Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill
hightimes.com
hightimes.com
It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
EDIT: I'm assuming this is to point out it's a bipartisan effort. Well, yes, there isn't exactly a pro-people party.
wtf.
https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/us-states/california/n...
They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for pesticides and such. When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
The only answer I can think of is that hemp grown outside of California was competing with california 'legal' weed, the testing angle is non-sensical since this change in law moves hemp from 'kind of required to be tested (but none of the DEA testing implemented, so it's done privately and sometimes not at all), but poorly' to 'illegal' and marijuana still at 'illegal'.
You have some regulatory framework which has already been created by captured regulators, so it has a couple of rules that it ought to have (always the ones pointed to in order to justify it) and then others that exist merely to exclude competitors or make sure fixed costs are high enough that only large incumbents can meet them.
The latter set of rules are unreasonable so the market finds a way around them. The incumbents then call this a "loophole" and insist that the competitors be forced into the entire framework rather than just the subset of reasonable rules they'd be able to satisfy without being destroyed. Which destroys them, as intended.
This is not at all what was happening. These aren't some special strains or cultivars where there is a remnant of THC that is getting squeezed out from a large quantity of plants to make a small quantity of product - they are same strains and cultivars being used by the legal dispensaries. It is a matter of timing and process - harvest and undercure the flower and it will not have converted enough THCa to Delta9 THC to hit the legal limit. In fact, many legal operations follow similar timing on harvesting and similar processing - the flower in your local dispensary is still mostly THCa, and a good chunk of it is likely under the limit for D9 THC as well.
Much if it is effectively the exact same thing under a different label.
> When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
I do agree here. There's no need for the unregulated market when a proper legal market exists.
Someone growing the same plant that is regulated by California but decides they don't need testing or licenses is just plain anti-social. You can't not know you're doing something wrong in that case.
I'm more concerned with ending an absurd prohibition, personally.
Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.
In most states with legalized cannabis, testing for a variety of harmful ingredients and the potency of specific products is required for those taking part in the legalized cannabis trade.
Those growing, packaging and distributing "hemp" products are not subject to such testing regulations.
That may not be nefarious, but avoiding such regulation increases the likelihood of harmful additives (chemical pesticides and other adulterants) and unknown potencies. This would likely increase the chances that unscrupulous vendors will sell (knowingly or unknowingly) harmful/dangerous products.
And given that the products are essentially the same, that gives those who don't have to pay for testing or go through the marketplaces defined by state laws, giving those folks an advantage over those who follow state law.
What's more, folks who avoid extant law through this loophole, are not incentivized to make safe, tested products.
So maybe not "nefarious," but certainly anti-consumer with perverse incentives to create and sell harmful products.
My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.
As someone in a non-rec state, as much as I would prefer the dispensary option with stricter regulations, it's still much more regulated than "the dude whose house i show up with and venmo him some money and get a bag that came from god knows where"
I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market. Even though I live in a (now) legalized state, there's still a thriving black market, both for folks who have been growing for decades who maintain a positive reputation among distributors/wholesalers, and those who purchase out-of-state product (that's tested and sold legally in those other states) without tax or records, and can then undercut the legal dispensaries.
I'm not familiar enough with the "hemp" growers/sellers, but IIUC, since it's not supposed to be used as a mind-altering substance, the testing and purity regulations may not apply.
All that said, things are a mess WRT to cannabis in the US. Some states are doing it well, others are not. And the Federal government, while not irrelevant, has not made progress in this area -- and that includes the "hemp" loophole which (and I could be mistaken here) isn't regulated at all.
Hopefully sometime in the future the states and the federal governments will get it right. Which is often how these types of issues are addressed in the US -- study the issue carefully, choose the path that is least effective and most harmful, then iterate, trying less bad and less harmful "solutions" as you go along.
Presumably we'll get there eventually.
Just basic laws around farming. For example, lead arsenate is banned in the US, and I trust the hemp farmers to not be using it as much as I trust any similar operation, but someone illegally growing stuff? They're already breaking the law. And who knows where it was grown to begin with?
And in general, there are companies behind all of this. There are names. Legal recourse if shit goes wrong. Who am I going to sue if I find out that the shit Bob has been selling me has been full of harmful pesticides or if the oil was full of some harmful additive, etc.?
Legal recourse is definitely an upside of not dealing with a black market. I agree.
I'm not familiar with the laws around hemp growing and/or the Federal loophole, but I hope you're right about at least minimal regulation (and legal recourse for) of non-consumable products, especially if they're being consumed (can you sue the makers of clothing or rope if you get sick eating or smoking their products?).
As I said, hopefully we'll eventually get to a sane policy regarding cannabis.
The anti-weed senators were voting for it because they are anti-weed.
THCa/Delta8/similar products are produced under an oversight in the hemp legislation and different businesses are taking advantage of that than those involved in the legal marijuana trade.
You can effectively just under-cure the exact same plant and get something that comes in under the limit.
It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
These levels are still primarily based on THCa content, not Delta9 THC. Even your regulated legal flower is very low in D9 THC.
