The efficacy of US democracy has eroded over time, and it's clear we're going to need reforms to preserve democratic governance for future generations.
Every branch of the federal government has experienced a decline in democratic accountability.
The House is so gerrymandered that only 10% of seats are remotely competitive each year, and it hasn't kept up with population growth.
The Senate is permanently gerrymandered, with state population differences that are far more disproportionate than what was originally designed for and intended when the Constitution was written.
This combined with hyper-partisanship prevents the US from accepting new states like Washington DC (population 700,000+) and Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million), depriving millions of US citizens from Congressional representation (no, non-voting representatives don't count).
The Supreme Court has become hyperpartisan, and appointments are a high stake circus that rely on arbitrary retirements and deaths. They need to be elected at this point to preserve democratic legitimacy.
As for the Presidency... the Electoral College has resulted in the election of the loser of a popular vote twice in 25 years.
I don't know how reform will happen, or if we'll ever see it in my lifetime but we desperately need it. The US government needs to be accountable to the people again.
Democracy is precious, and it's so tragic to see how much it's declined.
States with a total of 270 electoral votes agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. The effort appears to be stalled, but there are 209 votes from states who've already passed the law (which is in effect only once 270+ electoral votes are reached).
The Supreme Court's composition can be changed with a law, and the most popular option appears to be 18 year terms, staggered so that there are two appointments for each presidential term. The court can also be expanded, and should be to 13 (one for each circuit).
Gerrymandering is a serious problem, and would properly be solved by coming up with some algorithmic way of drawing districts. But for practical purposes this unlikely to ever happen. But I'm hopeful because of the effort of Democratic states to recognize the gerrymandering and turning it into a standoff of sorts. To date, there's been no reason not to gerrymander if you can do it, and Republicans have seriously overreached.
In 2011 Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. The DVD business would be called "Qwikster", which was mocked. Eventually they reversed the decision.
Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.
Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
> Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy
Where can one find those extensive disclosures, especially for year 2024/2025? I'd love to hear how Microsoft are protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a track record of excelling at whatever you'd call the opposite of those two things.
I guess you're familiar with those resources since you're claiming those mention Microsoft's approach to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy in Saudi Arabia. Could you please be kind and provide direct links to that/those page(s)? I opened and read through the links, but probably it's in some sub-page? Didn't manage to find anything about it.
Every step along the way, Microsoft picks "key" areas/terms/subjects, so they're only covering a few human rights that they convinced themselves are most important. Within each covered item, you'll find a couple of paragraphs that explain why complying can be problematic if they want to make more money, and a few lines of manager speak and links to "projects" and "partnerships" that vaguely promise to accomplish vague goals on a vague timeline with no mention of what happens if they fail their goals.
Countries and specific risks are not named. Microsoft may as well be helping Netanyahu organize optimal genocide directly and they'll still be able to barf up some manager speak to explain why they're trying real hard, honest!
Their statements are full of talk like:
> Our commitment to the rule of law
carries with it the legal obligation to comply with applicable local law. When we face requests from governments to provide user data or remove content, we work to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression by assessing whether the government requests are valid, legally binding, compliant with applicable law, and consistent with international laws, principles, and norms on human rights and the rule of law.
(in other words: they'll just ask legal if they should comply with government requests and that's supposed to protect your freedom of speech)
And gems like:
> The GNI Board concluded that we met our commitment to GNI to make
“good-faith efforts to implement the
GNI Principles with improvement over
time.
(in other words: we've managed to convince the GNI board that we really care)
In 2016 Saudi Arabia was armed to the teeth by the Trump (Administration #1) to launch a huge multibillion invasion of the Yemen, bombing, cutting off food supplies, as a tactic of war, causing a famine which left over 370k people dead.
In addition the Saudi's Armed the gnocidal Jajaweed/RSF (again with US weaponry) to fight in Yemen, the same RSF who have now creating mayhem and collapse in the Sudan.
