Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinph | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting and it should be paired with a dramatic re-thinking of the way our democracy functions. Namely, we should abolish the Senate's overrepresentation of small, rural states. It made sense that all states got two senators in 1789, but not in 2016. Wyoming, with a population of less than a million, does not deserve the representation of two senators, the same representation that California, New York, or Texas receive. The US is less agrarian than ever. This antiquated representation makes less sense than ever and harms our democracy by under-representing urban populations.

View on HN

Literally, this is exactly why the Senate was constructed in the way in which it is, as a check on mass-rule politics and the more populous states ramrodding country-wide legislation through.

Except it's the opposite now- smaller states out punch larger states.

Smaller states outpunch in the Senate, larger states outpunch in the House. As douche said, it was intended to be this way.

[Edit: Unless by "outpunch" you mean "have higher per-capita representation", in which case they punch equally in the House. But the large states dominate the House: nine states have more than half the votes.)

Do large cities really out perform more sparsely populated areas in terms of representatives?

NY City has more than half of the congressional districts allotted to NY state, so yes.

Yes, of course. Representatives are assigned at 1 per ~700,000 ppl.

One being proportional to population while the other is biased towards low population doesn't balance out. You would need another chamber biased towards high population.

Correct; smaller states having a larger voice is by original centrally planned design.

Why do the empty acres of Wyoming need defense against ramrodding?

Why isn't my town its own state, as a check against ramrodding country-wide legislation?

The empty acres of Wyoming need no such defense. The people of Wyoming do.

There is are families of issues where which side of the debate a person is on correlates strongly with his/her geographic location. On those issues, without some kind of protection, people in the less populous places will lose every time.

You could say that it's only fair for the majority to win all the time. But I've heard it said that a pure democracy is like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to eat for dinner, and that doesn't sound very just to me.

It wasn't thoughtfully designed by the Founding Fathers as a check. The less populous colonies insisted on federalism and disproportionate representation as a condition of ratifying the Constitution and a compromise was reached, the same as how slaves counted for 3/5 of a person in the census.

It was created this way by design. I'm not saying it's good, but there's always been skew in representation. Big cities can have their power checked by smaller cities.

I'll take the counter argument. It's generally the ideologies in the most populated cities that drive Senate seats. Do you think that the vast agricultural population of California is represented by Dianne Feinstein?

In fact, it's becoming an issue even among similar cities. For example, Senator's Feinstein's stance on surveillance is at odds with many of the technorati living around the bay.

It wasn't just designed that way to allow small cities/states to check the power of big cities/states. Additionally, the federal government was designed to be both a government of the people and a government of the states. The House represented the interests of the people, and the senate represented the interests of the states. This idea (that the Senate represented the states and not necessarily the people) was pretty much wrecked by the 17th amendment, but it was nonetheless part of the original design.

> This antiquated representation makes less sense than ever and harms our democracy by under-representing urban populations.

The United States are a federal republic, a federation of fifty states, not a unitary government of 350 million people. The Senate is where the States, not the people, are represented; the House is where the people's Representatives sit.

Abolish the 17th Amendment and have state legislatures appoint Senators.

We should go back in the other direction and repeal the 17th amendment.

The argument goes that if we do that the Senate appointments will be highly politicized and so on, but uh, that's the way the elections are.

Having the Senate represent the interests of the state governments was a useful check on centralization of government at the federal level.

> Having the Senate represent the interests of the state governments was a useful check on centralization of government at the federal level.

Confirming evidence: Shortly after the 17th amendment was passed, the federal government began growing dramatically.

>was a useful check on centralization of government at the federal level.

Why? Those Senators were accountable to the people of their state, same as state legislatures.

I am sympathetic to this idea, but I don't think it would work out the way you suppose. Rather than push the interests of state governments up into Washington, I think it would push Federal political debates down into state elections. Do we really want every state senate election to be fought over national issues rather than local ones?

What you're actually calling for is to completely remove the Senate since what you want is exactly how the House of Representatives is structured.

Also due to the fact that the wealth of the nation is centered in many of these urban centers I'm probably more worried about them wielding too much power in our current era of money/lobby dominated politics.

The way you avoid power corruption by wealth is apportion votes to people.

Why not just split California up into smaller states? Wouldn't that also solve the problem?

That would be like cutting off an arm because it is bleeding.

Here's an alternative off the top of my head. Each US citizen gets ONE vote no matter where they live. They vote for ONE person no matter where that person lives. The top 33 (or 34 once every six years) become United States senator.

> Each US citizen gets ONE vote no matter where they live. They vote for ONE person no matter where that person lives. The top 33 (or 34 once every six years) become United States senator.

So, we'd be ruled by American Idol winners? That doesn't seem like an improvement.

I believe american idol gets more than one vote a person, so it is only representative of those that spam votes

Also I'd like to add that I am not saying the plan I proposed is necessarily good. It is only at least as good as the proposal to split California.

