It’s a government by rich owners for rich owners and it’s working as designed
I mean, that’s most governments
Blame Connecticut. It’s their fault. It would up benefiting the South, but it was Delaware and CT mad about larger states having more a say.
The South actually wanted proportional representation. They were growing faster and had more land.
The Kentucky fried chicken chef guy is absolutely SLAYING those short shorts and boots 🔥🤩
Edit: apparently I already made this joke and forgot about it lmao
It would be somewhat OK if the House was much more powerful relative to the Senate, similar to how the (unelected) Canadian Senate rarely if ever opposes the will of the House.
I don’t even care so much about the Bicameral Compromise; but I do care that the electoral votes apply toward electing the President.
The reapportionment act of 1929 is screwing us over in the electoral college. The House should have a LOT more representatives, which would make the it more fair.
But more representatives would make it more difficult for big businesses to bribe them, and nobody is going to vote to dilute their personal power, so changing that is a nonstarter.
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One person, one vote.
But look at the US popular vote. Even with different representation of the populace, this election would still have been fucked. We do need massive reform of the US voting structure, but this is not the biggest thing. Getting rid of first past the post in favor of at least ranked choice would make a much bigger difference.
That would open the door for a true left wing party to actually have a voice.
Ranked voting is a very good thing all countries should implement.
But then the poor would run the country instead of a handful of unimaginably rich individuals! What kind of democracy would THAT be?
We don’t know but it was guaranteed to be different.
In Germany we have two votes, one for a local representative and one for a party. In itself it’s a pretty decent system
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.).
I’m not really happy with our democracy. It always feels like our say stops at the ballot box, we need more direct democracy.
Eight years ago I would have agreed. But, I think we’ve demonstrated the short comings of putting authority for our most important policies in the hands of your average citizen.
I don’t have a better answer, mind you. Hopefully someone way further right on the “average citizen” bell curve has better ideas.
If we required an IQ test and general knowledge test equally of all parties and eliminated all those who don’t know anything about what’s going on and those 10% or more below average we would have a better run country save for the Republicans revolting and committing acts of terrorism.
If we divided the country all the rurals would have the option of moving to Trumpistan
Where did we put authority for our most important policies in the hands of average citizens?
The German system is what the US would have been if they would have regularly updated their constitution.
It was largely modelled after the US, with bugfixes applied. It definitely has issues but isn’t remotely as fucked as a partisan 2-party system.
One bugfix, if you want so, is that in Germany, on federal level, we only have one chamber of pairlament, the Bundestag, that is directly elected by the people. The other chamber of pairlament, the Bundesrat, is a pairlament constituted of representatives of the governments of the federal states, i.e. a pairlament of the executive.
We have the technology to implement some direct democracy and get away from all this “represntitive democracy” that doesnt work so well. Let people vote on the actual issues and we’ll get progressive policies pretty quickly, we wont get into wars, we’ll spend much less on defense, and the corporatists wont be able to buy influence as easily.
i honestly don’t believe that any of this would be true. Unless you went the libertarian route and pretend that the people know better than the government at all levels. Maybe i’m just cynical. But there’s a federal government for a reason so.
so you dont beleive in democracy, sounds like.
Don’t forget, those senators translate to electoral college votes.
Them plus the house reps, which are artificially capped at a low number, again benefitting the low population states
Diddnt they cap the amount of house of representatives?
They came up with the best thing they could agree on at the time. They did not intend on it to become sacred, untouchable, and without the ability to change with the times, and sometimes we have changed it. Just not quite enough times.
It may be one of those myths, but I remember that one of the founders initially were proposing the constitution to be rewritten every 10 years.
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/travel/article/20230906-the-ancient-civilisation-that-inspired-us-democracy
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.
They came up with the best thing they could
Bad people with bad motives create bad systems of control.
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.
I may be misremembering, but I believe the way things were originally designed was that the Senate was supposed to represent the states, not the people. The house represented the people. That’s why the Senate has equal representation (because the states were meant to have equal say), and the house proportionate to population.
That is correct. The state legislatures generally (if not always) picked the senators, but due to huge state corruption, it was almost always political qui pro quo, and some states even going full terms without selecting sla sentaor. This led to the 17th amendment (which you’ll here rednecks and/or white supremacists asposing, because states’ rights.)
Edit to add: Wikipedia knows it better than I do.
Appreciate the extra details and the link!
This is correct, and this part of the system works fine. What should have happened though is a population break point where a state has to break up if they exceed a certain population. CA should be at least 3 states. New York needs a split as well, probably a few others. There is no way a state can serve its population well when the population is measured in the tens of millions.
Recipe for outright disaster as duplication of shit gets way out of control. We have too much already.
I agree in theory, but big cities are where things get muddy.
When a single city (e.g. New York City, population ~8 million just to use the biggest example) has a population larger than entire states, how do you “split” the state of New York? If the city itself, excluding any of the surrounding “metro area”, was its own state, it would be the 13th most populous in the US and also the smallest by area.
Do we carve up each of the boroughs as a separate state, and give New York City 10 senators? It would be more proportional representation for the people of NYC, but also their close proximity and interdependence would very much align their priorities and make them a formidable voting bloc. And even then, you could still fit 4 Vermonts worth of people into Brooklyn alone. How much would we need to cut to make it equitable? Or do we work the other way as well and tell Vermont it no longer gets to be its own state because there aren’t enough people?
For states like California, which still have large cities but not quite to the extreme of New York, how do we divide things fairly? Do we take a ruler and cut it into neat thirds, trying to leave some cities as the nucleus of each new state? Or do we end up with the state of California (area mostly unchanged), the state of Los Angeles, and the state of The Bay Area?
Are we bringing back city-states? We already have city-counties.
I like city-states, they’re my favorite part of fantasy novels.
Should have stuck with the monarchy they had.
Brave of the Bri’ish to remind America they exist as we’re on the cusp of our own outright Empire phase.
It’s not poor countries that speak a different language that empires like to annex first.
yeah…
It’s the senate.
You forgot to look at the house lmao.
It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well
Representative democracy is unstable and corruptible by design and it can’t be anything else.