> It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
Much of it is literally the exact same. They are growing the exact same strains and cultivars as the regulated legal marijuana industry, just making sure to harvest and process them in a way that prevents the decarboxylation of THCa into D9 THC from going over .3%
I live in Wyoming, where weed remains technically illegal. The 'legal' weed is trucked in from Montanta and sold at farmers' markets. The hemp is sold at the liquor store check-out counter.
The hemp products in question are not, like, hemp rope. They're just pot that is classified as hemp because they are harvested and processed in such a way that keeps the D9 THC below .3% at the time of testing.
If you were to go look at a growing operation for someone making THCa flower and then go look at a growing operation for someone making regulated legal marijuana, they would be virtually indistinguishable.
It is the absolute worst case of gas lighting. The literal, federally unregulated criminals were screeching that the people obeying the law and following the regulations (even if in a way legislators didn't expect) were unregulated cowboys who were 'skirting the law.'
It's absolutely comical if you think about it. And somehow, this argument actually won.
Many of the state legalized programs do have significantly higher standards because they are explicitly regulating for things intended to be consumed by humans, while the federal regulations for hemp are focused in an entirely different area.
As a consumer, I would prefer to be purchasing the more stringently regulated state-legalized product. But that would require I live in a state that has legalized it.
Instead, my options are (at least for another year), purchase the less stringently regulated "hemp" products or the entirely unregulated stuff grown god knows where by god knows who with no recourse if it turns out they've been spraying their crop with leftover lead arsenate.
76 of 100 voted to keep it. This, is like, literally the entire point of discussion in this part of the thread? I don't understand where your confusion lies.
TFA:
> On Sunday, Senate leadership inserted a hemp-recriminalization clause into the must-pass funding bill
> ...
> Not a standalone bill. Not a debate on cannabis reform.
Seems like it wasn't a full Senate vote on a specific amendment, but the bill as a whole. I've elsewhere seen it stated as McConnell acting alone.
Edit: as I googled around, I found that Rand Paul attempted to use an amendment to remove the language, and it failed. But people vote on amendments for all sorts of strategic reasons. For example maybe they felt the amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate bills need to match, and the terms had already been negotiated.
This is Mitch McConnell's crusade.
I don't recall ever hearing of reconciliation being a deal-breaker.
Also, if Senate leadership inserted the clause, that means that it wasn't in the House's version to begin with.
That’s a big assertion that needs evidence. I’m strongly in favor of legalization but not deregulation. It was a pretty big loophole that allowed what’s essentially weed to sidestep the regulation their competitors faced - and there wasn’t great consumer awareness about the differences even though there were safety implications: https://drexel.edu/cannabis-research/research/research-highl...
This law seems pretty well targeted in its scope, bringing the 2018 law back to what was intended (easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there).
It's just old-school think of the kids and not in my territory. We don't know how to regulate and handle this because our politicians and more and more our citizens don't understand what is being voted on or has been happening in their own states for 7 years.
Have you used these products? It's a shame, the quality that I was getting just within the past 3 months was incredible and it is market not afraid to try new stuff.
I'm sad, flower from OR, NC, OK, IN, and others will never legally hit my lungs. Back to the cartels? Or perhaps I should overpay by $200 with the comfort of having 0 clue where it comes from, again?
You have the power to elect people that will actually represent you.
There was absolutely no federal regulatory framework for marijuana. none. It's just plain illegal. Unless you can get one of a handful of research licenses, which is almost totally irrelevant.
Hemp had some, fairly weak regulation. And theoretically, testing requirements, although they were deferred and deferred to the point they were basically done only privately with the idea the DEA would eventually get involved.
Instead they're just dumped now into the marijuana bucket which has no federal regulation at all, or alternatively, at the state level the states could always define their regulatory framework to be agnostic to THC content of cannabis.
So this does the exact opposite of what you had hoped.
Your ignorance shows in spades. The arbitrary ban on THC and its analogues prevent chronic pain patients like me (a criminally underserved market) from becoming addicted to the big pharma system. The "other things in there" argument is the same as razorblades in candy, sanctimony to portray dissent as degeneracy.
I can imagine people in the future looking at us like idiots as they use cannabinoids in the same way we use paracetamol.
From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative. The difference between a life spiralling to nothing just about surviving on opioids compared to effective pain relief from cannabis and being able to work and be productive again.
One of the tragedies of the 20th and hopefully not the 21st century. So many people in so much unnecessary pain.
Looking at history I could quite easily come to the conclusion... ...due to racism.
Like all drugs, it’s sad it doesn’t work this way for everyone. I had to transition from cannabis to opiates and lyrica. I wish this was not the case.
They suspect it’s due to the source of the pain (spinal cord injury) and the cannabis is “exciting” my nerves in the wrong way, as it actually increases my pain; or at least my perception of it.
This is a very apt description. It’s like it narrows my entire focus into the pain and it seems to become more…in focus.
You clearly haven’t read either the original law or this one.
