Which is also why the system must prevent single reps from having a disproportionate ability to push, or prevent, legislative action.
e.g. It’s fine for Manchin to argue forcefully in favor of the coal industry and coal miners. He’d be derelict in his duties not to. But it’s not fine for him to single-handedly be able to prevent relevant legislation from being considered or enacted.
The same issue applies to the Senate. Witness Tuberville.
As a matter of rule, single members (or tiny coalitions) must not be permitted to obstruct the whole. Slow things down a bit, sure. But bring things to a practically un-overridable halt, absolutely not. That way lies vandalism and extortion pure and simple.
It’s in effect tyranny by obstruction. We would certainly be outraged if a single member of Congress could decree a law or appointment into place over the objections of the majority. Why are we not equally outraged by a single member being able to decree the absence of the same law or appointment which otherwise commands a majority?
But they pretty much do have proportional representation. I know it looks impressive to say that to match Wyoming, California should have 17 more congress members. Wow 17 whole members! California must be really getting screwed by the current system. The thing that is not mentioned is that they would do so in an congress that had every other state similarly expanded proportionally, so their relative clout would remain unchanged. Increasing the number of representatives is not going to give the larger states more clout, all it does is shift around a few fractional representatives randomly among the smaller states. The biggest effect of perfect proportional representation would have on the composition of the House would be the equivalent of shifting 1/3 of a representative from Montana to Delaware. Is that putting that fractional congressperson in the right place really worth expanding the size of the house by a factor of 10?
As I said in my previous post, the only states that really systematically benefit from this are those whose population is lower than 1/435 of the population of the overall US; that’s three states. For the other 47 states, including the ones with a small population, the chances of benefitting as opposed to suffering from the system are distributed randomly, based on the fraction of a seat that the state is away from the marginal next seat.
Two discussions going on here - representational numbers, how many voters per member vs other states - and what is proportional representation where the voters vote for a list or party or whatever, and the percentage of vote determines what number of that party’s ranked list become members.
The difference is, when a party is elected by proportional representation the individual members are more beholden to the party brass than the voters. It’s up to the party then excite voters for them.
With prop-rep it encourages single-issue parties; those are more likely to be obstructive if they do not get their specific cause addressed. Single obstrutionist members will always exist; they are less likely to elicit support if they need more than half the voters in an area to support them. If an anti-LGBT party needs only, say 14% of the votes in Alabama to get a member elected, then you are more likely to have an obstructionst group of members. Politics then degenerates into what we see in Israel, or used to see in Italy, where there are a dozen parties with assorted special interests, and the “mainstream” parties are lucky to get more than 25% of the seats, and ALL legislation is a negotiation with a mess of special interests.
Manchin’s or Sinema’s power lies in an almost perfectly divided house, which is (should be) a rarity. With prop-rep and fragmented parties, the need to persuade holdouts becomes a certainty. Tuberville’s relies on “lazy Senator” rules, where a filibuster can be a filibuster without actually being a filibuster; and spinal deficiencies of others who refuse to override him.
Puerto Rico could certainly become a state (given a Congress willing to enact it), but DC would require a Constitutional amendment.
Another method that can be used to choose members of a legislative body is sortition: Basically, you take the pool of all citizens, and randomly select whatever number of them. This is probably a bad idea for a single powerful office like the Presidency, because you’ll get extreme swings, and sometimes folks that very few people support, but for a body of hundreds of members, things will tend to average out, and you’ll only have the same proportion of cranks as in the general public. And it’d accurately represent the population across all demographic measures.
Technically, DC could become a state without an amendment. A law could create a new state by reducing the size of the federal district to the National Mall plus a large number of adjacent and nearby federal buildings. Those would of course include the White House and Capitol.
But yes, that new federal district would necessitate an amendment to repeal the 23rd Amendment, the one that gives the federal district 3 Elector College votes. The reduced federal district would have no residents other than the President and spouse and maybe other family. Since the President and spouse virtually always vote in their home state, the district would have no voters at all.
Now it’s a virtual certainty that in the current politcal atmosphere, any new amendment will be impossible to pass. That’s generally true, but it really only applies to substantive changes to the constitution. One that simply repeals a no longer needed amendment should have no problem passing.
DC statehood would be a polarized party-line thing, and the 23rd Amendment is key to the conservative legal movement’s arguments that statehood is unconstitutional in any form, so repeal would absolutely have a problem passing and the 23rd Amendment would probably stick around for at least a few decades, maybe forever. (But that’s not a big deal. The power to provide for presidential electors from the capital district would likely become another obsolete power that Congress simply doesn’t exercise, like the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal.)