The question is, given these encyclopaedic statements about corporate responsibility, for what exactly do they count for? when Microsoft is happy to engage with this regime which:
which arms and supplies a group known to practice mass genocide/ janjaweed /rsf sponsored by Saudis
* a government which practices mass starvation and invasions of it neighbour
* is know for torturing and dismembering dissidents alive
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.
Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.
All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.
This is the canned response for advising against a shareholder proposal. We’re already doing x, no need to vote for this nitwits shareholder proposal.
Another example that was written almost exactly the same, when a shareholder asked what Caterpillar were doing to avoid their machinery being used for deforestation in at risk locations.
If you’ve heard of activist investors, this is their battle ground. Buying enough of a company, tabling votes and then getting their preferred board candidates and shareholder votes put through.
Check the latest proxy statement for the AGM. This is where these votes are brought up in advance and then at the meeting they’re voting on, along with board seats.
Are human rights concerns running cover for more straightforward financial interests here? Norway and Saudi Arabia are both petrostates with large sovereign wealth funds.
Norway's SWF has become increasingly politicized [0] due to the death of the center and the rise of the populist left and right, which is a common issue for any SWF in a Western Democracy. The same thing happened with CalPERS, the Alaska Permanent Fund, Australia's Future Fund, and the Ontario Teacher's Fund as well because these funds are not firewalled off from politicians, thus making them ripe for a populist conversion into ideologically activist funds (this is a both sides problems - as can be seen in California [1] and Florida's [2] case).
A major reason why the gold standard of SWFs are funds like Singapore's Temasek, Japan's GPIF, or South Korea's KIC is because they work hard to remain technocratic in nature and single minded about their goal: provide an economic base for self sufficiency for their citizens should adverse economic crises hit, along with the economic cushion to underwrite social security and welfare programs.
At some point for an SWF, too much "democracy" just becomes a hinderance to the underlying mission, which in Norway's case, building a SWF to support Norwegian state pensions in perpetuity once their oil wealth dries up.
Complaining about "woke/ESG investments" (like in Florida) or stunting about "human rights abuses" (like in CalPERS or Norway's case) doesn't actually shift the needle one way or the other because most other institutional investors (public and private) are much more single-minded about their aims, and a number of funds and LPs have begun to reject investments from politicized SWFs because of the headaches associated with a fund that wasn't supported to be an activist fund dealing with an internal conflict over becoming one or not.
SWFs are a fundamental weapon in a government's economic arsenal, and using them in a non-strategic but politically popular manner leads to you only stealing the future from your kids - as can be seen with the woes the Alaska Permanent Fund now faces due to populist promising of constantly raising the Alaska dividend.
Talking about th "death of the centre" in the context of Norway shows a lack of understanding of Norwegian politics, and even more so of the relatively broad consensus over ethics rules for Norway's wealth fund.
E.g. the recent tightening of rules over investment in Israel saw the centre-left social democrat led government criticised by parties across the political spectrum.
This is common for Norway, where there often is broad, cross-party consensus on these things.
That's not true. Both Japan's and Singapore's fund follow ESG guidelines. Avoiding Israeli investments is no more "woke" than avoiding investing in tobacco companies. It's only "politicized" because you don't agree with their politics.
I'm not complaining about ESG - I think it's an overloaded term that fell prey to populist attacks from the right, as I pointed out in my Florida example.
What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost. This is why the GPIF and KIC heavily invested in China and each other despite both counties fighting trade wars amongst themselves. And similar to how Temasek heavily invested in Malaysia in the 1980s-90s despite virulently anti-Singaporean and anti-Chinese sentiment in Malaysia back then.
In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
And this specific case in the article is about Microsoft's investment in KSA which is unrelated to the Israel-Gaza Conflict. And in all honesty, when the far right end up winning in Norway in 2-3 election cycles, they'll do similarly stupid shenanigans with the GPF.
Non-experts do not have to have a say in every single nitty gritty decision. At some point, governance needs to be left to the administrators. And not everything needs to be a moral battle or culture war.
>What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost
Primary? Yes. But Norway's fund explicitly and consistently claims that it cares about environment and societal effects of it's investments. Everything else you say follows from this premise, but Norway's fund stubbornly refuses to invest "no matter the cost".