It really doesn't. It's well a well-established fact that heavy regulations favor larger enterprises over smaller ones.
> But the provision that was inserted into the government funding bill makes illegal any hemp product that contains more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container.
Now the online "hemp" industry will shift to selling gummies in "containers" that really equate to individually wrapped. You'll get bulk discounts for buying groups of 30 "containers", but what you get will feel like Japanese-style individual wrapping.
BTW: This was kinda-sorta what I encountered when I bought gummies in Ontario, Canada. The gummy was in a single "container" and had roughly ~0.4 mg THC.
While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned).
In CA, WA and CO, almost every single individual gummie is 10mg (up to 100mg in the pack, the state limit, so usually 10 gummies in a pack). I rarely see individual servings under 10mg ever, its not common.
People in these states routinely consume more than 10mgs in a single sitting - its just two gummies.
10mg for an entire pack of edibles strikes me as extremely low - shared with friends, none of you are getting that high...
> https://app.leg.wa.gov/Wac/default.aspx?cite=314-55-095
> https://cannabis.colorado.gov/responsible-use/safety-with-ed...
I usually eat 2 gummies (10mg) when I want to feel the effects, or a half gummy (2.5mg) when I want to microdose.
---
When my mom was in serious pain from cancer, I told her I use CBD for migraines. What I didn't realize was that she went to the dispensary in town, and they didn't have CBD-only products. She took a 5mg THC gummy and then called me up stoned out of her mind.
I wish I knew she planned on taking some, because I would have found the right kind for her.
I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic. Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night. On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant. I can find it on r/news but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning something very factual.
Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators voted for this ban to remain. 76 senators from across the political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
There were at least 3 posts on /r/all yesterday.
Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power, doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending money in their own states.
Because it's not "not considered by anyone".
Democrats have been demonstrably decriminalizing and legalizing weed all over the country, and the Democrats in the federal government have been pushing and submitting and trying to make it happen.
It's republicans. They are the ones that continually stonewall a measure the vast majority of their constituents support, and they are the ones that somehow still get elected despite that.
Show me the democrats preventing legalization of weed federally.
Show me the democrats who invite cop associations to talk at their meetings about how dangerous weed is. Show me the democrats who are taking money from cop associations or prison lobbying organizations who very explicitly want to keep weed illegal.
Stop overgeneralizing! It's literally how things are this bad! Blame who is actually at fault!
Is it necessary to recount how this entire split is partially due to racism, anyway?
That's not the same thing as legalization as it's implemented elsewhere in the US.
Many Republicans are just against it out right, and many Democrats are either indifferent or know that promising to legalize it will mobilize a subset of voters who prioritize it above else (or may just not vote at all otherwise, over 30% of Americans don't vote after all).
It'd explain why there's been so many opportunities to reschedule the drug, and why in some states even when they had the numbers to pass legalization, they still don't. Or do so with extra incentives (often the actual sale of it) to come later (vote next cycle!).
i used to be of the mind that decrim was preferable to legalization but testing is a pretty important part of making sure you're getting the safest products.
a lot of people in favor of decrim are either bad actors or are under the mistaken belief that all their flower is coming from some nice hippies who only use organic fertilizer and good vibes.
the legacy market was pretty much exactly the same as any other black market: full of people who were in it for the money and didn't care what it took to produce the highest yield at the greatest margin.
now we have legacy actors gone "legit" AND opportunists who got into the market post-legalization who still have the same profit motive above all else.
Google Docs can do this. Why can't the Congress??
https://www.lpm.org/news/2025-11-11/mcconnell-paul-clash-ove...
This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow...
And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?
Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.
You support my bill, I support yours, we both win. In the case is one-bill, one-entry requirements it allows for bad faith negotiations and trickery.
Maybe there is some middle ground where we cap the number of unrelated entries on a bill to allow transactions but not the classic “we don’t have time to read” shenanigans.
"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.
Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
Does this actually have any impact on legal dispensaries, their products, farms, etc?
Does this make it harder to eventually de-schedule pot.
The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that can produce a plant that doesn't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which the legal weed industry partially operates.
Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal' weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on prices because you could get better product for cheaper than going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what you were getting.
In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).
Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended consequences.
The more money you allow in politics, the more politics becomes about money.
Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an intern.
[1] Find and contact elected officials https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
[2] 120,000 Texans send letters and petitions against THC ban to Gov. Abbott https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-06-03/austin-tx-thc-ban-la...
Most of the time the response is even something like "ok cool opinion but I believe the opposite so bummer" (obviously exaggerated but the meaning is identical).
I will try a letter at some point, email feels completely useless.
Regardless, it doesn't need to be something you spend hours pouring your heart into.
Some representatives respond differently than others. I've gotten boilerplate letters back, and I've even had phone calls back with someone from their office. It really just depends.
EDIT: It's already been signed into law, so now they have 1 year to try and remedy the situation... :(
Trump Signs Bill To Recriminalize Hemp THC Products, Years After Approving Their Legalization https://www.marijuanamoment.net/congress-passes-bill-to-recr...
