Sorry, I was thinking about the Electoral College, which is based on reps in both chambers, and is skewed by the senate. I blame the lack of coffee so far… about to rectify that.
The EC is certainly less representative, but it’s still not 2-3.
Wisconsin has 10 ECs for 5.89 million residents, making it 1 EC for every 589,000 residents.
California has 54 ECs for 39.24 million residents, making it 1 EC for every 727,000 residents.
Certainly more skewed, but still nowhere near 2-3 times.
My biggest issue with the EC is the winner take all that most states use. This means that there are a handful of “battleground” states, and the rest are more or less ignored.
Though if we are overhauling, I wouldn’t mind getting rid of EC entirely and going to a straight vote.
But then, I’d make a whole lot of changes if I was in charge, and to some extent, discussing the EC is like debating the best treatment for a hangnail on a patient in cardiac arrest. Not saying it’s not worthwhile, and sometimes the only thing we can treat is the hangnail. But it does need to be recognized that there are far more systemic flaws that will continue to deliver less than ideal results. There are no silver bullets.
Fair enough; that certainly teaches me not to post based on half remembered figures before coffee. Thank you.
Huh. I thought nothing could have been more obvious than reminding people of the Marxist failure to come up with anything better than a futile denunciation of America is a historic parallel to the what I’m seeing here as a futile denunciation of America as a broken system that never was democratic.
The left has been critiquing the system for as long as the country has been split into left and right in modern terms. (When, exactly? Around the turn of the 20th century, but that’s like asking the exact date of the Industrial Revolution.) Historically they’ve been remarkably successful. But. The success is almost always long postponed after it first emerges as a serious national issue. The early adopters, so to speak, always rail in despair over their lack of ability to enact urgently needed policies and social disruptions.
Yet in the long run they keep winning and winning, making the country more democratic and voting available to many more people, reducing or eliminating legalized bigotry, and moving the middle ground of what is default acceptable law and customs farther and farther away from the beliefs of the conservative assholes I mentioned earlier.
This is what real world victory feels like, a fight that never stops, a constant, grinding, depressing slog whose immense and at one time totally unbelievable gains are diminished by their very ubiquity.
The Constitution is a symptom, not the cause, of inequalities. People on the right and the left have been getting around its few and vague words since the beginning. The Constitution cannot be ignored, nor should it be, but it’s not and never was a suicide pact. In the future the 2020s will be another blip in the history books that will be shown as overcoming near-disaster just as in the 1930s.
You keep bringing this up, but this type of amendment would require the assent of all 50 states. An amendment ostensibly limiting the Senate’s lawmaking powers to matters concerning state interests, would not necessarily be so constrained.
~Max
I mean, if you’re willing to undertake radical constitutional amendments, there’s no reason we couldn’t have more than two chambers. Imagine three or four regional chambers. Perhaps bills would have to pass a threshold of chambers before being guaranteed a vote - with no debate - by the legislative body as a whole, similar to House committees today.
~Max
When I was in high school, I wrote a paper proposing the establishment of a fourth branch of our government. It was quite some time ago, so I do not remember the details, sadly. I do remember my government teacher gave me an A on the thing.
Maybe you meant to write “Wyoming” instead of Wisconsin? It is the smallest, and therefore most over-represented State, getting one Representative for its 577,000 people.
I was reading older discussions and happenned across this usage of “the constitution is not a suicide pact”, consistent with what I described in post #81:
~Max
That’s still a far cry from the erroneous ratio I claimed in my coffee deprived state. But yes, in addition to that I also confused our two fair W states.
(And yes I am aware that Washington and West Virginia also exist)
Right, in almost every instance I’ve seen “constitution as a suicide pact”, it has been in that vein.
One person says that the constitution demands that something happen that is bad for the country, and the other responding that the constitution is not a suicide pact.
The only other way I see it used is someone lamenting bad outcomes due to interpreting the Constitution too closely.
And that’s the whole point, as written, it kinda is. But as we use it, it shouldn’t be. If things were interpreted literally, it really would be. If there were no restrictions on speech, or no restrictions on guns, our country would be in a bad place. But, since legislators and judges have decided that it is not a suicide pact, reasonable restrictions are allowed, even though it goes against the text of the constitution.
In other areas, where the constitution demands something that is bad for the country, if people are advocating for it because the constitution says so, even though they are aware of the harm their position advocates, that’s when the response of “the constitution is not a suicide pact” is appropriate.
And let’s say that SCOTUS strikes down all gun laws due to the textual reading of 2A. Then it would be appropriate to lament, “The constitution is a suicide pact.”
As to that last I’d say
The constitution has just been reinterpreted to be a suicide pact.
But certainly the same overall notion as you say.