Agreed on all points, but do we really want the House controlling a branch of government? Thanks to gerrymandering, small districts, and a two year election cycle, the house is stocked full of crazy people even more inept than the Senate. At least they can’t redraw state lines to create safe districts.
The people pointing out the behavior of the House are missing the fact that its members are operating within the current constitutional framework. If we didn’t have a Senate then the current House wouldn’t work the way it does. The way it works now is that members get to stand up and spout off about whatever divorced from reality rhetoric they wish because their speech effects primarily their own electoral prospects. They can’t act upon those crazy impulses (except negatively which is why the debt ceiling has become such a clusterfuck) since compromise on legislation must be reached in the Senate.
If instead we only had the House then the crazies would get to actually enact their agenda. Sure that would be bad in the short term but once people saw the effects they would vote the wackos out of office and we would be done with them and their antics. Instead reality never smacks them in the face because they are insulated by our constitutional system. So when you see politicians toeing an insane party line you have our checks and balances to blame. When you deny an organization responsibility you shouldn’t be surprised to find it behaves irresponsibly.
That’s not to say that the House couldn’t do with a big dose of reform as well.
Scrapping the filibuster and all the other slow down rules would outright fix it in my opinion.
No. It’s the lunatics in the House who think Democrats are Communists, push September 11th conspiracy theories, want to return the U.S. to the gold standard to prevent the rise of the Amero, and think HPV vaccinations cause mental retardation. Maybe you can see a qualitative difference between that and a political compromise, however regrettable that compromise might have been. I don’t think the Senate is close to perfect, but I do think it’s less of a zoo. If you wanted one chamber and any kind of sane government you’d have to reform the House almost beyond recognition.
The Senate was part of the deal that some people want to re-neg on. No way would states like Vermont and Rhode Island have agreed to join the U.S. if their voices would be drown out by more populous states. The U.S. gets the benefit of being united by making this trade off.
You have to consider the results of having no Senate and maintaining the current rules of the House. The merest majority will decide the law, and the Union will dissolve in short order as one side dominates the other. The Constitution was designed to (or possibly accidently) slow down the process of government and as a result make it subject to the democratic process of electing representation. I don’t like the way things work now, but I prefer it to the inevitable majoritarian rule.
Those states aren’t good examples. Neither participated in the federal convention and were left as small adjacent states outside the Union. Not an attractive situation. Perhaps they would have refused to join despite economic pressure to do so if the Senate also had proportional representation as people like James Madison and Gouverneur Morris fought so hard for but I doubt it. Much better examples are Maryland, Delaware, and New Hampshire whose constitutional delegates did threaten to scuttle the Constitution so successfully that the “large state” nationalists eventually did go along.
In any case the opinions of Americans long dead don’t seem to make the case for the continued benefits of the arrangement. Southern states would never have joined a Union that outlawed slavery. That’s not much of an argument in favor of repealing the 13th Amendment in the name of unity.
If we must consider then consider the wisdom of assuming that the representatives of some Americans would tyrannize the other Americans if they had their way. Consider instead the possibility that electing a government with the authority to enact their mandate would provide the benefit of Americans being able to judge for themselves the results of that agenda and exercise that judgement in the voting booth at the next election. Consider that unicameralism is hardly a radical new idea. Consider Nebraska which has had such a government for decades yet hasn’t devolved into tyranny. If we are compelled to consider then consider something useful. Consider something other then our prejudices.
And I don’t understand anyone who thinks it’s better to let a minority rule than a majority. A mob of fewer people, each with proportionally more power, is far worse. Either way, the worst case scenario is that the people in charge get what they want, and if that’s a minority, that means fewer people happy than if it were a majority.
Cite? I didn’t think PR had been invented then.
I should have been more clear. The size of each state’s delegation was to be proportional to the population of the state rather than 2 Senators per state.
Because I love taking things to ludicrous extremes (who doesn’t?), I checked the populations of the 20 least populous states. Assuming my eyes tracked properly, they add up to 10.2% of the population. Not that I think these places are going to form a solid voting block, but 1 part in 10 could tie up the senate.*
I’m open to suggestions on how things could be done better, but I’m not entirely sure that the senate slowing things down is a bad thing. I just moved to DC and have been getting an eyeful of how things work here. “Work” may be too strong a word though.
*ETA not even 1 part in 10. The senators from the ickle states could all win by slim margins, so total legislative shutdown from ~5% of the population.
I think unicameralism can work fine under certain conditions, but beyond a certain point of industrial development and population size a single chamber will start to have trouble adequately representing or addressing the enormous number of issues it will have to deal with. I think the rule of thumb is that no country with a population larger than 15 million is unicameral - except for South Korea, actually.
