Tonight on GeekNights, Rym begins a series of short episodes where he talks about something that's stuck in his craw. Join us in the forum thread to prove him wrong or ask questions. Whatever threads get the most engagement will lead to "part two" episodes of those topics going deeper.
This is why you can't let Scott go out of town. Mods asleep, post about structural concerns of government!
When I first read the subject line my first thought was that the idea would be to separate the news industries from corporate media.
Alas it’s about increasing the complication of our government structure, trying to get more small d democratic participation into our government. It’s laudable, and something that I think can be done otherwise. There are several studies that show that the things that our government is concerned with has been diverging with what our government is concerned with, so the instinct is a good one.
I honestly think that corporate capture of the government is the larger issue of why/how our current government doesn’t represent the overwhelming opinions of the populous. IIRC those studies do show that corporate interests are attended to, while regular people’s are ignored.
Look to the legislation that is actually really pushed, most seem like they are custom crafted for the corporations.
I too am frustrated by the division of representation in the House. I don’t recall the numbers, but the ballpark is that if we were to maintain the ratio of Represented to Representatives that we had at the start of the republic we’d need a few thousand members of the house. The scale there then raises the question of how the hell do you organize/run such a large body of people. I’m sure it can be done, but debate wouldn’t look the same as it does now. I do think that adjusting this ratio would be a good first step to fixing representation of the common man in the US government.
I do agree that regular people’s interests are not represented currently and that should be fixed. But leaving congress alone and adding on some system to try to balance it out seems a bit hacky to me.
We did change the way that Senators were elected to help mitigate the corruptive effects of having The States put them into power by moving them from whatever weird systems they were using, appointed by Governors and State Legislatures, to being elected by The People of said states.
I bring this up because so long as the House, “The People’s House”, is elected we can expose ourselves to professional politicians and those who are captured by corporate interests. The increased number of representatives would help dilute their influence, but because the reps would be on a smaller scale it would, more than likely, cost less to … let’s be generous and say influence … the representative.
To combat that I think we should more most, if not all, of The House to being chosen by Sortition. If the House is supposed to represent The Will of The People then it makes sense that we should, like Juries, grab a random assortment of Americans, put them through voir dire to make sure we don’t get anyone who is obviously unable to handle two years of being a legislator, and give them the salary that’s being given out now.
There would be such a huge number of representatives, and with a new roster every two years, it would be almost impossible for any corporation to “invest” in any given politician. Granted this means the influence would probably shift more to The Senate as a counter balance. But I feel over all I feel that this would be a more elegant modification to the current system.
There is a very easy solution for this, but people from low population areas would be quite upset about it. The solution is that you have a reasonable number of representatives, so they can have a reasonable debate. But then, not all the representatives have an equal vote. When the representative from Wyoming votes, it doesn’t count for much. Their vote is nearly meaningless. Maybe it could be a tiebreaker on a rare occasion. When the representative from New York votes, it counts a lot. Not all representatives would have equal power. Some would be extremely powerful.
This idea is also very compatible with proportional representation and the elimination of gerrymandering.
Let’s go back to little old Wyoming. A very red state indeed. But in the 2020 election 30% of them still went for Biden. The population of Wyoming is about 500k. So imagine a world where Wyoming has two representatives, which would probably be the minimum for any state. One representative is a Democrat with a single vote representing 150k people. I doubt anyone will represent fewer people than that. The Republican representative from Wyoming will get two votes representing about 350k people.
Now let’s look at NY state. It went 60/40 for Biden in 2020. The population is nearly 20 million, so that’s about 40 Wyomings worth. That gives the representatives from NY state, however many there are, a combined total of 133 votes. 53ish of those votes will be given to Republican representatives and 80ish of those votes will be divided amongst Democratic representatives. Some of those Democratic representatives will be very powerful indeed.
Lastly, let’s look at Louisiana. There are currently 6 representatives from that state. One is Democrat. The rest are Republican. But in 2020 the state went 60/40 for Trump. If not for Gerrymandering it would be split 4/2, but it’s split 5/1 under the current system. The population of Louisiana is about 5 million. That would give the state a total of around 33 votes. 20 for the Republicans and 13ish for the Democratic reps.
As much as this system gives greater representation of red voters in blue states, it does the opposite in red. It makes sure no voters are disenfranchised. No matter what district someone is in, even if it doesn’t get them an extra representative, their vote will make their chosen representative more powerful. Your vote could give your rep one more vote in the house, even though it’s the same person it’s always been.
The downside of this system is that the powerful representatives will be too powerful, and big targets for corruption. Lobbyists will have a bullseye to aim for. Those powerful people will get heaps of money on them.
But if we’re talking about a world where we can even get this system implemented, it’s also a world where we can get money out of politics. Also, term limits so nobody can hold such vast power for very long.
I’m not totally opposed to the idea of a variable amount of votes for the state, but your thoughts on how to divvy them up ignore the potential for 3rd parties, and differences between individual representatives. I know that now the parties tend to behave more like solid voting blocks but that hasn’t and won’t remain the case.
