Comment by WesternWind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WesternWind | Hacker News Reader

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That's half right.

The Biden administration has been appointing judges, using the fact that it has a bare majority of the senate (50 + the VP). All Federal judges need Senate approval. Biden in fact had the largest number of Article III judicial nominees confirmed during a president's first year in office since Reagan.

Democrats aren't trying to work completely legislatively, in fact this decision is an injunction against an administrative rulemaking applying a Supreme court decision preventing sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace to other parts of the same law.

Because at least one of the 50 Democratic senators don't support the elimination of the senate filibuster for normal legislation, the only laws passed by congress under Biden have been reconciliation bills, which have to be primarily financial in nature, and a few bipartisan bills, (the post uvalde bill on responsible gun ownership and red flag laws).

You are right that Republicans are attempting to entrench minority rule using gerrymandering though.

I find it really hard to look at electoral district maps in the USA without feeling like “this is where the all the problems started”… I’ve NEVER seen a valid justification for the sorts of egregious gerrymandering you see all across the USA. It’s like poison,once it’s gerrymandered and the incumbent is safe, they can push their most radical agendas and slide the Overton window slowly towards their own views.

And because it benefits them all, I expect reforming who is responsible for district boundaries to never change. The more frustrating thing is under the present political status quo, the only enduring fix would require a constitutional amendment to enshrine a “federal district boundary committee” with something like 33 people serving lifetime appointments like the Supreme Court (even if the pay isn’t that good, a lifetime appointment means they can give the politicians the middle finger as appropriate, once they are in the job), since there’s a lot of district boundaries to look after and the larger the group the harder it is for one party to “pack the court”. But without it being constitutional level law, it would get battered about by congress, and the states and Supreme Court until it died in some disused basement in a bathroom behind a sign that said beware of leopard.

I think state constitutional amendments or state ballot initiatives are the current best possible way to reform this. Of course not all states let citizens pass stuff without going through a gerrymandered state legislature.

And of course it's not just gerrymandering, but the electoral college and a host of other things that are just done badly.

These are all fixable problems, even if they are difficult. In fact both the electoral college and gerrymandering at the federal level would be improved if we just doubled or tripled the number of representatives in the House. The smaller the districts the harder it is to gerrymander effectively. Course to do that we probably need to get rid of the filibuster.

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