Making the US Senate More Representative

[lpetrich]

The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College - Vox

After discussing the Electoral College, the article gets into the Senate. It has two members per state, and they were originally elected by state legislatures. The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, made Senators elected by each state's voters instead. I've seen some right-wingers call for returning to the Senate's original electors.

The Senate started out by working by majority vote, and that is what's in the Federalist Papers. The filibuster emerged in the 19th cy. and was not used very much for a long time. Mainly on anti-lynching and civil-rights bills, however. Senate rules allow for "cloture", a vote to end debate on some measure. The cloture rule was established in 1917, and it was originally 2/3 of Senators that are present.

In 1975, the cloture threshold was lowered to three-fifths of all senators. In the decades following this, the prevalence of bills and nominations blocked by filibusters greatly increased. At the same time, Congress has created several exceptions to the filibuster rules, most notably the increasingly used “reconciliation” rules, which allow bills affecting the budget to be passed by majority vote, and, in the past decade, the abolition of supermajority requirements for all presidential nominations.

Filibusters originally took the form of Senators talking and talking and talking, but a recent change was "holds", where a Senator could threaten to do that. Sort of like the fake war in ST:TOS "A Taste of Armageddon".

Since the Senate is two Senators per state, it effectively overrepresents inland rural states. As AOC said about the Electoral College, it's a form of affirmative action.

One can work around the Electoral College by the states agreeing on something like National Popular Vote, but the Senate is more difficult.

Compared to this, the challenges to fixing or abolishing the Senate are much bigger. There is no plausible fix like the NPV without a constitutional amendment. Furthermore, Article 5 of the Constitution states that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” This appears to imply that even an ordinary constitutional amendment couldn’t change the way Senate seats are allocated or abolish the body.

One would need to override that provision before doing something like altering the Senate's composition or abolishing it.

 

[repoman]

Or just reorganize all states.

Although I am kinda partial to a state of San Andreas containing cities of Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas, eh I mean Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Not the worst idea, but it's not going to prevent the dilution of the Master Race gene pool. Only some good old fashioned genocide is going to do that.

Or ethnic cleansing, which is one of Trump's biggest accomplishments so far.

Maybe, but white suicides are up

https://twitter.com/ROHLL5/status/1210679166170890240

 

[RVonse]

The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College - Vox

Citizens United is a much bigger problem (by order of magnitude) than either the senate problem or the electoral college put together. (rvonse post 20)

 

[lpetrich]

First, one can weaken or abolish the filibuster.

Second, one can admit DC and Puerto Rico as states.

Third, one can strip the Senate of some of its authority, or even most of that. But that would require a Constitutional amendment, and that involves 2/3 of the Senate agreeing. A Constitutional Convention could be a way around that, but that would be a joker in the political deck.

American democracy’s Senate problem, explained - Vox

Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and advocacy organization, is trying to raise alarm bells about the issue. In a new memo, co-founder Colin McAuliffe writes that “the Senate is an irredeemable institution” that’s biased 3 percentage points in the GOP’s favor and systematically underweights the interests of nonwhite Americans.

...
A key issue is race. As the US has gotten more diverse, that diversity has spread throughout the country unevenly. It’s not impossible for a state to be both small and diverse (Hawaii) or even small and heavily urbanized (Rhode Island), but lower-population states tend to be whiter, more rural, and less educated than average. The result is a system of “racism by proxy” that overweights the interests and opinions of white voters over those of black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.

Back when the US was founded, the most populous colony, Virginia, was 12.6 times as populous as the least populous colony, Delaware. Counting only free people, it was only 8 times as populous.

Nowadays, it is much worse, with the most populous state, California, being 68 times as populous as the least populous state, Wyoming. State boundaries are historical accidents more than anything else.

When currently big states like Texas, Illinois, Florida, and California were admitted to the Union, their populations were not particularly large, and there was no specific intention to downweight their residents.

As of the 1860 US census, for example, Texas and California both had fewer residents than Maine, and Vermont was bigger than Minnesota or even Florida.

For most of America’s history, meanwhile, nonwhite participation in the political process was suppressed so dramatically that the racial skew of the Senate was a non-issue. In the contemporary US, that’s not the case — America’s large and growing nonwhite minority enjoys, in theory, equal citizenship rights. But today’s Senate overrepresents white voters and significantly underrepresents nonwhite ones.

 

[lpetrich]

But the non-college-educated white vote has been shifting rightward at a rapid clip even as the overall country has diversified, meaning the partisan skew has grown considerably more severe in recent years.

It’s also worth emphasizing that though the current GOP majority in the Senate is of recent vintage, it’s also built on a remarkably thin electoral base. In 2014, Republican candidates won 52 percent of the vote and gained nine Senate seats. Two years later, Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and gained only two seats. And in 2018, even if you ignore the California race (where both candidates were Democrats because no Republican did well enough in the first round to qualify for round two), Democrats won 54 percent of the vote and lost two seats.