>In all honesty, it's people like you like you who have lead politicans on both the right and the left to realize that turning SWFs into a political football yields electoral wins while ignoring the long-term impact it has.
In all honesty, people like you like you - who believe it's morally OK to support any atrocity as long as it makes money - make the world a progressively worse place by ignoring long-term global impact of those decisions.
> What I'm saying is the primary goal of a sovereign wealth fund is to invest in developing an economic cushion for it's home country no matter the cost.
Obviously there has to be some nuance there. It wouldn't be a good idea for Norway to dump their entire SWF into the Russian economy even if their economic analysis showed that this was the most prudent thing to do with the money.
And national security is absolutely intertwined with the operation of a SWF, but these are very nuanced discussions that cannot be decided willy nilly based on electoral whims.
These are complex and nuanced topics that cannot be resolved via simple populist retorts, which only puts strategy at the backseat at the expense of electoral short-termism.
And this is why examples like Florida's "anti-woke investment" law which lead Florida to miss out on a significant amount of green and renewable investment opportunities that equally red Georgia took advantage of, and California's complete opposite "banning of all greenhouse gas adjacent industries" lead CalPERS to take a significant beating despite similarly progressive funds in Colorado and Oregon continuing to invest in ONG adjacent sectors.
Your reference for #1, The Center Square, is a conservative rag and not a neutral source. Also, the source cited in its article, is from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian advocacy organization. Can you provide an actual source that is not some political advocacy organization? This is no better than if someone used an article from Mother Jones to support the assertion of how awesome CalPERS is. Do better.
I had trouble getting one. I thought I was prepared. I brought in my passport, my social security card, my paystubs, and stacks of utility bills to prove my residence.
They told me bills needed to be physically postmarked, not printed, so what I brought didn't count. The problem was I had gone digital/paperless, so I hardly ever received physical bills in the mail.
I eventually had to switch two of them to paper billing, wait a month or two, get the bill, and then use that before switching back, then go back to the DMV. It was really annoying.
I haven't had a social security card in decades since a wallet was stolen. I do have a passport (and global entry card) but I basically get almost no paystubs/utility bills/etc. in the mail.
When I got my RealID license I forget what I needed to dig out but it was annoying. (Was able to handle through AAA rather than DMV though.)
I don't get it. Nobody blinked twice about getting into a car with a total stranger before Uber either — taxis have been around for well over a hundred years. It's not exactly a huge cultural change, just more efficient and convenient.
The Senate is not subject to garrymandering and if we fixed the issues with the House (literally via any mechanism) the Senate would immediately go back to being the vehicle used to prevent the will of the people (see the Senate under Mitch McConnell any time the House was under Democrat control)
Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.
The Senate is in a permanent state of gerrymandering.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
In 1776, the population of Virgin was about 500K, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were about 270K, and Delaware and Georgia were about 50K each.
The founders knew exactly what they were agreeing to when they gave each State two Senators. It’s supposed to be a separate check on the Federal power to force a wide swathe of consensus.
California currently has of 60x the population of Wyoming, which means that Wyoming voters have over 60x the voting power in the Senate as California voters.
Whether the founders intended that or not it's a shitty, unfair, and undemocratic system that doesn't act as a check, it just enables permanent minority rule.
It was semi intentional. It wasn't as extreme but the Senate was still a compromise for smaller states to have leverage in government and get them to sign on.
Meanwhile, the house is about 10 times smaller than what the founders envisioned. Maybe that's overkill but we probably should at least expand the house quite a bit. And Probably expand the supreme court as well.
I would argue then that the Senate is extremely overpowered. The disproportionate body should be a brake on the power of the government, not be the literally stronger half of Congress.
The fact that the most democratic part of the US government, the house of reps, is now the weakest part of the US legislature is ridiculous.
If we're dreaming up fixes, I'd say
1) Senate actions should require a strict majority. If anything should require super-majorities, it should be the House of Representatives.
2) The Senate should not be in control of appointments to the exclusion of House of Reps. No idea what the ideal system is there but the disproportionate body should not be more powerful than the proportionate body.
