Abolish the senate - don't just reform it | Hacker News Reader

Abolish the senate - don't just reform it

marketwatch.com

8 pointsjawartak4 comments

Abolishing the right to filibuster as the author proposes would truly make our democracy "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner".

Sorry Mr. Nutting, but there's no "tyranny of the minority"...

Tyranny: "A government in which a single ruler (a tyrant) has absolute power"

The minority can't enforce their wishes on anyone directly - they simply have the power, if they are a highly significant minority, to stop certain wishes of the majority being forced upon them ("tyranny" of the majority). Minorities having some power to block actions of the majority is a great check on government power, and we're fortunate to have it.

So the tyranny of 59 representatives is evil and undemocratic but the tyranny of 61 is just?

There are many legislative bodies in the world, maybe we could talk about process and policy in an informed way instead of whipping out the tyranny card every ten minutes.

I'm sorry, this is a bit dumb. The senate was not founded because "we cannot trust the people" but because in the senate EACH STATE has equal power, regardless of size, while in the congress each state has power proportinal to the population. This ensures that small states with 0.2% of the population are not entirely ignored in all politial matters because they might literally have the ability to break ties, no more. It might wind up being that ruling NY + NJ + FL + TX + CA would give you enough power to outvote every single other state.

The senate is critical and not to be abolished.

But why should each state have equal power? The reason that was important when the constitution was drafted was because they were the polities that already existed, and you needed their assistance to build a larger union.

Today, states command less loyalty than baseball teams, and are covered so poorly in the media that they are close to unsupervised by the people. They're an anachronism, why should we care about their individual power?

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