of our states would be shit out of luck. The votes won't be disallowed, but they simply won't matter.
Having a Senate makes it so that their votes do matter.
edited 19th Dec '11 11:33:54 PM by AceofSpades
> Well that's the thing though. When outnumbered that badly, they basically would be silenced altogether on regionally sensitive issues.
This is probably true, but only on very specific regional issues that urban area happen to care much. on many case local protest and indifferent urban voter will result in regional voters winning.
> It's like if you were put in a room with four other people that you knew were going to vote against you every time. Sure your vote is still counted, but fat lot of good it does.
This are not going to happen. Have Urban Areas always cooperate is difficult. SF, LA, NYC, Chicago, and Dallas all have different interest. people inside them also have different, Urban Area have people who born in rural areas; who have family in rural area. Urban Area is also divided, suburb often culturally far more connected with rural areas, Different cities also have different need, etc.
it will not one rural against four urban every time. depending on issues, the alliance will constantly change. And rural areas vote will still matter.
> The Bill of Rights don't have any teeth that the government and judiciary doesn't let them have. By reducing us to merely the House of Representatives, you reduce our politics to a numbers game.
I think this is highly unlikely. atheist didn't have senator, nor african americans, Bill of Rights still protect them. as long as American is still one nation, abandoning Bill of Rights is unlikely. You talk like America is like German and Greek or Beijing and Tibetans, American is highly mobile, large number of American live in several different place in their life, the idea that Californians and New Englanders will ignore oklahoman Bill of Rights is ridiculous.
No, no it is not. For one, we're talking electoral college here, which is where the votes of the states and their representatives matter. A New York politician does not have much of a reason to give a fuck about what's going on in Ohio. When the power is weighted so much in your favor, the New York Republican does not have to give a fuck about the Ohio Republican. Party loyalties break right the fuck down when you're working in the area that has the money and the people, and they don't have any way to balance things out to make things more fair to themselves.
And fuck all this mobility shit; people move to the prosperous areas because that's where the jobs and financial opportunities are. People don't move out to the boonies en masse and drastically change the number of House seats the states have every ten years. It's functionally irrelevant to this discussion.
edited 20th Dec '11 12:49:31 AM by AceofSpades
NOT THE BEES
You say that like you expect there to be maybe one or two minor ones that don't actually matter in the long run. There's a pretty decent number of areas of policy where the country can get screwed sideways by urban interests. Transportation comes to mind (subsidies for current biofuel fads in particular). Urban sprawl is another big one. Excessive food regulations tend to shut out smaller farms. Wage decisions are a tricky subject when there's such a huge discrepancy between costs of living and neither side understands what the other actually needs. And so on.
And also fuck mobility because moving out of an urban center is considerably more difficult than moving into one.
edited 20th Dec '11 12:40:08 AM by Pykrete
In the OP I said to keep this realistic. Abolishing a part of Congress is unrealistic, so don't chase a pipe dream like that.
This is a think tank, not a debate hall. This derail has gone on long enough.
Abolishing the Senate requires consent of all the states. Nothing short of a revolution would cause that. I don't mind having the Senate in itself, and anyway, there's no need to abolish it; all you need to do is to shift the powers of the institutions around, much like what they did in Britain.
I would advocate giving more powers to the House, except that our Senate's playing an important check right now, so I don't know about that at the moment. I would also reduce inefficient slowdowns by moving away a bit from the current system, in which both houses have to agree separately on just about everything.
President Obama needs to do what President Truman did, and call out against the obstructionist Congress, thereby shifting unfair blame away from him and exposing the shortcomings of the Congress.
Now using Trivialis handle.
He's doing that, just not very strongly. Which is probably a shame.
Anyway, aside from the obvious "get the money out of politics" that everyone wants these days, I'd argue for proportional representation of political parties in the house, as well as proportional population representation. You have to have like... five percent of the vote or something in places like Sweden? (It may be higher, I don't know) and that's what's required to achieve a set in the House. Senate remains a statewide election, but would end up representing more parties simply because of how the House changes. But I repeat my point about it probably having to be tested in state legislatures first. It's a lot easier for one state to change its governmental structure than a whole country, and after that we have a blueprint for how it can work. (I also like how Nebraska's seats are supposed to be non-partisan, though it probably doesn't work out that way in practice.)