3) The Senate should be able to at most block an action for one term of Congress. That means that every Senate action can be overridden by an election. Which means the disproportionate body is effectively calling a referendum on legislation, instead of being a hard-stop.
the problem is that since 1911 the house has also been a compromise for smaller states to have leverage because it's capped at 435 total members regardless of population. we've gone from a system of dynamic tension between popular rule and representation for smaller populaces to a system where both houses are on the side of the "underrepresented" to an extent where they're actually vastly overrepresented. Combine that with the electoral college (which again allows a ruling elite to overrule the populace and advantages smaller states) and the fact that the elitist president and elitist senate pick the supreme court and you can see where the so-called "underrepresented" populations are actually the ones in charge of every branch of government.
This is, of course, exactly what the founding fathers intended. They disliked kings but they feared rule by common people and always intended there to be a privileged class of citizenry that does the actual ruling because people like you and me are just too ignorant to be trusted with that. That's why they excluded the vast majority of people from voting at all and those that were allowed to vote had their power diluted by various mechanistic means like capping the senate, flooring the house (and later capping it as well), using the electoral college to make sure that those precious few who vote at all don't vote incorrectly and having the least representative members of the executive and legislative branch select the judicial branch so that they're not swayed by "politics" (read: what the governed actually want).
And that's how we have a system that claims to be a democracy but where what people want is actually completely disconnected from what happens, and where "The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all" (https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/).
doubly so because the house has been floored since inception and capped since 1911, the president gets elected by the electoral college (which favors smaller states) and the president and senate pick the supreme court so there is no proportional representation anywhere and there hasn't been for over a hundred years
If states are so independent and equal that they demand exact same legislative power as fifty times bigger states, then maybe that equality should be full? Like for example equal federal monetary transhes to every equal state? And equal taxes collected from each state? No?
I doubt the founders considered the possibility that political realignment would result in nearly all low population states being on one side of the spectrum.
The very top and very bottom are a 55% to 45% split in either direction. It's not a heavy skew, a single party flip in the quintile from the majority to the minority would make it 50/50 even. Those quintiles cancel each other out when voting on party/caucus lines. It's actually the 2nd and 4th quintiles that have the biggest skews. Democrats take the 2nd quintile while Republicans take the 3rd and 4th.
I definitely appreciate your measurements, but I think your analysis is off.
The top & bottom quintiles don't cancel out, but rather support the same trend, which is that Republicans have more voting power per capita.
That said, I am surprised that the top & bottom quintiles are nearly balanced. I'll have to look up which bottom quintile states have Democratic senators.
I agree, the data does indeed show that Republicans have more voting power per capita, as they have advantages in the bottom 3 quintiles. However, I don't think the correlation of population to party (at the state level) is as extreme as some try to portray it. There are high population Republican states as well as low population Democratic ones. Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire are Democratic states in the bottom quintile.
The top has 11 Democratic votes and 9 Republican votes. The bottom has 9 Democratic votes and 11 Republican votes. If they all vote on party lines it's a tie. So it's really the middle population states that give Republicans their current edge.
It's a frequent criticism that smaller states have outsized representation relative to their population. The US is not alone in this, the EU also has the same characteristic. Germany, the most populous, has over 150 times the population of Malta, the least populous, but only 16 times the amount of representation in parliament (96 MEP vs 6 MEP). By comparison, the largest state, California, has 37 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming, but 18 times the representation in Congress and the electoral college (54 vs 3). Granted, it's not an apples to apples comparison as the votes are divided between houses and the relative power of the EU vs the US federal government but it's a comparison nonetheless.
It's a compromise when trying to form a union of political entities that differ so greatly in size. The smaller entities obviously give up some sovereignty to their larger counterparts. The larger ones seem to have to have to reciprocate in a meaningful way to keep a voluntary union.
The existence of the Virginia Plan (the Large State Plan) and the New Jersey Plan (the Small State Plan) indicates that balancing the differing interests of high- and low- population states was a prominent concern of the founders. I think they would expect states to often align by population size since that very thing occurring at the convention led to the compromise written into the Constitution.