I’d rather a unicameral parliament, however, over an absolutely bicameral one. Which is why I prefer the UK system, which leans more towards unicameralism-plus. A single chamber with all the power but supported, and sometimes slowed down (but never outrightly stopped) by another chamber.
Prove it. Intelligence, common sense and true patriotism are not additive. Then add in the fact that 5 people can’t even agree where to have lunch, much less formulate policy efficiently. Every step up in the number of people deciding policy increases the flaws in said policy exponentially. Then factor in the fact that most people are as stupid as stumps about damn near everything. That’s why democracy is idiotic.
Do you want a committee of random people performing your gall bladder operation? Didn’t think so. Legislators and the government bureaucracy are supposed to be reasonably neutral, centrist professionals. They have been corrupted by ideological extremists, but that is no reason to scrap a system that worked quite well until that point.
The House by itself could remove the rights of the minority in a single session, so the next election will be moot. And as usual in these discussions, what any one state does is irrelevant. The states are subject to federal law and if a state tries to remove the rights of it’s citizens there is a recourse to higher level of government. The federal government is the end of the line.
Has the House actually passed any legislation concerning the nutty things you’ve mentioned, or are those just things put forth by a few isolated cranks? Because all the stuff I mentioned were things the House passed and had 50 votes in the Senate.
The federal government is also subject to a higher power. Why would Americans put up with blatantly stripping voting rights from their fellow Americans? No majority party would be dumb enough to try such a stunt because it would fail badly. Their own support would shrivel up and they would become pariah if not actually imprisoned. Majoritarianism doesn’t work well with distinct and hostile groups such as Germans and Jews or Israelis and Palestinians or Shi’a and Sunni Muslims but when the group shares a predominant identity, as we do as Americans, then what reason is there to assume one part of the group will suddenly tyrannize another part? On the contrary I find a far more conceivable devolution from our inclusive democratic system would be to continue down our path of congressional dysfunction and irrelevancy until an imperial presidency is as powerful domestically as it is in international affairs.
I would disagree but it’s irrelevant. You’ve missed the point. The reason majority rule is better than minority rule is not because a few select people can’t be more competent than the majority of people but rather than power is safer in the hands of the majority since it requires broader support for any significant decision.
Do you want one pizza with anchovies loving slob deciding the school’s menu for the year?
(I mean, if we are offering ridiculous scenarios.)
You are entitled to your opinion. The reason we have elections is so that people can decide for themselves how their representatives are supposed to be. Simply because you view some people’s views are unworthy does not make them illegitimate.
The fact is, the whole Senate thing currently mainly boils down to older, more rural, whiter people (with the partial exception of Rhode Island, mainly) telling all the rest of of what to do.
How is that good, or ideal? I mean, the wisdom of age, I see that, sure. I also see that rural people are often abused by telecoms (AT&T had to practically be forced at gunpoint to install landline service in rural areas).
But what other reasons? Our population is becoming more and more educated and better-informed, thanks to higher college attendance rates and the internet. At some point can the electorate not simply be trusted to govern itself, without your grandpa from rural Idaho putting in his 2 cents on everything? No offense to any rural grandfathers, meant, of course.
Well rebellion and chaos. But not something that’s preferrable.
It’s done all the time now. It’s just difficult because of the checks and balances we have, and the Senate is the major check and balance on the House.
I don’t think Majoritarianism works well. But history shows it’s inevitability when the opportunity exists. That’s the problem, not that it will succeed long term, or even short term, but that it is a problem in itself. We don’t like law which is carved in stone, because it so difficult to change. No Senate gives the House the ability to start carving stone unchecked. With the President only having veto power to rein in Congress he will be left in the vulnerable position GWB was in, needing to sign inadvisable legislation in order to make sure (what he thought) the critical needs of the country were funded. We are not increasing the power of the President through discord, but instead decreasing it. The height of the Imperial Presidency achieved by LBJ was based on a long term one-side politcal monopoly by the Democratic party. Since that time, for varying reasons, the powers of th President have steadily decreased.
That is the circumstance today. The Constitution must endure over time.
And that is precisely what should happen. Because you will not get the 20 least populous states uniting as a bloc against the others unless it is an issue that directly injures their inhabitants to the benefit of the more populous states’ inhabitants. For example,a law requiring that recipients of public things of value transport them to secure repositories within 24 hours. This works fine if the secure repository is 10 blocks away in the same city, not so fine if it’s 100 miles away as the crow flies, and the crow has to drive on winding mountainous back roads instead. Differing circyumstances dictate different solutions; what is right for the L.A. or D.C. metropolitan area ,ay be entirely inappropriate for New Mexico or Idaho, and vice versa.