Fixing Congress

[That_Don_Guy]

@TheSeaOtter

Proportional representation doesn’t get rid of local representatives, it just adds additional seats so that the parties have the correct number of representatives, matching their support among the population.

Actually, pretty much every PR proposal I have seen for the House of Representatives so far (except for things like Single Transferrable Vote, but that’s not exactly PR) does get rid of “local” representatives; the idea is that each party is told, “You get X number of Representatives in California,” and let the national and/or state party decide just who gets the seats without regard to where they live. Got a local fracking problem in NW California? Try finding a Representative willing to take a local interest in it.

Then again, you would probably get a district that’s 200 miles long and 50 feet wide running from Eureka to Napa.

[Do_Not_Taunt]

So the OP has a complaint about the Senate, and this thread turns into a rant about how to solve gerrymandered districts in the House of Representatives? Am I the only one a bit confused?

[wdodd]

@BrainGlutton

A better approach would be to take the redistricting power away from the state legislature and give it to a nonpartisan commission.

First, I agree with you both: partisan gerrymandering undermines the representative nature of the U.S. House and many state legislatures, though this no longer affects the U.S. Senate. (The 17th Amendment ended the practice of electing senators by state legislatures, opting instead for popular voting by state constituents.)

I think that much of our disagreement stems from the title of this thread, which I could have done a better job of naming. To wit, something like “How Do We Improve the Senate” as opposed to “Fixing Congress” would have avoided unnecessary disagreement and started us all on the same page.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

I found this on C-SPAN’s audience. The time frame is September 2013:

Rentrak’s nationwide audience projections are based on anonymous data from set-top boxes in about 12 million homes served by companies like DirecTV, Dish Network and Charter. A 1.0 rating is approximately 1.15 million households, and C-Span’s average daily rating in September was 0.017, meaning 19,550 households were watching at any given time. C-Span2’s average was 0.012, or 13,000 households. Those averages are undeniably low. But Bruce Goerlich, Rentrak’s chief research officer, observed that the ratings “popped up” toward the end of the month as a government shutdown loomed. 

And since C-Span is a utility of sorts, its real relevance is measured in its cumulative ratings: the number of households that watch at one time or another. In September, nearly 9 million households tuned in to C-Span at least once, according to Rentrak’s projections, and about 5.3 million households tuned into C-Span2.

The OP’s figure seems to come from this Hart Research survey. Running those numbers, approximately 10% of adults have seen any Congressional representative at any time. The percentage watching actual Senate floor debate is necessarily far less.

Whatever the numbers, the overwhelming percentage of a Senator’s time in Washington is spent in staff and committee meetings, not in speaking on the Senate floor. Speeches there tend to be purely rhetorical, to be sure, but so are almost every speech a politician makes, and so they have always been. Unlike the OP, I was an adult in 1986 and in my view nothing whatsoever changed when cameras were allowed in.

Of the myriad of things wrong with political discourse today, cameras on the Senate floor broadcasting through C-SPAN have to rank in the low 9,000s. The distance between parties is a matter of the loss of moderates generally, across all offices of all levels. That cannot be explained away with cameras.

[octopus]

@yellowjacketcoder

Better than either would be to go proportional representation, IMHO.

Parties have no right to be represented.

[eschereal]

@octopus

Parties have no right to be represented.

Parties are people, my friend.

At present, political parties, dominated by the two big ones who basically run the show, look a lot like the embodiment of the problem. The voters are squeezed into a choice between R or D or, almost all of the time, wasting their vote. Or we get something like the recent election in Alberta, in which the PCs and Wildrose split the right, giving the election to the leftish New Democrats.

But parties do serve a purpose and can accomplish net positives. As long as they are not the be-all-end-all of the entire process. Some voices might need to be heard yet might not without a party to give them a boost. They just need to be reined in, kept from reaching the level of gaining a stranglehold on the system.

[octopus]

@eschereal

Parties are people, my friend.

At present, political parties, dominated by the two big ones who basically run the show, look a lot like the embodiment of the problem. The voters are squeezed into a choice between R or D or, almost all of the time, wasting their vote. Or we get something like the recent election in Alberta, in which the PCs and Wildrose split the right, giving the election to the leftish New Democrats.

But parties do serve a purpose and can accomplish net positives. As long as they are not the be-all-end-all of the entire process. Some voices might need to be heard yet might not without a party to give them a boost. They just need to be reined in, kept from reaching the level of gaining a stranglehold on the system.

People form parties. People get elected. It would be even a more corrupt mess if parties were entitled proportional representation.

[tomndebb]

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[ /Moderating ]