All good except ranked choice.
Anything requiring this ratio is impossible in the US of today.
The laws that empower profit-seeking organizations also empower nonprofit organizations.
ACLU
NAACP
AFL-CIO
The Democratic National Committee
are all legal persons that have the same rights as any corporation, and need those rights in order to function.
In the 2020 presidential primaries, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both had campaign organizations that operated as legal persons.
Are you sure you want to disempower them all?
I’d be more inclined to combine Wyoming and Idaho, if only to get rid of the Zone of Death.
Nevermind
I don’t explicitly rule out autonomous states, that’s just an option to consider.
You are assuming incorrectly. I am an American and know the basis of American history. My point is that the current structure and organization of the country is an artifact of many numerous events that do not necessarily reflect the needs of modern 21st Century America. I wish to propose that none of these specific results is off limits for consideration if it leads to a modern America that functions better.
For this thread, we are not limited to the system Americans know best. A parliamentary system is a viable answer, but it has to be justified against why the changes work better.
If you can devise something completely new, I’m open to that, too. Obviously that’s harder.
So? This thread is about what we would like to work, especially after we fix the country.
Obviously that is a target for fixing in some manner. That’s a small deal when rebuilding the government as a whole.
I think there’s a balance between saying a corporation or entity can function as an individual for the purposes of contracts and financial obligations, and them being persons with full rights. I mean, you can’t throw a corporation in jail, so obviously there is a distinction.
I think everyone opposed to Citizen’s United would be happy with the limits equally applied to the DNC or Dem PACs.
Related (2022):
~Max
Do they?
Corporations existed in the USA long before court decisions decided they were persons. Corporate law therefore can be designed to allow them to function without requiring them to be persons.
The Dakotas were split to give Republicans an extra two seats in the Senate.
~Max
To be fair, that was in 1889, less than 25 years after Lincoln was in the White House. You know, when the Republican party was the sane one.
There is a long history of corporate personhood-
Corporate personhood - Wikipedia.
Also, being a “person” takes away protections- This federal statute has many consequences. For example, a corporation may enter contracts,[19] sue and be sued,[20] and be held liable under both civil and criminal law.
And there was no issues since at least 1886, until Citizens United.
I dont think people have any real issues with Corporate personhood, it is that last decision that people hate.
Call them what you will, configure them as you will, let them be as innocuous as you will. My main point in the first part of my post is that I believe there still needs to be a way for the interests of the under-populated regions of the country to be represented, along with the interests of the most populous areas, in law-making.
If there are regions, that implies there is at least some regional administration responsible for taking care of local business. And, if we are talking about some form of democracy, citizens anywhere can vote, and we can expect everyone to complain their interests are not being adequately represented, but things are still too vague to say whether or not they will have a legitimate beef.
Absolutely! One of the concerns expressed at Philadelphia in the Convention was whether it was possible to govern a country the size of the US (the 13 colonies, which were huge compared to many countries in Europe at the time), by a democratic/republican government. There was a widespread view amongst some contemporary political thinkers that only a monarchy or oligarchy could govern a country that size.
The US federal model proved that those thinkers were wrong; federalism combined with republicanism could work.
That is the subsidiarity principle, which underlies most federations, although with some tweaks:
Sorry, that was meant as a joke. But it demonstrates my point. The political motivations for making 2 states had nothing to do with geography or any real limit on size.
If size is an issue, explain Texas, or California, or Alaska. I’m saying states could be repartitioned and resized to fit modem needs or a more sensible division. Two sparsely populated adjacent states with similar populations and geography could be one state. Texas could be partitioned into two or more states. Is there really a connection between El Paso and Houston? Is there a reason the panhandle couldn’t be broken off and given to Oklahoma?
Irishman wrote: If size is an issue, explain Texas, or California, or Alaska. […] Is there really a connection between El Paso and Houston?
The answer, for Texas and California, is the legacy of slavery
Texas was an independent nation encompassing El Paso and Houston when it joined the United States. Neither city played a part in the Texan Revolution (El Paso being ceded by general Santa Anna but otherwise playing no part in the war; and Houston being founded after the war). But Texan-Americans aggressively settled El Paso to get in on the Santa Fe trade, and Houston was named the temporary capital of the new nation. Texas claimed much larger borders, encompassing like half of the great plains, and they waged war against the Native Americans who actually lived there. It was Texas’s size and integrity, and the will of Texan-Americans, which largely drove United States to initiate the Mexican-American war.
Texas was admitted as a state in 1845 after Sam Houston threatened to join the UK (and thus ban slavery, a bluff). Following the conclusion of the Mexican-American war in 1848, Mexico ceded lands extending from Texas to Colorado to the Pacific. However, the reason El Paso was given to Texas and not New Mexico was because of the compromise of 1850, which among other things trimmed Texas’s northwest borders set California’s size.
Regarding California, the population had exploded between 1848 and 1850 due to the gold rush (hence, the '49ers). Because it was not an organized territory the people had no representatives in government. So the people of California self-organized and its 1849 constitutional convention outlawed slavery. They applied for statehood. The big issue at the time was slavery and many in Congress wanted to split California in two, as per the Missouri Compromise, with Southern California being a slave state. Having two new free states was out of the question. Against this background, the compromise of 1850 balanced free California with slave Texas, both with very large populations at the time and roughly their present borders, and organized the Utah and New Mexico territories without resolving the free/slave question there.
~Max
But this specific thread is supposed to ignore all that.
So I took the question to be, are there any reasons aside from historical legacy to allow size to be an issue for the Dakotas but not for Texas or California (or Alaska)?
Size was never an issue for the Dakotas.
~Max
The opinions of the people who live there.