Rather than the country’s growing diversity offering a path out of this bind, it only underscores the fact that the skew is likely to grow as well, with the non-college-educated white share of key Midwestern swing states remaining higher than the national average.

This is a big problem for Democrats in the Electoral College in 2020, but in the long term they can expect the balance of power there to shift as big states like Texas and Georgia become swing states that carry huge electoral prizes. In the Senate, however, that can’t nearly compensate for the rightward drift of not only the key Midwestern Electoral College swing states, but also nearby Minnesota as well as smaller, super-white states like New Hampshire and Maine.

Author Matthew Yglesias can't think of a simple way out. Statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would help, but not much.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College - Vox

Citizens United is a much bigger problem (by order of magnitude) than either the senate problem or the electoral college put together. (rvonse post 20)

Citizens United is not a problem, it simply exposes a problem. The court made the right decision, it doesn't matter how popular an idea is if it goes against the Constitution. The only way we will get money out of politics is with a constitutional amendment and even there we need to tread awfully carefully.

 

[lpetrich]

As I was perusing the campaign sites of some progressive candidates for the US Congress, I noted a remarkable proposal:

Make the Senate use this system:  Mixed-member proportional representation

Here is how MMP works. The legislature has two kinds of seats, district seats and at-large seats. Each voter has two votes, one for a district-seat candidate for one's district, and one for a political party. The district seats are filled with the winning district-seat candidates and the at-large seats are filled by party candidates to make the entire legislature have a party composition that is proportional to the votes for each party. From the tradition of parties proposing lists of candidates to seat, the at-large seats are often called list seats. Some places add extra at-large seats ("overhang seats") to make the overall results proportional if necessary.

It must be noted that many nations use only the at-large or list seats in this system, and also that in many cases, the at-large seats are selected over superdistricts and not the legislature as a whole.

Nations and subnational polities that use MMP -  List of electoral systems by country

Polity	Dist	List	L/D
Germany	299	299	1
New Zealand	72	120	1.67
Thailand	350	150	0.43
Lesotho	80	40	0.5
Bolivia	70	60	0.86
Scotland (UK)	73	56	0.77
Wales (UK)	40	20	0.5

 

[lpetrich]

Applying MMP to the US Senate, the existing Senate becomes the district seats, and those seats' elections work like the existing Senate's elections.

One might have list-seat elections every two years, with voters picking a party for the Senate in every even year. They would do that even if no district-seat Senators would be elected in some year.

There is a problem.

The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription | National Archives

Article V: "... no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."

One would have to either (1) amend the Constitution or else (2) argue that that only applies to the district seats and not to the list seats.

I don't know how plausible (2) is, but when the advocates of the most expansive interpretations of the Second Amendment don't argue for the gun rights of prisoners, it might be possible to pull that off.

 

[Swammerdami]

The U.K. also has weird inequity IIUC. In 2019 Wales, with only 4.9% of the population, had 6.2% of the seats in House of Commons. Why?

This is especially unfair to England, IIUC, since Wales and Scotland have their own legislatures while England has only the Parliament.

Why is it always ignored that it’s the United STATES.

Because the division into States is an archaism from the days when it was a long buggy ride from Boston to New York and many people didn't own a buggy. Is the cultural difference between North and South Dakota really so great that they need to be separated? I think I could name ten counties in California any pair of which are more different from each other culturally than, say, the Dakotas, or Carolinas.

Also wrong is the claim that "Land" deserves representation as well as people. Even if that principle were accepted, it wouldn't explain why Rhode Island and Delaware "deserve" statehood. Nor why Texas gets only two Senators.

 

[Jayjay]

It must be noted that many nations use only the at-large or list seats in this system, and also that in many cases, the at-large seats are selected over superdistricts and not the legislature as a whole.

The first statement makes no sense. If a nation uses only the list seats, then it's no longer a mixed member system. It'd be a plain old party list proportional system.

I suppose this would be a compromise for a country that wants to move away from FPTP, but in my opinion it's a just a band-aid. Also I'm not sure if the senate is the best place to apply it: with only a 100 senators, you'd have to add a lot of new seats to compensate, because reducing the number of senators per state seems unlikely to be accepted. Furthermore the senate term being 6 years with one third being elected every two years means that proportionality would be a bit trickier.

Maybe it'd work better in the house. Of course, this is purely hypothetical because there is no freaking way Americans would ever accept some fancy-pants European system to replace their own.

 

[lpetrich]

 Demography of the United Kingdom

What	Population	Fraction	Has parl
England	56.6 M	84.3%
Scotland	5.5 M	8.2%	X
Wales	3.2 M	4.7%	X
N Ireland	1.9 M	2.8%	X
Total	67.1 M	100%	X

 

[Bomb#20]

Here is how MMP works. The legislature has two kinds of seats, district seats and at-large seats. Each voter has two votes, one for a district-seat candidate for one's district, and one for a political party. The district seats are filled with the winning district-seat candidates and the at-large seats are filled by party candidates to make the entire legislature have a party composition that is proportional to the votes for each party. From the tradition of parties proposing lists of candidates to seat, the at-large seats are often called list seats. Some places add extra at-large seats ("overhang seats") to make the overall results proportional if necessary.