It’d be much simpler to just say that reps from NY count for 40x of Wyoming’s, no?
I was just basing my rough numbers on 2020 election results which did not have significant third party votes. If the system was in place, third parties could absolutely emerge much more easily. They won’t need to try to win an entire district. They would just try to get 150k votes total across an entire state, and that would get them one rep in the house with a single vote. I could see that happening quite easily in a state like California.
Simply saying that reps from NY count for 40x of Wyoming is too simple of an explanation. Does that mean we keep the house as-is, and every rep from the same state has equal power to others from the same state? That’s terrible. You have to apportion the votes so that some reps from the same state are stronger than others. Otherwise, you have to go back to having district lines and gerrymandering.
There’s nothing fundamental about any individual State, they’re just district lines by another name.
Is there nothing fundamental about Germany and France in the EU? Are they now district lines by another name? Sure, US states are not as culturally distinct as European countries, but they are still quite different. I’m in Oregon right now, and I can tell you, this sure isn’t New York.
If state lines are just districts, then redistricting should be no problem. Redistricting within states is mostly ignored. Nobody loses sleep if their house district changes. If you tried to give part of NY to NJ, or vice versa, it would be an absolute outrage. Few people would stand to have their state changed. Just as you would expect from a German to suddenly wake up and find their home is now in France.
Other than those lines have been drawn for a long time? Not really.
Would you say there’s something fundamental with the borders of Queens? Brooklyn? Are the interests of the people in Kansas City Missouri that different from the ones in Kansas City Kansas?
The reason why people would be upset if NYS tried to claim, say an Island between NYS and NJ, is because those lines are old. We don’t blink at, nor care about, the changing of house districts because they change every 10 years.
I don’t know enough about Kansas City, but the people of Brooklyn are quite distinct from the people of Queens. Even within the boroughs, each neighborhood is significantly different in terms of culture and attitude. That’s why you have districts at all. You want to outline a group of people with a shared interest, and have an actual person from that group represent the group.
Imagine you were assembling a group to select best novel of the year. You could have representatives from various categories. There could be representatives supporting each genre. Authors, publishers, readers, critics, academics, and other groups could all be represented. Those are all districts, just non-geographical.
But people tend to live in areas with people who are like themselves. There’s a reason that Astoria, where I live, is represented at almost all levels of government by socialists. That’s the kind of people that live in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, Flushing that has a majority Chinese and Asian population has very different representatives, even in the same borough.
What I’m suggesting is you make the districts that group people together appropriately while ignoring the quantity of people. Each district gets a single representative. But then the power of that representative becomes proportional to the number of people they represent. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
I feel like that word “appropriately” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
I still don’t feel like there is anything special, fundamental, about a specific state’s borders, beyond historical happenstance. On a small enough scale I feel like you could make a way better argument that there is something more fundamental to the grouping.
Still, someone will need to make an arbitrary decision as to where those borders are. Historical like States/Counties, or population based and redrawn every 10 years, or to “group people together appropriately”, or even just by “party affiliation”.
We are a bit far afield of the original points though, apologies.
It’s not about party affiliation. It’s about enabling people of common interest to be represented.
There are lots of special interests within a population. People who share a particular cultural heritage. People who share a profession. People who have children, and people who do not. People with various levels of immigration. People of various ages.
Even within a party, you need to have people to represent those interests. A state like Michigan is going to have a lot of people whose lies are severely impacted by The Great Lakes, and those people should have someone representing their interests. A representative from Nebrasks, even from the same party will not represent those people. The socialists representing me in Astoria do not represent the Chinese immigrants in LIC, even though they are our neighbors and also elect Democrats.
You want to group people by their shared interests, and give each group a representative. Then give each representative an amount of power relative to the size of the population they represent.
The existing states are not perfect groupings, but they’re not awful either. Even in adjoining states, the interest of peoples are significantly different. The people of Utah and the people of Colorado are distinct peoples who deserve to have their own separate representatives.
Good. Third parties don’t make sense in a nation even remotely resembling the US. Our existing parties are already coalitions, and they’re aligned along the basic fault lines of our society.
The Democrats are a collection of all the various “third parties” that are willing to form a power-seeking coalition. Every other non-aligned third party is either a scam, a bad-faith spoiler, or a group that is unwilling and unable to effectively form a coalition.
To be honest, even in countries with more realistic 3rd party options, that’s often the case. For example, in Australia, I’m a regular greens voter, but in reality, I’m just voting for Labor 99% of the time, because the greens don’t get enough votes to win, and they almost always kick all their preferences to Labor.
You still get coalitions forming, you still get a defacto two-party system, those third parties - well, some of them, there’s also a lot of kook parties with zero power or influence still - just have marginally more leverage, because they might be able to swing a couple votes, or a couple seats, sometimes.
At least that Green party is an actual Green party. Ours is literally fake and funded by Russia.
Oh, I’m aware. Thankfully, they’ve nothing to do with each other - and, while not without their controversies and fuck-ups, do actually believe what they say, rather than whatever they’re told to.