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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

The Senate doesn't represent people, it represents States. The Representation is exactly equal, as intended: 1 State == 2 Senators.

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No one is questioning that it is working as designed.

That something is working as designed is not an endorsement if the design is bad.

The issue is, modernly, people equate not getting what they want with the system being broken.

The idea of compromise rarely survives the day. It's a 100% or zero game, lest we look like we actually agree with some of the other side... oh the horror.

I think the idea of compromise rarely survives actual scrutiny when it comes to specific values. I don't know what a compromise on the death penalty is to an anti-death penalty stance. I don't know what a compromise on abortion is to an "abortion is murder" stance. Even if I fully understand with and sympathize with someone I disagree with, I may not be at all willing to budge from specific positions I've taken because I believe there is no acceptable compromise. (e.g. I don't think I could budge from being against sex trafficking.)

And even where it does survive scrutiny based on the values of the factions involved in the compromise, it may not for other people in different contexts. I mean, we’re in an age where slavers are, like pirates and torturers, recognized as hostis humani generis, but many of the compromises in the Constitution are between two major factions, one of which thought slavery should be legally tolerated but not especially protected and favored, and the other of which thought that slavery should be specially protected and slavers should be rewarded with full extra votes for each slave – and the compromises all throughout the Constitution between those two factions tended to favor the latter faction. Sure, where it explicitly concerns slavery, those have been mostly reversed (outside of the open door for penal slavery), but the substructures agreed in compromises between those factions whose underlying purpose related to slavery but which did not reference it have been in many cases preserved, and even there defenders often can come up with little beyond “It’s working as designed”.

> The issue is, modernly, people equate not getting what they want with the system being broken

Since value is subjective, there is literally no other viable definition of broken, and if you think this is a modern idea, you haven't seen much of history.

Right, there are two failure modes in the US governmental system, basically:

1) Things the founders got wrong on purpose. We've fixed a bunch of these, by e.g. broadening the franchise and ending chattel slavery with that whole Civil War thing. The way our Senate is composed is arguably an un-fixed one of these—it's that way on purpose, but it's, you know, bad.

2) Things they got wrong by accident. These are usually cases where politicking, application of game theory, and bad actors in general conspire to make things work differently than they were intended. This is stuff like the system stabilizing at two viable political parties, and the way the electoral college has worked in-practice almost from day one (but not the way the electoral college favors low-population states, because that part was on purpose, so would go under point 1 if we're regarding it as an error)

You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it. There's nothing inherently bad about the upper chamber of a bicameral legislature being explicitly not designed to represent individual people in a perfectly proportional manner.

As originally designed, the US is not a nation with a strong central federal government that happens to be made up up 50 weak states and a handful of territories and districts. It's 50 strong states who happen to be united under one central but relatively weak federal government. In that context, having States represented equally, without regard to their populations, makes complete and total sense.

Completely by chance, that happens to indirectly overrepresent people you disagree with. That's unfortunate (depending on your ideology), but it certainly doesn't make the entire system broken or bad.

> You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it

I would love to know what this by-definition version of "bad" is. That's a remarkable finding.

I think they got the Senate right by not allowing direct election the 17 Amendment screwed that up.

As a non U.S citizen, sounds like a state with a million residents is represented as much as a state with 10 million residents. Not sure that's fair, be it I get you don't want to be underrepresented based on where you live either.

It is fair because States are sovereign. The United States is a Union of States, after all.

The Union is predicated on the States agreeing to certain terms and conditions that guarantee certain State Rights while compromising on others.

One such compromise is representation within the Union, whereby the Lower House (House of Representatives) has the States represented proportionally by population and the Upper House (Senate) has the States represented equally regardless their population. Territories that aren't a State receive no representation.

Additionally, the Lower and Upper Houses each have different duties and powers afforded to them. The Lower House legislates matters concerning money, among other things, while the Upper House legislates matters concerning government appointments and foreign diplomacy (eg: treaties), among other things. Both Houses must also agree with each other on any bills that are intended to go to the President for signing into law.

The States in the Union are tantamount to independent countries in most other contexts, so States' Rights are a very big deal.

This sounds like it was written in 1860. States have not been tantamount to independent countries in a time where anyone currently alive could remember.

Almost a hundred years before that, but yeah that's kind of the point.

Prior to 1913 Senators weren't even elected by the popular vote, they were elected by state legislators. Literally elected by the State. One could argue that actually makes more sense.

Right the senate is kind of like how in the UN each country only has one vote. It’s by design that Luxembourg and China have the same votes.

The UN comparison doesn't make much sense to me; in the context of the UN these are states with often vastly different languages, cultures, histories etc. not the case for the U.S. or at least nowhere near the same extent.

Did you reply to the wrong comment, by chance? One of the child comments to mine compare to the UN, while I made no such specific comparisons.

Yes, meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35622319

Each of those States is represented by two Senators. It's completely equal when you understand that as originally written the Senators represent the States, not the people within the States.

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