I don’t really understand how this works. I mean , I get that people get to choose their district which isn’t geographic. What I don’t get is how they actually choose a district - how do I choose District 28 unless District 28 already has a representative so that I am really not choosing a district but rather a representative. And if that’s the case , and I decide I don’t like my representative and change to another district , then what happens when lots of people leave District 28? It might work for a municipality to have no districts at all but instead have “at-large” positions (which have their own issues) but I can’t see how it works on a national level.
I personally consider political engagement the number one problem and the proper solution to all these problems, so I wouldn’t support overhauling government for any of these reasons. And I know it’s a hot take, but I like this Supreme Court’s decisions.
My contribution to this thread - something I have a very open mind about - is rethinking economic regulations. The tax code should be comprehensible to a layman. The minimum wage, if we have one, should not be below sustenance level. Every useful business should be able to turn a reasonable profit, but extortion and price gauging should be discouraged. Ideally everyone has the opportunity of meaningful employment and a reasonable standard of living, while we can support our government and military.
I’ve occasionally put together half-thoughts about redesigning a national economy from the ground up, that is, taking a laissez-fare economy as a base and adding regulations where needed. But where do you start? My most recent thoughts have been to fix the value of a dollar to an arbitrary unit of time, such as 1/X man-hours, and work from there.
~Max
This seems like a round-about way of getting to a system that is effectively some form of proportional representation? A system in which every vote counts towards the result and where minorities can be represented even if they aren’t concentrated in one geographical area.
I’ve said that the one thing that I agreed with Donald Trump on is infrastructure. There are people who feel that building and maintaining bridges and roads is an important government function. So that would be an issue that districts would form around.
The difference would be that the locations of bridges and roads would be decided by where there is the most need for them rather than by the principle of “build a bridge to nowhere in my geographic district”.
If an elected official stays in office because all of the voters in their district are happy with the job they’re doing, I don’t see that as a flaw with the system.
I will point out that districts have to be above a certain size to remain districts. If too many people move out, then the district disappears and the congress member no longer has a job.
There would be details like this that needed to be worked out.
I envision something like a system where people can fill out some document declaring they want to belong to a particular district. Each district would have to maintain a certain population level to continue to exist. There would probably need to be some kind of limit on how often people can switch districts just to keep it manageable.
This kind of thing happens now. In 2022, for example, seven existing congressional districts “disappeared” in California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia and seven new congressional districts “appeared” in Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas (which got two).
I feel it’s a better system. Let’s say some political ideology is shared by one percent of the population, distributed all over the country.
Now let’s say we have a proportional representation system with fifty districts and each district is given ten representatives. The one percenters vote all over the country but don’t achieve enough votes in any district to win a representative.
In my system you would instead have five hundred virtual districts. The one percenters could assign themselves to districts and with a little self-organization should end up winning five representatives.
This fringe faction should not be represented in government.
~Max
That’s not quite what I meant by “how do I choose a district” - the administrative bit of how to register my choice doesn’t really matter , there will be a way to do that. Whether by a form like voter’s registration or whether it’s a component of the ballot, that will be easy. I’m talking about how I actually make my choice of district - I’m not choosing a group of people who have the common interest of geography. I don’t see how the Green party could realistically organize a particular district to represent it , but lets say it could. And Congressman Jones gets elected to it. After that, isn’t every election mostly going to be “do I want to stay in Congressman Jones’ district or move to Congressman Smith’s” until/unless a district becomes so small it doesn’t qualify ? Because if I don’t like Jones, why wouldn’t I switch to another district rather than hoping Brown can oust them?
You can have systems that have much purer proportional representation. For example (taking this example just because I know it well) the National Assembly of South Africa has 400 members elected by party-list proportional representation with no threshold. In other words, for every 0.25% of the vote a party gets, it gets a seat in parliament.
You can also combine such a system with district-based representation, where some members are elected from districts (in whatever manner) and others are elected from party lists. This is called mixed-member proportional and is used in, amongst others, Germany and New Zealand.
The same human-hour for sitting in a climate-controlled office (possibly in one’s own house) entering info that requires one day’s training to be able to do and carries no additional responsiblility, and for putting out fires in horrendous weather at risk of one’s life and the lives of others, and for life-saving surgery that requires ten years of original training plus many hours every year and will kill the patient if one’s hand slips?
I think we currently assign wages with no relation or often a negative relation to the necessity of the job, and with very little and often a negative relation to the difficulty of the job; but I don’t think a flat ‘an hour of anybody’s labor doing anything is worth the same amount’ is a good solution to the problem.
[whoops that one’s just asking for a hijack. Stopping myself from committing one – ]
That might work – except that it seems likely to wind up with even more divisive and unqualified representation than we’ve already got. Almost any nut could find enough people in the country to fill a district.
I think you’d also need a maximum size per district. But I’m also still dubious that this would work.
I had run into this problem before, and my thinking was that it would be a man-hour under average conditions, or an hour of recreation time, etc. It is a generalization. The core idea behind tying value to time is that it provides a fixed standard to build regulations off of. As opposed to x bushels of corn or y ounces of silver, which have boom and bust cycles. It doesn’t follow that people are actually getting paid the same wages for the same number of hours since some jobs are more valuable than others, due to factors other than time i.e. skill, danger, utility, geography.
~Max
My thinking is that after a regulatory scheme is worked out, the structure of government follows. Form follows function and all that…
~Max
To start with, appointing open partisans to a body will not produce a neutral body. It will produce a body riven by partisanship.