Wow, you're right, he is doing just that.
Now using Trivialis handle.
Proportional representation is not realistic so long as the US elects Congress and the President by states. The President is elected by winning the most states, not individual votes. Each Senator represents a state, not a certain percentage of the population. Nothing can be done about this, without scrapping our entire political structure- a federation of states is what we are, we cant be anything else without starting entirely over. Within each state, the number of representatives we elect is often so small that the difference between the two systems isn't that great.
A constitutional amendment is needed to cap the amount of campaign contributions, and make public campaign financing a viable option. That would accomplish more than anything else we could do.
I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies
President: I don't know about doing it with popular vote, but at least get rid of electors. They're completely useless.
Senate: Leave it as is. It's statewide popular vote anyway, so no gerrymandering effect.
House: Actually, I would argue that the bipartisan hold would weaken if we did House elections proportionally. It would make more of a difference for large-population states. It wouldn't work for states that only get 1 at-large Representative. But that can be fixed by raising the minimum Representative count per state to at least 2, same as the Senator count. Of course, this would also require having House elections in a state at the same time so that we can actually implement a proportional effect.
Now using Trivialis handle.
I don't know if changing the timing of the elections would really help or hurt that. But, looking at the chart I linked on the previous page, each state currently has at least three House reps. I don't see the population shrinking much any time soon, so I'd still go for the proportional voting. If only to more clearly represent folks. And, like I said, this would have more of an effect on the state legislatures.
The downside is Texas would probably end up with more Libertarians in office, but stricter federal regulations on business and preventing business donations to political campaigns would probably balance that out a bit. And Vermont would probably end up with more of their Progressive Party in office.
Actually, each House has a minimum of one. That chart is for the electoral college; other two votes are Senate votes.
I've been corrected; the House has election every 2 years anyway. It's Senate that has rotation system.
edited 21st Dec '11 12:39:22 PM by abstractematics
Now using Trivialis handle.
Hm. Well, providing that this ever got passed anyway, it would affect which parties ended up in the Senate by default, wouldn't it? Most likely whichever parties were biggest, and some states would probably end up with something other than the Republicans and Democrats.
An article
in Salon.com that makes the case for a national popular vote.
Well, that's not Congress, though...
Now using Trivialis handle.
It can still be applied to it; the presidential voting cards I've used have never just had the presidential choices listed.
Samurai Troper
I like the idea of imposing term limits on Congress, but there's one slight problem with it and I don't think I have to elaborate what that is
Doesn't the House have two year terms? That always seemed... counterproductive to me. Such a short time in which to get anything done.
NOT THE BEES
I think he was referring to the fact that a corrupt institution of entrenched, continually-bribed legislators is not likely to pass an amendment to unentrench themselves.
The Republicans tried in the 1990's though. IIRC they even managed to get a simple majority for it, but not the 2/3 majority to amend it through.
edited 23rd Dec '11 12:46:43 PM by Pykrete
x3 Please do elaborate.
Thread Hop:
- Increase the number of Representatives in the House from 435 to 500.
- Institute term limits in the Senate. No more than two consecutive terms, followed by a six year break. After that point they can try running again.
- Cut wages across the board.
- Set up a independent non-partisan commission in every state to redraw district borders following every census. If it doesn't destroy gerrymandering, it will certainly impede it.
- Oh, if you want to be really nice, after doing this reform the electoral college so that every state functions like Nebraska or Maine. It destroys the 'Winner Takes All' aspect of the US Presidential Election and allows the possibility of third party candidates.
Putting term limits on the House would not work due to the sheer number of people involved and the brevity of their terms. I'm already iffy about term limits in general.
edited 23rd Dec '11 2:16:23 PM by Pentadragon
> But they do get the shaft. New England and California have such an enormous chunk of the population that they could for all practical purposes drown out rural voters and dictate national policy in everything.
Probably True, although i think it is unlikely. but other groups also have the same problem. African-American is minority and their interest is often drown out by other voters even sometimes in Democratic primary. Non-Christian interest is also drown-out by much larger majority.
Rural Voters should not get special kind of privilege for their own interest. They should use other means available to minority to persuade majority to help them. They could engage environmentalist groups to prevent toxic dumping; They could engage protectionist voters for farm subsidy for American Food Security; etc.