I have a hard time conceiving of matters that states would separate themselves on by population size other then proportional representation in Congress back then.
I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
>I suppose, however, that the majority of low-population states were also frontier states, seems like a fairly compelling distinction.
Not so much, unless you consider Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont to be "frontier" states in 1787. Actual frontier states like Georgia were in favor of the Virginia Plan as they figured their population would grow soon enough and they could take advantage of their eventual large population (with slaves being counted as 3/5 of a person) in a "Virginia Plan" world.
The Connecticut Compromise[0][3] ended up in the Constitution as a reconciliation of the Virginia Plan[1][4] and the New Jersey Plan[2][5], with the larger states supporting the Virginia Plan and smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan.
The above is incredibly abridged and ignores much context. As such, I strongly recommend you read Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the US Constitution[7] (the result of the Connecticut Compromise) as well as the original Virginia and New Jersey plans, or at least the wikipedia pages I linked for a much better discourse on the topic.
[3] The current system. Which differs from the original only in direct election of Senators, rather than them being appointed by state legislatures[6].
[4] Proposed a bicameral legislature with both houses apportioned by population.
[5] Proposed a unicameral legislature with one vote per state.
No, I like the way the Senate runs in theory. Equal representation for the states regardless of size. Only if it's alongside the house with proportionate representation.
That seems like a good theory that would keep itself in check.
In execution it's an absolute shit show, I'll give you. But I do believe the theory is sound. With the house and the Senate we get the best of both worlds.
Why is the theory sound? It’s an arbitrary number of regions delineated by arbitrary lines given a disproportionate amount of power that run completely counter to the goal of a democracy.
Because tyranny of the majority is still a thing. Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes. So the house is there as a large power and senate can check it.
Of course, in practice the house is way under represented so its almost like we have a senate and a mini-senate. That's where things fall apart.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
I don't see why that would be the case. To win an election you don't need to win states at all; you need to win lots of voters, and those voters could come from anywhere.
You could lose every single voter in both CA and TX and still win the election, given different political demographics across states.
As an aside, I also think abolishing the Electoral College and going strictly by the national popular vote would increase voter turnout for presidential elections. I live in a solidly blue state, and if I didn't care about down-ballot races, I probably wouldn't bother to vote in presidential elections, since my vote doesn't really matter here. Only votes in swing states matter under the current system.
> Elections would just switch from swing states to appealing to California and Texas if we did everything with purely popular votes.
No, it wouldn’t. It would switch to appealing to the most voters, who may or may not happen to live in California and Texas, but that is irrelevant to a democracy.
Yes. I hope I don't need to explain the many times that the majority sentiment was in fact not the correct one. A pure democracy under the basis the US was founded under would end up much more conservative than what we have today.
> It would switch to appealing to the most voters.
So it'd switch to appealing to urban cities and ignore the rural areas. Iirc the top 10 cities today make up some 40+% of voters. Why bother going to Omaha when you can focus instead of LA and NYC?
You are taking a very narrow one sided view. We live in a Republic of states, not a Federal Democracy. I know you would like this to happen, but it won't here for good reasons.
There is no “good” reason. It just so happens to be the way the power dynamics of the past have played out, and there has not yet been sufficient motivation for the population to go to war.
the senate was not originally meant to be elected. It was a way for the elites to maintain order if populism got out of hand. People often forget that the entire US Constitution is a response to the crisis of Shays Rebellion where the poor starting rebelling and even getting their members elected under the articles of confederation. The whole point of the senate is to limit democracy's threat to elites
Minority forces of change also happen for the good as well. There aren't too many landmark cases where the majority suddenly voted to give more representation, more power to workers, nor simply cede powers previously enjoyed by government.
Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things. They set their own laws.
Having 1 chamber that allows equal representation
And
Having 1 chamber that allows proportionate
Is a good system in theory. Otherwise, States (which are again separate entities) with high populations just steamroll those that have low populations.
The system now allows states with high populations to be appropriately represented in the house, which sends bills to the Senate.