The problem is that Söder and his CSU are obviously following the old Nixon attitude of targetting cannabis to hit left-wings [1]:
> You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
And then you got the absolute deranged ones, like Marlene "Cannabis ist verboten, weil es eine illegale Droge ist" (cannabis is banned because it's an illegal drug") Mortler or Daniela "Cannabis ist kein Brokkoli" (cannabis ain't broccoli) Ludwig [2]. Imagine, these two utter failures were the official drug policy heads.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
[2] https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/legalisierung-von-c...
Police was infamous for kicking in your door if a random copper walked home and smelled weed. "You smell like you got some weed on you" was a popular excuse the cops used at Munich Central Station to fleece everyone they deemed to look like a punk or, worse, Black person.
And the latter, well, it's certainly not a coincidence that the cops asked for, and got, the weapon ban zones in train stations giving them back the authority to fleece people at will, right after the cannabis legalisation came in force last year.
It's not about cannabis, it's not about the guns, it's all about the ability of the fucking cops to abuse their power whenever they goddamn want to, and Bavarian police are notable in Germany for being particularly aggressive and ignorant.
I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-hand.
Personally, I don't drink or smoke, but I think the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most part, a footgun.
They can blame Trump, not go after Hemp farmers.
They don't. Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot. I might have a beer when I'm stoned, but only a very tasty one, and only one.
I think that extremely light pot smoking is killing alcohol sales. The tiniest bit of pot is just as pleasing as a mild alcohol buzz, and an alcohol buzz kills the effect of pot. I know I got in the habit for a while of smoking a tiny, tiny bit when I got home, with the effect long gone before I went to sleep. Back in the day (and sometimes still), I would have had one beer, or one glass of wine.
???
There have been multiple studies in Colorado and California that have shown that black markets aren't shrinking, but expanding.
Legal weed and other drugs creates more demand, and the black market picks up these extra customers.
This was easily predicted by me and many other people, before legalization.
I suppose it's why I'm making more money than ever in this economy and most other people are getting laid off.
But that's really a government problem. They always pretend to tax stuff because it will slow the consumption but it never works, people keep using as much or even more if they get served on the black market that doesn't have to answer to regulation and taxation.
All of this is very well known, you just can't regulate drugs consumption, the only thing that works it social pressure but since governments have no say/power in that they pretend otherwise.
It's all very hypocritical, the only reason they legalise some stuff is because they want the tax money. Cannabis is heavily regulated because it is so simple to grow that there would be very little tax money to be made. You would just need to know someone who grow some in his garden, like tomatoes and around the time of harvest you would get massive oversupply.
It has accomplished everything its proponents hoped for and much more.
"You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”
- John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Richard Nixon
McConnel sponsored the original bill. Kentucky is historically one of the largest hemp producing states. The whole thing just shows how inept the entire administration is. DJT 45 signed the original law himself, after it was drafted and passed by his Republican house and senate.
These natives certainly know what they're doing with their dependant-domestic sovereign nation.
Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the party in power. Amazing how that works.
The GOP hasn't been a party of small government since W. Bush. And it hasn't really claimed to be as much since Trump 1.
That's not even close to being true. The "Two Santas" strategy[0] has been in place since at least Reagan's first term.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again eventually) to make that argument.
I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to speed up major change the next time a party has a super majority, by planting the seeds early...
It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.
Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.
Source? The President and--until like 24 hours ago--the House have been leading the charge on illiberalism and populism.
Undemocratic is insufficient for removing a governing body per se. (Courts are technically undemocratic. That doesn't make them bad.)
Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.
You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative body and you'd still have the same problem.
You could abolish the Senate and have a unicameral House. But then we'd never have survived 250 years as a democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)
> I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought
The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2013/09/30/227292952/a-short-history-of-...
And this is definitely not a necessary aspect of the system. Even if you want to argue that the Senate itself is essential, the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades.
I'd be fine with a bicameral legislature as long as both houses were actually representative. Maybe you'd have one with short terms and one with long terms. But having a body where California and Wyoming both get two representatives is just ridiculous.
I'm curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate. It looks to me like they're doing pretty much whatever they want aside from passing the recent spending bill, and to the extent that they aren't, it's because of a handful of Republican holdouts in the House, not because the Senate stands in their way. And if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either.
All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
(Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
> the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades
Sure. Agreed. I'd honestly argue the concept of shutting down the government is dumber and setting a debt ceiling for already-appropriated and spent funds is unconstitutional.
> curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate
All the crap Trump is doing by fiat would have been passed into law. That, in turn, would strongly reduce the ability for the courts to call foul.
> if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either
The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
A fundamental aspects that makes the Senate different is each Senator is elected by more people, and thus must cater to more-diverse interests, than a Congressman, and they have longer terms. That means more people in the Senate must think about how what they're doing today will look after 2028.
[1] https://navigatorresearch.org/three-in-four-americans-feel-g...
You're missing the point. Of course they have rules. But to effectively make it so that you need 60% to pass anything is very different from ordinary parliamentary rules.
