> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
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.