I feel like it's a good system, in theory. You get your population representation and checks and balances for rural areas as well.
You keep saying "in theory". If the practice -- as you seem to admit -- doesn't actually work, then what's the point defending the theory? It doesn't work in practice, so it's a bad idea.
> Arbitrary or not, States are sovereign things.
In practice that's not really true. The federal government has many, many levers it can use to get states to fall in line.
In theory, but in practice, most states are highly dependent on a few very populous and productive ones, for economic and military protection.
Not to mention that the Feds control the purchasing power of the currency and international trade, so the states aren’t sovereign to do anything of consequence.
Hence in practice, this whole theory of states being sovereign goes out the window.
States are sovereign entities with their own laws. They can even, in theory, secede from the union.
The Senate is a good system, it's just that most states are Republican.
Some of the larger states might consider splitting themselves into separate states to better represent their populations. Though that may not be constitutionally possible.
If we ever add additional states to the Union (Puerto Rico, D.C., etc.), they'll want to enjoy having an equal say with every other state in the Union. It's a compelling feature of our system.
The House, as a proportional system, actually needs to be re-normalized. There are not enough representatives to have an actually proportional vote.
Is it a good system? I'm not sure I understand why? The system as it's designed seems to want to incentivize having many low population states as a way to spread and gain power, and as such the current 100 power holders are incentivized to to protect their power by preventing the dilution of their power that would come with more states.
Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control this is frequently mentioned and brought up several times in this post alone. Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
> Is it a good system? I'm not sure I understand why?
States have sovereignty and rights.
The point is that all states have equal representation.
> Not sure what aspects make it a good system, some type of beleaguered point about preventing tyranny of the majority? At what cost? tyranny of the minority, political stagnation?
Because states are political test tubes and need autonomy.
> Additionally, because the population of the country is not evenly distributed across all the states, senators from some states have disproportionate power and control
In my lifetime, the Senate has been majority Democratic party controlled [1].
If you go back to the second Bush term, it's been 60% Democrat.
The current party makeup is only temporary. Things are constantly in flux.
Most states are Republican only because of first past the post system. If states internally did democratic majority elections, then most of them would turn progressive very fast. Including Texas, which is already democratic, but is suppressed by a blatant corruption via gerrymandering.
The Senate is a terrible system. There's no logical reason why citizens in one state should have orders of magnitude more say in the federal government than citizens in another.
The founders aren't infallible gods, and they really fucked up here.
Unlike in many other countries, where provinces or regions are merely administrative divisions created to decentralize or streamline administration, the US emerged when states voluntarily came together and decided to create a country. The states were willing to outsource part of their autonomy to a federal level, on condition that guardrails were put in place to limit the power of that federal level. Those guardrails were: bicameralism, equal representation of states in the Senate, and the electoral college. The House is the voice of the people, the Senate is the voice of the states.
The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively prevents a majority of voters from large urban centers from imposing their will onto rural populations, at least at the federal level. It was designed that way.
I've seen comments here claiming that countries like Canada or France deliver better outcomes than the US. They are stronger welfare states, yes, but they also have become overly paternalistic nanny states, with heavy-handed regulations, and high taxes stifling individual initiative.
The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively allows a minority of voters from rural areas to impose their will onto large urban centers
The fact that we have minority rule in the Senate, House, and Supreme Court is exactly why we don't have any checks and balances any more and Trump gets to act like an emperor.
Again, you're saying "minority rule". But Trump (Republican) won the popular vote. So which party is the minority?
Do you have another way of determining which party is the majority/minority besides votes for the President?
It seems clear that the majority in the 2024 election preferred Republican governance, and so they gained control over President/House/Senate.
Is this a joke? You think Democrat Senators got 24 million more votes? Where are you getting these nonsense numbers?
Update
Here are some rough numbers I found quickly (because your numbers are obvious nonsense):
President
R - 77.3m - 49.8%
D - 75.0m - 48.3%
Others - 2.9m - 1.9%
Senate
D - 55.9m - 49.1%
R - 54.4m - 47.7%
Others - 3.7m - 3.2%
House
R - 74.4m - 49.8%
D - 70.6m - 47.2%
Others - 4.6m - 3.1%
Looks like the system is working to me. The Senate vote not withstanding of course because of some smaller states, but it's not some extreme miscarriage of justice as you imply. The majority party won and is currently enacting policies that voters wanted. I'm sorry that your beliefs aren't as popular as you thought.