> (Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
Until recently, the Senate filibuster was completely different from what we have now. It used to be something that sometimes allowed Senators to make a show of delaying legislation. This thing where nearly nothing can be passed without 60 votes is new.
> The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
This means nothing. The rule isn't a secret. Things that couldn't achieve 60 votes will generally not be brought up in the first place, since it would be a waste of time.
If having a body where each representative represents more people and has longer terms is important, we can have that while still having it be reasonably proportional. The fundamental thing that sets the Senate apart is that it's meant to represent the states themselves, not the people. Thus each state is equally represented, and until the early 20th century they were not elected by the people. That no longer serves a purpose and that's what I'd like to see changed.
Do you earnestly think this is a function of the rural-urban skew? In my view it is almost certainly due to the differences in number of people being represented by a senator and possibly term limit differences.
edit: Since I cannot respond due to throttling, I agree with the below idea of statewide house races, but by doing Proportional representation and a ranked/approval voting system.
if you think it's recent, you haven't been paying particularly close attention
2021: The Senate Cannot Be Reformed — It Can Only Be Abolished [0]
2018: The Case for Abolishing the Senate [1]
2004: What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate [2]
and that's just from the first page of Kagi results for "abolish the senate". I have no doubt it goes back farther than that if I actually went digging for historical sources.
the imbalance of power is only going to get worse as time goes on, as well [3]
> By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate
> “David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states,” Seib wrote. “They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”
0: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abolish-us-senate...
1: https://www.gq.com/story/the-case-for-abolishing-the-senate
2: https://harpers.org/archive/2004/05/what-democracy-the-case-...
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287234169_The_Robus...
It's way, way more complicated than these articles suggest.
(Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)
The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population of the US would end up and how the system would act to give the minority far too much power rather than protect them from having too little.
People often say stuff like "the founders would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population would end up [wrt representation]", but they don't propose anything specific or constructive (short of federal-state litigation, secession or another civil war). How about a (neutral) commission to reapportion State boundaries every 10 years based on Census results (with some population formula between not-quite-linear and wildly disproportionate)? Or else, to periodically reapportion state counts of Senators to total 100. (Obviously these couldn't get ratified these days, but they just might have in the 1790s). If not, what's your specific suggestion?
Another thing people aren't currently discussing much is how badly break down if/when the Supreme Court gets captured by a dominant group that is both ideological and not independent. Look at how high the stakes will be for nominating the eventual replacement to Justice Clarence Thomas/Sotomayor/etc.
And of course the terrible Citizens Utd ruling muddies every consideration of representation.
And then there's also the parallel discussion of the Senate filbuster rule, remember though that if there was no filibuster, Citizens Utd would allow unlimited dark money to influence every vote, specifically all the action would focus on the Senators in the middle, think Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Manchin, Sinema. Seems near-impossible to reconstruct democracy under these constraints. (Look at the recent Senate stealth attack in the shutdown bill by lobbyists for newly-legalized CBD to try to ban Hemp).
Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states into more smaller states, but big states don't like that because it means they have less power as individual smaller states. And we have already have congressman holding far more power than they were originally meant to because they froze congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives we are suppose to have.
The US political and legislative system has been corrupted beyond reason and this is just the next step to further consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
Or they want to live in a democracy where every single person is represented equally to every single other person. And not a system where some people are "more equal" to others.
That's not even getting into how this weirdly, strangely seems to align up with a history of slavery and racism in the US. Total coincidence that some people think it's fair those "urban people" get 3/5 of a vote compared to them, the enlightened farmers who need to save others from themselves.
And before you say "well the house and electoral college are proportional" - no, they absolutely are not since 1929. Try that talking point when the apportionment act is repealed.
Nor are districts even conceivably "local" anymore for those arguing about "personal governance".
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
Nobody wants to harm their customers, but it 100% happened in the early days. A lot of harm is/was not immediately obvious. Of was repeated exposure to harmful chemicals. Good intentions are great, but resources and incentives still matter. Nobodyv wants to get hacked, but building a new feature over hardening is what stops you from getting yelled at
Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
The US also has state representatives in every state.
This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
We need merit-selected technical committees of non-representatives to advise politicians and tell them clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the technical committees should be independent and able to make their case on the internet and social media.
Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by politics. For example, China's vaunted "political meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the government will find a way to skew an "independent" technical committee to suppress those facts.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
26 Senators is a substantially different shape of legislative body than the current 100.
Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
California should make it's own laws, Montana should make it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the rules on how they talk to each-other.
States Rights are supposed to be the protection against political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites.
The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency.
To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.
>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.
I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.
If you're going to make inane comments about how ahckchtually everything in the world is a creation of the man who just wants to keep us down, you'll need to qualify the statements.
That can be stopped easily enough. The Constitution makes it clear that Congress is the ultimate source of power; the SCOTUS power of judicial review was granted to itself by itself. Congress can (and has, a few times, though not often) make legislation not subject to judicial review.
Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
I agree, we seem to have perfected the art of splitting of the population into fairly stable tribes similar in size. Unless one side goes batshit insane (and even then, I think current evidence counters this idea) there is probably not going to be a supermajority in the foreseeable future.
It's not unlikely. It's just... I don't know. It's as if some Svengali is out there hypnotnizing you dolts to ignore it. No other explanation makes sense. Seriously, this could be down to 2-3 jackass state representatives in Iowa or New Mexico or Florida just getting a wild hair up their ass.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
- No gerrymandering
- Longer terms mean that senators can spend more time governing, less time running for election, and they can take a longer view on the impact of their decisions
- Filibuster means that a tiny minority cannot force legislation through
You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights to a Senate minority.
Yeah, I meant that 50.1% can't force legislation through. I should have said tiny majority.
States aren't gerrymandering because the people decide for themselves where to live.
The people can also decide for themselves where they want to live with respect to gerrymandered Congressional and other districts. So by your logic, gerrymandering doesn't exist at that level either.
You're not going to convince me that some procedural nonsense is more important than equal representation.
I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority cannot force legislation through regardless of whether the filibuster exists or not.
I recognize that the filibuster isn't guaranteed, but it has served as a powerful tool for a very long time.
With the Missouri Compromise, when territories were admitted, their voters were being chosen for political reasons. Territories were admitted two by two, slave holding and free to maintain a status quo. This falls under your definition of gerrymandering.
There is no justification for this gerrymandering. There's nothing so great about Wyoming such that it should have such an outsized influence on the body politic while possessing the GDP of a mid-sized county.
Here is a video for us: https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time.
I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
If it's not noticeable via satellite imagery then yeah, probably nothing will happen.
But even if it wasn't your local government, insurance companies do this sort of thing to deny claims even in tangentially related unapproved installations.
Asserted without evidence.
Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no building codes. Now many of them do (some still go without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design and construction standards, and we justify this with both public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own solar panels, under license from the state.
Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed. So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up to modern code or something.
Connecting your house to the grid poses more or less no threat to the grid or the linemen who work on it.
I've never claimed there is a city/rural contrasting point of relevance on documenting the electrical generation capacity of the solar panels.
> The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
But since your house is (presumably) not a generator, no, that's still less connected to others than even a single solar panel would be.
The most likely explanation is they simply forgot rural folks often don't have roof plans, and should have written an exception in such case that the solar permit could be issued without them.
Some people aren't used to thinking of states as relevant sovereign entities.
The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.
One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
I just meant in practice that the low-population states tend to be rural.
Huntington-Hill is better than nothing but it is still significantly worse than getting rid of the PAA and letting the House grow based on population size. Pressing my hand down on a bullet wound will slow the bleeding more than if I didn't, but not getting shot to begin with would sure be preferable.
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...
This argues for just an increase to 700, and shows a ~5% swing in likelihood of Democrat control, and I would argue that just increasing it to 700 is still not where we want to be - a ratio similar to the UK would put us at closer to 3k representatives, and I believe this is still within reason (and is roughly the size of the equivalent chamber in China). Ideally we get rid of gerrymandering at the same time and redistricting is done apolitically by independent groups.
At 3k seats, every state is above their 1 rep minimum, representatives have 1/7th the number of constituents, population to representation at each state is much closer to 1:1, etc. Obviously not everything will end up on clean divisible lines so there's going to be some differences, but Wyoming would be more like .96:1 instead of .75:1 like they are currently.
Ideally the size should also be set to be revisited based on population on a periodic basis
If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.
"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."
That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
I made no comment about what "we" are ...
The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.
> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state
I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
Perhaps you can read the history then.
"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."
I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
590,000 / 342,800,000 roughly 0.00172 0.00172 × 435 roughly 0.75
Wyoming would not even qualify for a full seat in the House if it wasn't for minimums at this size house.
But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else.
(*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.
But effectively giving dirt a vote clearly isn't the solution. When voting maps are made weighted by strict land area they look one way, but weighted by population, they look entirely different, e.g., [0]
Or, should Wyoming, with a population of 587,618 as of 2024 [1] really have as many senators as the 39,431,263 people in California [2]? California has nearly five times the rural population of Wyoming [3], yet all rural and urban Californians get only 1.4% of the representative power of anyone living in Wyoming. Does a Wyoming resident really deserve 67X the representation of people in California?
I absolutely think rural concerns must be heard and met, but this setup is not right, and is clearly not meeting those concerns.
[0] https://worldmapper.org/us-presidential-election-2024/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming
Why have states? Why indeed!
One answer: to create a level of governmental organization smaller than the federal one that can act as a set of laboratories for legislative and legal experimentation.
Another answer: to reflect the fact that not all laws and regulations make sense across a diverse range of climate and geography and demographics and economies.
Neither of those answers, however, require states to be considered inviolable sovereign entities, and a lot of us born after 1880 don't think of them that way.
For better or worse.
I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the Federal level.
Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a culture. The more culturally people identify as "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian" etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the federal level expand, because that's what "the people" are asking for.
The problem with democracy is that people don't always vote or act in accordance with their objective best interests.