And by that approach we could also phase in Proportional Representation. IMO, it’s only with PR that the US could become a true multi-party system. “True” as in congress would usually be controlled by a coalition made up of two or more parties.
I agree. It’s really a question of whether you move the imbalance to the smaller states (what we do today), or to the larger states (what most are proposing).
If we’re having to divide up the number of people in the country (339 million) by either 435 (the current number of reps) or 578,803 (the population of Wyoming), and keep it within state boundaries, it’s always going to be disproportionate somehow.
The real problem people have here is the idea that the Senate and Electoral College represents the States not the people. That’s where the whole direct election of Senators was a big fuck up by itself- it somehow gives the impression that the People are voting for their senators, not those of their state. And by extension, the whole reporting on the popular vote confuses (conveniently?) the fact that the Electoral College is basically the way the States elect a President, not the people.
That’s the problem- most of our institutions are actually State level things, not popular things, but people get them confused, or think they should be popular when in fact, they’re not.
It’s been at least 150 years since the idea of the USA as some sort of weak mild-mannered umbrella organization over 50 (or however many historically) robust independent actors on the world stage.
But our ossified primitive governance structures are stuck in that increasingly irrelevant now centuries ago past.
Congress just finished Jim Jordan’s 3rd loss. It’s instructive is that the guy who claims the election was stolen could not get the Speakership because, according to the pundits, the 20 plus who voted against him mostly came from “swing” districts where voting for someone so radical could be held against them in the next election. Again, something that with prop-rep would likely not have been the same outcome - those members would only have to worry how high they were on the party list for the entire state of New York, or California, etc. And voting for the party’s dubious choice might have helped move them up that list.
The tilt to small states for the elctoral college was a sop to the smaller states who did not want the presidency to be won simply by total popular vote, effectively handing it to the popular characters of much more populous states. Similarly, counting slaves as 3/5 of a person (!!??) was to help mitigate that imbalance, although the 1619 Project argues the electoral college was solely motivated by the slave states’ effort to protect their interests.
The fastest communication of the time was horseback or fast ships, and news outside the state was slower and less widespread than once the railroad and telegraph came along. The founding fathers apparently did not anticipate country-wide political parties - the idea was that unless a candidate was so widely popular across the eastern seaboard, like Washington, nobody would get an electoral college majority and the result would generally fall to the House of Representatives. “Best laid plans of mice and men…” and all that.
In a related note Rep Jeff Jackson announced on social media that North Carolina gerrymandered his district so that it is impossible for him to win next election. IIRC his district was drawn up fairly after the last census. At the first opportunity it was redrawn to kept a Democrat from winning again.
Jackson is a rising star and my hope for a future president. It’s going to be much harder for him to be on that path now.
I feel this is the key point. There’s not a consensus on what the goal is, which makes it difficult to move towards a goal.
Let’s say we have a hypothetical state which has a population that entitles it to ten Representatives. The voters in the state are seventy percent Party A and thirty percent party B.
Which is the ideal system?
One; ten districts, each of which represent the state’s percentages (70% A and 30% B). The result is that the state sends ten representatives from Party A to Congress and none from Party B.
Two; seven districts which are mostly Party A voters and three districts which are mostly Party B voters. The result is that the states sends seven Party A representatives and three Party B representatives to Congress.
Here’s one possibility; eliminate geographical districts. Just assign a state a number of voting groups based on its population. And then let the voters decide for themselves which group they wish to belong to. Candidates can choose a group which they want to represent and then the voters in the group can elect one of the candidates to be their representative.
So a group might be based around a geographical region (“Vote for me and I’ll represent the interests on Metropolis City.”) Or a group might be based around a common ideology (“Vote for me and I’ll defend traditional conservative values.”) Or a group might be based around a specific goal (“Vote for me and I’ll enact a public health care system.”)
Because voters would be free to choose their group, they would tend towards groups with like-minded people. There would be no point, for example, in a conservative voter belonging to a group with a liberal majority. That voter would seek out a different group with more conservative voters.
My thought for at-large/proportional has always been this. For this example we will use Colorado and its 8 representatives.
Primary (closed): Each party member votes for a candidate. Top 8 vote getters are ranked 1-8. Unaffilated do not get to vote and not crossing parties. If you want to vote Democrat you need to be a registered Democrat.
General (everyone votes):You vote party not person. Suppose that based on the apportion of the vote, Democrats get 5 reps, Republicans 2 and Green 1, Then the top 5 Dems on the list from the primary are reps, the top 2 Pubs and top Green likewise.
ETA: Candidates in the primary can run on platforms like Little_Nemo points to. I could run as pro-Denver, pro-life, pro-farmer, etc.