This sounds like a way to get the worst aspects of both systems. The FPTP district seats and Duverger's Law ensure that the Republicans and Democrats will maintain their two-party cartel on legislation, while the list seats ensure that the two parties get their party bosses into the legislature whether or not the voters want to primary them out.

 

[TomC]

The Senate was designed to prevent democratic republican government. Back when the Founding Fathers didn't believe in that.

The USA was far more "States" than "United", and we certainly weren't representative of America.
Tom

 

[WAB]

The Senate was designed to prevent democratic republican government. Back when the Founding Fathers didn't believe in that.

The USA was far more "States" than "United", and we certainly weren't representative of America.
Tom

Well said. Ain't it great to live in the good ole U. S. of I?

Show

[United States of India. ]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Here is how MMP works. The legislature has two kinds of seats, district seats and at-large seats. Each voter has two votes, one for a district-seat candidate for one's district, and one for a political party. The district seats are filled with the winning district-seat candidates and the at-large seats are filled by party candidates to make the entire legislature have a party composition that is proportional to the votes for each party. From the tradition of parties proposing lists of candidates to seat, the at-large seats are often called list seats. Some places add extra at-large seats ("overhang seats") to make the overall results proportional if necessary.

This sounds like a way to get the worst aspects of both systems. The FPTP district seats and Duverger's Law ensure that the Republicans and Democrats will maintain their two-party cartel on legislation, while the list seats ensure that the two parties get their party bosses into the legislature whether or not the voters want to primary them out.

This. The party-based votes are a horrible idea because it ensures government is about working for the parties, not for the people.

 

[Trausti]

The better way to improve the Senate, and the House, is for a term limits amendment.

 

[lpetrich]

The better way to improve the Senate, and the House, is for a term limits amendment.

What would term limits accomplish?

 

[Derec]

This sounds like a way to get the worst aspects of both systems. The FPTP district seats and Duverger's Law ensure that the Republicans and Democrats will maintain their two-party cartel on legislation, while the list seats ensure that the two parties get their party bosses into the legislature whether or not the voters want to primary them out.

No, it does not. The list seats mean that smaller parties get the number of seats based on their proportion of votes. Germany has this system. It is basically proportional representation for purposes of determining the overall makeup of the legislature, but you can still send specific people with the individual vote. To avoid many tiny parties getting a few seats each and making a stable government impossible, Germany has a 5% hurdle to move into the Bundestag. However, if a candidate wins a direct seat, he or she gets in regardless of whether the party failed the 5% hurdle. And if a party gets 3 direct seats, all their list seats get filled even if they failed to reach 5%, to help regional parties.

 

[Swammerdami]

The better way to improve the Senate, and the House, is for a term limits amendment.

What would term limits accomplish?

In principle, term limits may seem like a terrible idea. In practice, it would be nice to find some way to counter the huge power of incumbency, and the corrupt symbiosis (and "revolving-door") connecting legislators to corporations and lobbyists.

The U.S.A. was not the first nation to consider this problem! Although chosen for life IIUC — so the opposite of term limits — the Venetians were intent on keeping their Chief of State, the Doge, uncorrupt. The Doge's offspring were not allowed to hold office; the Doge was not permitted to own land in foreign countries; diplomatic mail had to be unsealed in the presence of other officials; and so on. The procedure for selecting a Doge was amusingly complicated ( Doge_of_Venice#Selection_of_the_Doge):

New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.

Before taking the oath of investiture, the doge-elect was presented to the concio with the words: "This is your doge, if it please you." This ceremonial gesture signified the assent of the Venetian people. This practice came to an end with the abolition of the concio in 1423; after the election of Francesco Foscari, he was presented with the unconditional pronouncement – "Your doge"

I'm not going to Google — was it in North Carolina? — but a few years ago, several $100,000's were given to a Republican Governor as obvious bribery. The slimebag was convicted, but the conviction was reversed on appeal for lack of a clearcut "smoking gun." (Only idiots would be recorded on a telephone acknowledging a quid pro quo.)

I'm afraid the People's Republic of China has the best solution: Death penalty for corruption by a public official.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'm afraid the People's Republic of China has the best solution: Death penalty for corruption by a public official.

Given the PRC's reputation for fair trials, what this means in practice is most likely conviction of corruption and execution for a public official who displeases his superiors whether the official was corrupt or not, combined with impunity and open season for corruption for public officials who please their superiors.

Cromwell: I have evidence that Sir Thomas, during the period of his judicature, accepted bribes.

The Duke of Norfolk: What? Goddammit, he was the only judge since Cato who didn't accept bribes!

- A Man for All Seasons​