And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude towards democracy itself is indicative of my point. Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom" even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our roads?). But there are other matters that should never, under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups of people have rights).
This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is much easier to capture city or county government than it is state, and much easier to capture state government than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a more powerful federal government than we did 200 years ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read: rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state government cannot control it adequately.
There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be just as responsive as more local ones, other than an entire political philosophy and party that is committed to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally wrong.
It works well for everyone. The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
You're effectively saying that because you're worried about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government, you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face value.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps have interests outside of the country.
In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just make government farther removed for everyone. Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are all sacrificial lambs on offer.
No, this is not a problem with government for and by the people. It is, however, a problem in a system in which economic power (read: wealth) translates (often almost literally) into political power for individuals. Rich people deserve a vote just like everyone else - but nothing more.
> you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
You say "farther removed" - I say "larger, less dependent on local influence, and with more power". As I said, there is an entire political philosophy and party that insists that responsive federal level government is not possible; as I implied, I simply don't agree with this. Of course, if that philosophy/party has significant political power, then federal government will be less responsive, but that's not inherent.
Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
Do we need to be careful to not have the federal level squash deserved local variation? Yes, absolutely. But we also do not have to give in to the self-interested claim that federal government cannot serve the interests of the people well, either.
It boggles the mind that you can say this with a straight face. What do you think vesting more power at the federal level will do if not cause moneyed interests to work harder to capture it?
Im intrigued by why you believe federal level should override local variations. It seems so counter intuitive.
The first problem is that city/county/state governments in general have completely inadequate power to confront national or trans-national corporations. The second problem is that some things (e.g. health insurance) really do work better when handled at the largest possible scale.
There are clearly things, like running the municipal rec center, where local government is better positioned than any federal government agency probably ever could be (though I stress "probably"). But there are lots of things where the opposite is true.
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
I don't see where this is implied. I took the implication of "your opinion did not sway my own"
>Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
The "logic" is "larger states in a democracy should have more power because they represent more people". Which naively makes sense. I'm sure game theory would show some consequence of this formation though as a bunch of smaller states coalition around each other and make a two party system based on land, as opposed to ideology.
In much of internet discourse, your goal isn't even to convince the person to reply to, it's to give more viewpoints to the silent majority who lurk and never comment. Whether they think an opinion is better or worse is up to them.
I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
By your logic if I replied with that to every comment chain in every HN post adjusting X to each topic… then I would become the most productive HN user of all time.
Yes, I browse reddit every now and then. It's a shame the Alt-Right pipeline hijacked this. They realized that being loud is better than being correct.
I'm a bit confused on how we got onto a tangent about productivity, though. All I was talking about came down to "opinions are arguments, and restating an opinion (in good faith) often means you aren't convinced of another opinion". They're opinions, they aren't inherently right or wrong.
I would become the most productive HN user ever… anyone could do so by following that… so clearly opinions cannot be worth anything.
All the opinions you’ve ever written, and will ever write, must literally all add up to less than one solid argument.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.
In other legal contexts, we recognize that allowing people to exert control over things long after their deaths is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason that equal Senate representation, or even general state "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly compelling.
But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic when it came to this matter instead.
This may have been true for the original 13 colonies. Doubtful for the subsequent joiners.
The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly your food production, natural resource extraction, and logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of the country to function.
You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.
>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this way because we have a very functioning system, most rural people don't even use the food and resources that are extracted around them anyway as we import and move things around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level. You literally can not support the cities without the rural output, even if the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban area.
>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".
> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.
California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.
I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.
Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?
Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.
So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?
Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.
I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.
Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on top of that one seat per 500k citizens?
The big issue is that our House of Representatives stopped being proportional to the population some 90 years ago. I believe analysts suggested that a House today would have over 1000 members, as to the 435 seats today. So that only increases representation of smaller states.
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
This is how my country works.
This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try to assure that only bills which had strong support overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would make it through the double gauntlet.
House ----- Impeach Purse Break Electoral Tie for President
Senate ----- Try the impeachment Break Electoral Tie for Vice President Ratify treaties Confirm executive appointments
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51 seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous state (California) receives two, just like a very small state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here refers to population, not land area]
If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2 senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a simple majority, all by themselves.
For most day-to-day legislation, we can have 59% in favor and still have a deadlocked Senate. The House has no means to bypass/override the Senate.
But, that's probably a whole other topic and way in the weeds.
And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).
In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.
The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...
2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%. 2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.
Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.
Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.
For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
Amazingly some guys thought it up hundreds of years ago. Is your issue that it is bicameral? If so what advantage would one house have?
This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no longer actually true.
The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed seats mean that low population states have more power per capita in the house to a significant degree.
One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to each state part.
A second group with the number of seats determined directly by population (the House). This is "the rest set ... according to census data on population".
One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
Thankfully, the Permanent Apportionment Act is not actually a constitutional amendment and could be corrected with the passing of legislation rather than needing to go through a full amendment process.
Er, why?
I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have something that compensated for the increased power the larger states had due to their population.