Sorry, I copy and pasted wrong, the Democratic senators represent 24M more people, and had about 2.8M more votes, yet have 6 fewer seats counting the independents that caucus with the Dems.
So fewer voters and constituents for a pretty significant majority in senators.
No, the _minority_ vote argument still holds. The Republican senators represent a minority of the vote and population, yet have a strong majority in the Senate. It's minority rule.
Do you have a better way of determining which party is the "majority" in Congress? That is what we are discussing here. Whether the current makeup of Congress accurately represents the votes of the people or not.
Obviously I understand that not every person voted in the election (many are not even eligible). It is simply not relevant to this conversation, and is an often trotted out diversion meant to diminish the mandate given by the actual voters.
In this case it’s much simpler: the question was minority rule and you can see that power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is held by Republican politicians representing less than a majority—Trump is arguably the best claim they have on plurality since he is come very close to winning the popular vote since so many Democrats stayed home—and enacting policies which are very unpopular, in most cases policies which are unpopular even among registered Republicans.
They were logical at the time they were implemented. Most of those reasons have been invalid since the Civil War, and should have been fixed during Reconstruction, except the winners didn't have the foresight or political will to do what needed to be done.
Gerrymandering is particular powerful because Congress has refused to reapportion representatives for over a century. They just decided to stop following that part of the Constitution back in 1929. We still have the same number of representatives as we did when we were less than a third our current population. Each representative now covers 20 times more people than when the Constitution was ratified.
Yes and: our first-past-the-post form of elections begets gerrymandering.
My future perfect world:
proportional representation for assemblies (eg US House),
some arbitrarily low number of reps per citizens (200k - 400k?),
no upper assembly (eg US Senate),
approval voting for executive positions (eg Mayor, Sheriff, President),
only public financing of campaigns,
limit campaign season to maybe 6 weeks.
Friendly amendments to my wishlist cheerfully accepted.
There's so many reasonable, impactful reforms which could be done. And my wishlist is based on my (imperfect) understanding of best available (political) science. And I'm all ears about SCOTUS reforms. And I doubt any reforms will stick, so long as our gini coefficient is so out of whack (wealth vs democracy, the timeless struggle).
I wonder if it slowly progresses over time, or if it develops opportunistically once some other bodily system that keeps it in check breaks down with age.
You have one misfolded protein that “teaches” other proteins to misfold in the same way[1]. It’s very slow initially because you’re talking about individual proteins, and it takes a while for each prion to bump into a normal protein of the correct type. The immune system can’t do anything about them though, so once a protein is converted there’s permanently another prion. The conversion rate is very slow, but it never ever ratchets back - the number only increases. It’s a geometric progression.
Once symptoms show up there’s a TON of them, and it goes downhill fairly quickly. That’s why there’s such a long latency period.
WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it.
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
Every branch of the federal government has experienced a decline in democratic accountability.
The House is so gerrymandered that only 10% of seats are remotely competitive each year, and it hasn't kept up with population growth.
The Senate is permanently gerrymandered, with state population differences that are far more disproportionate than what was originally designed for and intended when the Constitution was written.
This combined with hyper-partisanship prevents the US from accepting new states like Washington DC (population 700,000+) and Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million), depriving millions of US citizens from Congressional representation (no, non-voting representatives don't count).
The Supreme Court has become hyperpartisan, and appointments are a high stake circus that rely on arbitrary retirements and deaths. They need to be elected at this point to preserve democratic legitimacy.
As for the Presidency... the Electoral College has resulted in the election of the loser of a popular vote twice in 25 years.
I don't know how reform will happen, or if we'll ever see it in my lifetime but we desperately need it. The US government needs to be accountable to the people again.
Democracy is precious, and it's so tragic to see how much it's declined.