If all states have the same voting rights (the Senate), that means rural Nebraska is just as important as New York City. This is obviously incorrect, because the two are in no way equal.
HOWEVER, if all states have proportional voting rights (the House), that means that the concerns of New York would completely dominate Nebraska. If New Yorkers tried to impose a law that makes no sense on Nebraska, the Nebraskans would be unable to resist.
The bicameral system acknowledges that both of these ideas are flawed. That is why the Senate and the House must both agree on a law. The House ensures that the more populous states have some degree of power commensurate to their size, while the Senate ensures that the little guys still have the opportunity to be heard.
Then you must have been living under a rock. The first example that comes to my mind is the issue of illegal immigration. Why should a populous city like San Francisco or Los Angeles be able to dictate federal immigration laws that apply to somewhere like Arizona? If you are an Arizona farmer living on the border, illegal human trafficking is a very real danger that a person in San Francisco doesn’t have to live with. On the other hand, letting someone like Sherrif Joe dictate the entire nation’s response to immigration is an equally terrible idea, so they have to find some way to balance these concerns.
Look, I hear you and I disagree. The point of this thread isn’t to convince anyone that the back-of-a-napkin government I came up with is the absolute best one. The point is to figure out how one would go about getting any sweeping changes, of which I gave hypothetical examples, into the constitution. So far the only actual response here is simply, “You can’t, for the reasons you’ve already identified,” but fuck me if that isn’t unsatisfying. Ya know?
Yeah, I get that you want us to just accept that your ideas would be an improvement over the existing system, and talk about how/whether they could be implemented…
But, sorry, most of us don’t think your ideas are worth implementing.
Well, pity parties don’t encourage it. But if you must know how to implement radical systematic change, you need to build and launch a series of orbital mind-control lasers and take mental command of about 1000 Americans, all of whom are members of Congress or various state legislatures, and get them to vote on the appropriate constitutional amendments.
Don’t know about all that. You cannot just ignore the fact that states existed before the nation and have their own sovereignty. Why would the states voluntarily give up even more sovereignty by holding a constitutional convention and getting rid of the senate?
Proportional representation along party lines is also a very bad idea.
This. The system was deliberately engineered to prevent what is known as the “tyranny of the majority”. As noted the last thing we want is something that makes it easier to get stuff done.