Speaking of elections and democracy, we have more problems when it comes to state and local governments. At least many people can name who they'd like to vote for POTUS and some can even name their state senators. Given this, I think it is ridiculous to say that state legislators get to decide replacement for US Senators. I am also not a big fan of the way we do things in the house.

As an elected House member of District n of the great state of X, how do I approach any legislation? What's best for the nation is not always what's best for the businesses in state X and definitely what's good for the nation isn't always what's best for the businesses in district n.

If I am supposed to look out for the whole nation, not just people in a particular district, why am I being voted in by just people in a particular district in a particular state?

If I am supposed to look out for just my district, is this the best way to look out for the interest of my district? Anyone with one ounce of naivety removed from them can easily see that although all of our House members and Senators are supposedly equal, some are more equal than others (and not just because we have two major political parties).

Interesting. You could have one house with 33-past-the-post and one with proportional representation, though I guess the difference would be more meaningful if it was less than 33.

Another thing that would be interesting would be choosing the government by first-past-the-post and the parliament by proportional representation, preferably in the same election, i.e. proportional representation with no coalitions allowed.

Why not use approval voting? Why not use mixed-member proportional districts drawn with a shortest-splitline algorithm?

You're clearly more educated on electoral systems than those who'd entertain the notion of using some novel system invented off the cuff by someone without expertise in social choice theory. Hats off.

I think you'd have to renegotiate representation with states as if they were sovereign entities.

No, the method for changing how representation is apportioned was already negotiated as part of the original constitution. You would just have to pass a constitutional amendment.

Every argument against this hinges on a very odd idea that land is more important than individuals.

Rural areas use more resources per capita, contribute less to our GDP, and are less educated than urban areas. Giving these areas a greater influence holds back progress.

No, it hinges on the idea that both states and individuals matter. The Senate represents states; the House represents individuals.

Why is it this way? Because at the Constitutional Convention, the small states were wary of being dominated by the large ones. Well, that was then: Is it still a reasonable concern? If you live in Iowa or North Dakota, say, and you don't want New York, California, and Ohio to set policy for the whole nation (including you), then yes, it's still a reasonable concern.

States are just a collection of individuals. Laws are made by human beings, not land.

House: Californians and Wyomingans are equal.

Senate: Wyomingans are 48 times more important than Californians.

It doesn't balance out.

If you're ok with the senate giving greater influence to low-populated areas, would you be ok with giving rural voters a larger vote weight than urban people when electing a senator? It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.

> States are just a collection of individuals.

No. States actually have rights, not just individuals. There's a difference between a federation and a unitary state, and federation was considered a good idea. (Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)

> Laws are made by human beings, not land.

Nobody ever said that laws were made by land. But laws are made by states, not just by individuals.

> It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.

Only if you hold the mistaken idea that senators represent people rather than states. They don't, and they shouldn't.

>States actually have rights, not just individuals

States are arbitrary and given rights by individuals. States cannot feel the effects of any law. States are not citizens.

>(Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)

That's a comforting idea in the abstract, but when applied it basically means people in rural areas should have more say in the national government than people in urban areas. You're literally in favor of taking power away from people and giving it to others. You're for tyranny of the rural rather than people being treated equally. In the age of telecommunication it makes even less sense.

We're not the EU. The idea that the US is a collection of countries went out the window a long, long time ago. Federal laws have a much bigger effect on people than state laws.

The Senate is the only place where people are not proportionally represented. To argue for it is to say that people are not equal, and that states are more important than people, which flies in the face of democracy.

EDIT: To address your point below, you're in favor of taking away power from some and giving it to others based on population density. This is a horrible idea since our cities are where our most educated and most productive live.

> You're literally in favor of taking power away from people and giving it to others.

Absolutely. For the exact same reason that we don't live in a democracy. It's a feature, not a bug.

I mean, by your argument, why have a House or a Senate? We've got telecommunications, just have a vote. Direct democracy. Why not?

Well, that turns out historically to be a really bad idea. But anything short of it is "taking power away from people and giving it to others", in one form or another.

Senators are not supposed to be directly elected. Nor are income taxes supposed to be constitutional. Fortunately, we gave up banning the production and sale of alcohol as a bad job, but these other two perverse amendments from a hundred years ago have yet to be repealed.

Fun fact: the 16th Amendment does not mean what you think it means. It was written in response to the Pollock decision, which said that a tax on income derived from property was in essence a property tax. Hence why the amendment explicitly refers to "incomes, from whatever source derived." Income taxes were, even at the time, considered constitutional (and were in fact in effect for decades prior). Indeed, the Pollock decision was later overturned, so one might say that the 16th amendment is one of the more useless ones in the Constitution.

I couldn't disagree more. People matter. States don't.

New York, California and Ohio don't get votes. They have no say in setting national policy. The people living in them do, and they deserve to have an equal say in setting national policy as the people who live in small states.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com