One thing that really stands out for me in listening to American political debates is the conviction by Americans that it’s impossible to have truly non-partisan bodies involved in governance. That seems to be the case for the US, but it doesn’t match what those of us in parliamentary systems have experienced.
@PatrickLondon (UK), @penultima_thule (Oz) and I (Canada) have all taken the position in this thread and others that it is possible to have non-partisan, non-ideological boards and commissions carrying out what might be called the government infrastructure, such as neutral election commissions to run elections, neutral redistribution commissions to draw electoral boundaries, neutral judges, neutral police and prosecutors.
I don’t think we’re delusional on this 
, or starry-eyed 
. That is the reality of our systems.
I think one of the fundamental differences between our systems is that we don’t elect as many government officials as Americans. That means that we don’t see all government positions as inherently partisan.
We don’t elect judges. We don’t elect police or sheriffs. We don’t elect the bodies who run elections. (I’ve mentioned before my surprise that the SecState in Florida in 2000 was the state chair of Bush’s campaign. Then I heard about the Georgia SecState, Brian Kemp, who was running the election in which he was candidate for governor. 
)
In Canada, we generally just vote for MPs (federal); MLAs (provincial); mayors and councillors; and school boards. (There may be some other elected positions in other provinces, but none come to mind.) We rarely have referendums (I’ve voted in one federal referendum and one provincial. That’s it.)
Nor are we heavily involved in the selection of candidates. We don’t have primaries run by the government. The selection of candidates is an internal party matter. If you want to get involved in candidate selection, you join the party. Most Canadians don’t.
All of that means, in my opinion, that in our system it’s clear that there are non-partisans who can be entrusted with government positions that require neutrality. The federal Chief Electoral Officer, who runs the elections, is a non-partisan position, appointed by the House of Commons, with support from the government and the opposition.
Getting back to the OP, I don’t know if there is a way to change that deeply ingrained political attitude in the US. As an outsider, the partisanship in the US seems extreme, and a hindrance to good government.
They needed some rights to operate. That doesn’t mean they need the exact same set of rights as natural persons have. I think there’s room for a reasonable debate about where the boundaries lie, considering that it wasn’t all that long ago that the US didn’t think that corporate persons had all the same rights as natural persons.
And while we’re debating that, let’s ask if corporate persons have the same obligations as natural persons. If a corporation is convicted of a crime, can/should they be subject to the same penalties as a natural person? Can a corporation be put in jail, or executed?
I don’t think that’s actually the reason. I was a state government employee and my position was not inherently partisan or political. But that didn’t mean my personal politics couldn’t have any affect on how I did my job. I’ll give an example - my state has closed a lot of prisons since 2011. Around 24 and more closures expected. Now, the governor decides how many close- but someone has to decide which. Probably someone who works in the agency that runs the prisons. The two main parties have different opinions on whether prisons should be closed and which ones it should be. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to believe that the decision of which prison to close couldn’t possibly end up being based on saving jobs in a Republican town or making it easier for family members to visit in hopes of getting Democratic votes. I hope it doesn’t happen but it certainly isn’t impossible.
I’m not convinced it’s impossible. It’s not what you’re going to get right now in the USA, but that’s not the same thing.
But I don’t know how to legislate in order to require it. At a given time and place (and our blank-slate starting-from-scratch USA would probably be such a time and place, though our current one isn’t), it might well be possible and even easy. But how do you legislate to make sure that it stays that way?
Maybe that’s how you get there. But who does the appointing? Doesn’t the appointing need, somewhere along the line, to be done by elected officials? How do you keep those officials from appointing people who will favor their party?
(If the answer is ‘we’ve always done it that way and it’s been working’ – look out. The USA right now is a huge red flag warning against relying on that as a barrier.)
Two factors. The first is basic math. If a district requires five hundred thousand voters, then the maximum limit of the subsequent legislative body is going to be a few hundred people. There aren’t enough voters for every nut in the country to have their own district.
The second factor is that getting elected to office isn’t the end of the job (although admittedly it sometimes seems that way). Those representatives are going to have to work with other representatives if they want to actually carry out the program they were elected to accomplish. Representatives who can’t practice politics once in office will find themselves losing voters to other more effective representatives.
I feel it’s a naturally self-limiting issue. Let’s say you have a super-charismatic and highly effective person who represents a district. They’re so great that millions of people flock to their district.
That representative is still only one member of the legislature and they only get one vote on bills. Those millions of people will realize they’d be much more effective if they split up into several districts and elected several representatives.
The argument that proportional representation (and first past the post voting) is bad because Israel and Italy use forms of it crumbles when one sees that countries ahead of the US in the world democracy rankings are mostly, if not all, PR countries.
If nothing else, the increasing number of non-affiliated voters should give us pause about continuing to support a system which discourages viable third parties.
I’ve responded multiple times to how the state would handle it if Trump got incarcerated.
But don’t ask me how the state would handle it if Amazon got incarcerated. I have no idea.
+1 and many more
To my mind further to that is that whom I vote for is between my conscience and the ballot paper. My kids and other family members don’t know whom I vote for. That simply isn’t discussed. I doubt they’d be surprised, but you never know. Politics is certainly discussed over the water cooler or backyard BBQ. We don’t mind putting the boot into whomever is sitting on the Treasury benches. And there are inhabitants of the continent who get hyper partisan around election time. But once the writs are returned it goes back to normal.
In the US, it seems to me that partisan allegiance is a singularly crucial part of your core identity a bit like your sorority house.
“Hi there, my name is XXXXX YYYYY, I’m alpha beta gamma and I’m GOP/DEM, how can I help you today?”