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Comment by spankalee | Hacker News Reader

The Senate is a terrible system. There's no logical reason why citizens in one state should have orders of magnitude more say in the federal government than citizens in another.

The founders aren't infallible gods, and they really fucked up here.

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Unlike in many other countries, where provinces or regions are merely administrative divisions created to decentralize or streamline administration, the US emerged when states voluntarily came together and decided to create a country. The states were willing to outsource part of their autonomy to a federal level, on condition that guardrails were put in place to limit the power of that federal level. Those guardrails were: bicameralism, equal representation of states in the Senate, and the electoral college. The House is the voice of the people, the Senate is the voice of the states.

The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively prevents a majority of voters from large urban centers from imposing their will onto rural populations, at least at the federal level. It was designed that way.

I've seen comments here claiming that countries like Canada or France deliver better outcomes than the US. They are stronger welfare states, yes, but they also have become overly paternalistic nanny states, with heavy-handed regulations, and high taxes stifling individual initiative.

The practical consequence of this system is that it effectively allows a minority of voters from rural areas to impose their will onto large urban centers

Which you want the opposite to happen , not a better system.

How in the world is minority rule better than majority rule?

We don't have minority rule though, we have a balance.

What?

We absolutely do have minority rule. In both the Senate and the House, the Republican majorities represent a minority of the population.

Trump easily won the popular vote. What makes you say that they represent a minority of the population?

The fact that both the House and Senate are nearly 50% by party again points to the fact that we have a good balance.

Trump got 49% of the votes cast, which is roughly a quarter of the US population.

Do you have a better way of determining which party is the "majority" in Congress? That is what we are discussing here. Whether the current makeup of Congress accurately represents the votes of the people or not.

Obviously I understand that not every person voted in the election (many are not even eligible). It is simply not relevant to this conversation, and is an often trotted out diversion meant to diminish the mandate given by the actual voters.

In this case it’s much simpler: the question was minority rule and you can see that power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is held by Republican politicians representing less than a majority—Trump is arguably the best claim they have on plurality since he is come very close to winning the popular vote since so many Democrats stayed home—and enacting policies which are very unpopular, in most cases policies which are unpopular even among registered Republicans.

Did I mention Trump?

The fact that we have minority rule in the Senate, House, and Supreme Court is exactly why we don't have any checks and balances any more and Trump gets to act like an emperor.

Again, you're saying "minority rule". But Trump (Republican) won the popular vote. So which party is the minority? Do you have another way of determining which party is the majority/minority besides votes for the President?

It seems clear that the majority in the 2024 election preferred Republican governance, and so they gained control over President/House/Senate.

Yes, minority rule. You keep bringing up the presidency, but I'm talking about the Senate.

Republicans have a majority in the Senate when their senators received a minority of votes, by about 24 million votes.

Is this a joke? You think Democrat Senators got 24 million more votes? Where are you getting these nonsense numbers?

Update

Here are some rough numbers I found quickly (because your numbers are obvious nonsense):

  President
    R - 77.3m - 49.8%
    D - 75.0m - 48.3%
    Others - 2.9m - 1.9%
  Senate
    D - 55.9m - 49.1%
    R - 54.4m - 47.7%
    Others - 3.7m - 3.2%
  House
    R - 74.4m - 49.8%
    D - 70.6m - 47.2%
    Others - 4.6m - 3.1%

Looks like the system is working to me. The Senate vote not withstanding of course because of some smaller states, but it's not some extreme miscarriage of justice as you imply. The majority party won and is currently enacting policies that voters wanted. I'm sorry that your beliefs aren't as popular as you thought.

Sorry, I copy and pasted wrong, the Democratic senators represent 24M more people, and had about 2.8M more votes, yet have 6 fewer seats counting the independents that caucus with the Dems.

So fewer voters and constituents for a pretty significant majority in senators.

So you've abandoned the "majority" vote argument, and now you're saying the individual vote tallies in that state don't matter.

So if 49% of California voted Republican, but both Senators are Democrats, then the entire population they represent should be counted as Democrats.

A flawed argument.

It also completely ignores the entire reason the Senate exists in the first place, to represent the States.

No, the _minority_ vote argument still holds. The Republican senators represent a minority of the vote and population, yet have a strong majority in the Senate. It's minority rule.

Again, you're mistaking a Senator representing a state vs the people in a state. The Senator represents the state, no matter if they got 51% or 100%.

What makes you say that Republican senators represent a minority of the population?

There is no real way to determine the population in each state represented by a party other than votes. The presidential vote tallies (the only truly national vote) are the closest we have to this. Numbers in the Senate are fairly close to the popular vote (not a coincidence).

> There's no logical reason

If you study the U.S. history in detail the you see the reasons and the main ones are quite "logical".

You might not agree with them (I don't necessarily), but that doesn't make them illogical.

They were logical at the time they were implemented. Most of those reasons have been invalid since the Civil War, and should have been fixed during Reconstruction, except the winners didn't have the foresight or political will to do what needed to be done.

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