In the nearly 232-year history of the US Senate only 11 senators were Black
cnn.com
cnn.com
The first and foremost problem in the United States is a lack of representation. Look to those overrepresented to see why.
Maybe we could instead support a veto branch? Run it like jury duty where people get randomly chosen to go to DC for 1-4 years. Those people have to vote to decide if they veto a bill before it goes to the president for signature. Try and pass bad policy through that system… corporations would be pissed…
>Randomly chosen
How long before that gets hijacked? Nothing is random and gaming random chance systems is a specialty of a whole group of industry con-artists.
As far as I know jury duty is by random selection, and it's one of the fundamental building blocks of our democracy, and in my opinion it's a well functioning one.
And as the joke goes, you’ll be judged by a jury of people who couldn’t get out of jury duty.
The thing is we need a whole bunch of great people for parlimentary work. But nobody can know all of them well enough to vote for them.
But if every voter was randomly assigned a limited collection of candidates some months ahead of the election, they could make a very well informed vote on those specific candidates.
If there are 100 million voters, 1000 parliament seats and 10,000 candidates then every voter could be assigned let's say 20 candidates and 4 votes to distribute among them.
With a 50% participation rate you'd get about 100,000 inspections of each candidate which should be more than enough.
The best part is that this system completely eliminates personality cults.
For a random system to work it would have to randomly appoint people for life or at least long enough terms that they can actually learn how to implement what they want.
How can it be detected in our current system?
The issue is with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.
House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.
For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.
California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.
Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 has it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.
Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems
I’ve wondered what practical difference rolling back the 17th amendment would have. One concept it might re-establish is that of each state as an entity whose viewpoint should be heard (at the level of the state government). I suppose it would also be an additional check between states and people?
Also, https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-ap... is more subtle than I expected.
They didn't want too much direct representation but apparently didn't worry about too little. That said, I have never dug into the history and I am taking the text at face value.
Looked at in a snapshot in time, it would be unrepresentative. After all, there are plenty of men and plenty of white people in this country. But are we trying to make the number of seats in an institution representative? Or are we trying to make the number of seat-years representative, i.e., integrate over the dimension of time as well as seats.
When you consider the temporal dimension, even a fully black Senate or all-woman Senate would be still fall far short of offering those demographics fair representation when optimizing for seat-years. It would take at least 50 years or so of domination by those demographics before things start to even out.
Personally, I find this framing helpful when considering what it means for public institutions to be representative, and why I am supportive of efforts to make it more so.
How do you reconcile that with democracy? Consider gender for example. My mom has a strong preference for male elected officials. She’s no bumpkin—she has a master’s degree in chemistry. She simply embraces that aspect of traditional gender roles. This isn’t an uncommon view—women make up the majority of voters nearly everywhere, but most legislators are still men.
Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?
Also, isn’t there an underlying contradiction in your position? In your view, is an Asian person fungible with a white person? If not—if you think an Asian maybe might bring an “Asian perspective” to the job, or give special attention to “Asian issues”—why isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?
No, and I would not presume to do so. I am only expressing my view that, over time, these preferences would counterbalance each other in a way that results in a distribution in our institutions that broadly reflects the demographics of society.
You mom has a preference for male elected officials. But maybe my dad has a preference for female elected officials. My comment isn't intended to reflect negatively or positively on any of that, I hope you see. It's only a theory about population-level preferences as applied to our public institutions.
I'm not suggesting anything normative, just describing what an equitable society might look like and why an all-black Senate for some period would not be unrepresentative when representation is aggregated over years and not just seats or states.
> [W]hy isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?
I am not saying anything is not appropriate. I think my main point didn't get through.
The core of what I'm saying is that when looking at representation in a public institution, it's useful to take into account the history of that institution and how it has been constituted _over time_ rather than just in the present.
For example, if it is your position that the race of a legislator matters--that one can expect a black or asian senator to do something differently than a white senator--then it is entirely rational for individual voters to prefer representatives of their own race. And in a white-majority society like the U.S., where minorities are geographically distributed amongst a white majority, that means that almost all legislators will be white. Any effort to rebalance that racial distribution would be in tension with the will and self interest of the voters.
What does "racial and gender makeup of the country" even mean? Should use the idiotic government definition of "AAPI" that bundles Samoans with Japanese? Or that considers Afghanis white but Pakistanis Asian? It's idiotic.
Hispanic immigration to the U.S. has been relatively low human capital (mostly poorer, blue collar workers). The average NAEP and SAT scores of black Americans are over a standard deviation below Asians. You're willing to significantly hurt the productivity and efficiency of government because having racial representation gives you warm and fuzzies? If people like you were in charge of government, we would be South Africa in less than a year.