But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions. They still have some independent power but it's not a lot. And there's no option to leave the union.
We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power from the current form of the Senate also have disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
It explicitly does not due to Permanent Apportionment Act. It is more proportional than the senate, but the hard cap on the size of the House and it no longer growing with population still fundamentally skews more power per capita to lower population states.
Very few people move based on where they would have voting influence.
Yeah, just the millionaires. Now billionaires. But with internet and private jets they don't even need to move anymore to exert power.
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
That said I bet the Senate exists in 500 years.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Congress is currently structured so that both chambers provide outsized representation to lower population states. With how the electoral college works, this also provides them with outsized representation in presidential selection, as well.
If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not invest so much power into higher population states, then it is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so much power into lower population states as well.
(A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-heavy social media.)
"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and administrative functions based on the census, with no municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
(Premise 1) If a country has 350 million people, then the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes.
(Premise 2) America has 350 million people.
(Conclusion 1) So, the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes in America.
(Conclusion 2) So, the Senate is bad for America.
What do you think they are arguing?
> Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people.
I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people.
> So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people."
The 17th amendment was a huge mistake.
Revoke them both and we're much closer to what the founders intended when it comes to Congress.
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p
So before dreaming about 100% democracy, maybe the US could slide away from "flawed democracy", first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
There is no free lunch.
Notably, imagine direct democracy and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic]!
Without guardrails on the levers of power, a lot of people would have died. As it is, a lot of lives still got ruined.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
Yet another thing I vehemently disagree with.
If a rep basically says ‘I don’t care what y’all say, I’m doing z’, and they get elected.
Does that mean they got elected because everyone wants z? Or they got elected, and plan to do z?
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
Apps just tiktok’itize the whole process.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
There are reasons why literally nobody does it, and it isn’t because it works too well.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
Why would they vote to be stomped on?
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
The gov’t shutdown was precisely using the day to day crap to get leverage!
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
Its the only way.
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
It’s why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the state (or even lower) level.
A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100 years.
Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.
Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.
Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely.
This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
Here's my ideas...
The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together
The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
- Ranked choice voting everywhere
Maybe the territories get less representation.
The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state.
It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.
The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council.
The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.
The US democratic system was inspired by this.
Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.
---
On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.
The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones.
The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones.
Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
Regardless of what the measure is, or what party it's coming from, it's a significant flaw in the process.
I think I am more interested in the mechanics of how this happens. Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation? What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
Because they can't agree on anything normally, so the only way to make changes is to shove them in with things they must agree on.
> What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_rule
Multiple states already have this.
> The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, arguing that the omnibus bill, whose original title is over 300 words before it keels over in repetition of the word “subdivision,” violated the single-subject rule.
https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2025/09/the-minnes...
The 10th amendment exists for a reason. The system wasn't intended for congress to even control something like this in the first place.
Maybe we just need to change the constitution--which I know is technically possible but im practically it's frozen. It's like a legacy API no one wants to touch.
Allowing several issues to be passed as a singular unit provides opportunity for an agreement to be made about several issues at once. Think of it like a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Or if that's really impossible, you could compromise on separate bills. If people ever break promises, that's a reason not to trust them in the future and it's a lot more clear to the public about who voted which way rather than having a rider which no one really understands where it came from.
To get such an amendment passed it would have to come from the States. Nobody that is already in congress is going to vote for this. It is a huge restriction on their power to spend our money.
Here is Alaska's single bill requirement: The Alaska Constitution Art II, Section 13. Form of Bills reads: Every bill shall be confined to one subject unless it is an appropriation bill or one codifying, revising, or rearranging existing laws. Bills for appropriations shall be confined to appropriations. The subject of each bill shall be expressed in the title. The enacting clause shall be: “Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Alaska.”
But if it works, then maybe it's what we need.
It is also an inaccurate portrayal of Alaska state politics. While historically the State Legislature has been majority republican it has been more even since 2015ish. Which is coincidentally when weed was made legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_House_of_Representative...
How we vote in federal elections has more to do with Republicans in general being more aligned with the majority interests in Alaska.
That said, I guess the Alaska legislature is a lot more balanced than I assumed. If the single subject rule works there, bravo. Congress is a different beast, though.
It makes things like the Patriot Act and Inflation Reduction Act impossible.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/e-coli-outbreak-trac...
Our state similarly tried to get it outlawed by using these excuses but ignoring the many shops where they are just selling quality product, not allowing kids, etc.
I think the world is still figuring out how to deal with this. The German firewall looks quite interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_against_the_far-right...
Of course things like the electoral college, filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, lifetime appointments etc don't help.
I was really stupid to think Republicans wanted a clean CR and Democrats wanted to help people with insurance.
Both sides wanted to slip in something their lobbyists wanted, and they did it. Win.
> And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul’s efforts.
> His “shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately balanced deal to reopen the federal government,” a Nov. 10 letter from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
https://mjbizdaily.com/trump-backs-hemp-thc-ban-included-in-...
Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.
No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.
History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.