By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate

$25k is a bit low, but I agree wit he sentiment

25,000 a year or even twice that and the only people you would get willing to run for Congress would be people who couldn't get a job anywhere else (insert joke about me here if you wish).

You want professionals you have to pay them more than an assistant manager at Walmart.

By "sentiment," I was referring to the latter part of his post.

But he isn't wrong about limiting salaries. It doesn't need to be minimum wage, but no one need to be able to buy a Ferrari cash on it either.

The latter part of his post was about having people in Washington on a rotating basis which makes no sense and would be the end of representative government in the United States as we know it.

When everybody's in charge then no one's in charge.

You left the part about having a rotation And the rest follow along over Internet feed. Not just "no one shows up at all."

I specifically mentioned the "rotation" Anna.

The latter part of his post was about having people in Washington on a rotating basis

Remains a horrendously stupid idea. If anything we need our representatives to spend a lot more time in Washington D.C. actually working and not back in their districts trolling for votes to prevent being primaried.

I understand that the Senate is disproportional by design, but if it's a good idea to give some people disproportionate representation based on where they live, why not do it by ethnicity or other factors? 20 senators for white people, 20 for blacks, 20 for Asians, and so on. The current system lets white people dominate the government due to their numbers. If it's not okay for populous areas to dominate based on their numbers, why is it okay for race? Heck, why not make it 50 straight senators and 50 gay senators? Why should straight people get more say just because there are more of them?

^Funniest post in a while !

Sadly that makes about as much sense as most "social justice" policies.

That is 100% true about the cap.

I agree that such a system would be silly. It's no more silly that the current setup for the Senate though.

This. End of line.

The Senate is not disproportional. Each state gets equal representation. See above.

How does the Senate represent the states? Senators are popularly elected. In practice, the Senate has the same role in legislation as the house.

I know the idea behind it. I just don't think it's a good idea.

If we take a look at Germany, the Bundesrat represents the states, but they are subordinate to the Bundestag. The Bundesrat is only required to approve laws that deal with powers delegated to the states and constitutional amendments. For other legislation, they only have a suspensive veto that can be overridden by the Bundestag. If we had this setup, it would make sense to say that the Senate represents the states, but it really doesn't work out that way.

Having the same number of Senators when populations are unequal is the definition of disproportional.

Our bicameral legislature was specifically designed to address the thorny problem of unequal representation. The House represents the people with proportional representation, and the Senate represents the states with equal representation. The idea being that the two houses of Congress would balance each other and enact compromise between the two different constituencies. In that light, the Seventeenth Amendment was a major mistake. It should be repealed.

It doesn't seem like a really good design though. Even if we went back to legislatures picking Senators, the Senate still fulfills the same role as the house in regards to legislation. As far as the interests of states, what interests do the states have apart from their citizens? At the end of the day, state lines are pretty much arbitrary.

While the US Constitution has been influential worldwide, the developed world tends to not follow ours that closely. The only country I can think of that emulates us in regards to the Senate is Australia, and even they have a mechanism to force an election if the House and Senate can't agree.

If the Senators were elected by the state legislatures (as before) then the U.S. Senate now would have more than 60 Republican Senators. While this might be a good outcome for the time being for my side, I doubt that many on the other side would be very happy. Especially over the last decade or two when the GOP figured out how to win state legislature elections.

By gerrymandering the living shit out of their districts. Not a good example.

Again, I think Germany is a good place to look for how to deal with gerrymandering. They used the Mixed Member Proportional system, which is also used in New Zealand (video description at the link).

For legislative elections, you have 2 votes. You vote for a rep for your district and for the party you want to govern. After all of the district candidates are seated, additional reps are seated from a party list so that the overall makeup of the legislature mirrors the percentages that each party received in the party vote.

State legislative districts have been gerrymandered?

How? You do know that to obtain the power to gerrymander that the party doing so has to win elections in the first place don't you?

Yes. And once they've a majority they manipulate the system to keep and increase it.

a set up arranged by folks who say each state as a largely autonomous member of a fairly lose union. Big war changed that perception for good.

I don't know what better solution there is....but the world Madison et al was living in ain't much similar to the one we live in and for a society to survive it has to be able to adjust to such realities.

I don't care for an "adjustment" that leaves California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois as effectively ruling the entire United States no matter how many people live there.

see that's the thing hero, the STATES would not be running anything, the CITIZENS who happen to live in those states would have proportional power.


There was a time, back in the 70's, when Federal courts did away with the idea of state senates being arranged like the federal senate is, on the grounds that it distorted representation. Now, we have state senate districts and state house districts elected much the same way, they just are not identical districts. You can't do that on the federal level unless you change the constitution, but it's certainly not a "wrong" or "bad" way of doing things.

As a thought experiment, as long as we are stuck with the two party arrangement (which, sadly, if we were not going to throw that off last year we likely never will) you might get much better government if every state was obliged to send one Democrat and one Republican to the senate. That way no bill gets passed without either SOME support from across the aisle or a tiebreaker vote.

Hell, make all the committees 50/50 too.