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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently? I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the House at the moment.

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...

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> Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently?

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...

I suggest scholars such as Bednar.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287234169_The_Robus...

It's way, way more complicated than these articles suggest.

The Senate has been nothing but a non-population-proportional version of the House since the 17th amendment. The House was supposed to give voice to the people while the Senate saw to the needs of the nation. The requirement for the house and senate to work together would balance these often competing needs. Direct election of senators is a worst of both worlds situation - democracy where some people's votes count for more than others. Since the 17th amendment was ratified, the legislature has ceded tremendous power to the executive and judiciary as it has become steadily more ineffectual, and public perception of the institution has plummeted. This has only accelerated in recent decades. Abolishing the senate is only one potential form that reform could take, but I don't know how anyone could look at the current situation and not see the need for some type of reform to get the legislative branch back on track.

I don't know what you're talking about, since abolishing the Senate (or at least making it the lesser of the two bodies) is anything but nonsense.

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 anything I think we need to make the House more like the Senate by making them run state wide. That would do a lot to get rid of the hyper partisan nutjobs since there's usually more ideological diversity across a state than in a given district. As a bonus it would also get rid of gerrymandering.

Yeah -- keeping population-based apportionment of representatives per state, while making representatives elected state-wide would be a huge shift of power, for the better, especially in the South (speaking as a southerner).

I've been harping on this for years. My support for democratic, rational governance is non-partisan - if a majority of voters support the republican, that's their prerogative

It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.

There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good.

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.

I'm not sure it's possible to reform the system. Its way too stacked towards corporate interests.

> No, we need the House of Lords, otherwise the plebeians might do something crazy like tax us!

Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation?

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.

> the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism

Source? The President and--until like 24 hours ago--the House have been leading the charge on illiberalism and populism.

The Supreme Court is leading the charge. The presidency is a close second. Congress is pretty much just watching.

There are plenty of little-r republican institutions that can put a check on populism without blatant disproportionate representation.

> It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone

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.

We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.

> We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken

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-...

The fact that the Senate can't pass things without a 60% majority, despite that not being a thing in the constitution, is just another facet of its undemocratic nature. The body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says.

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.

> body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says

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...

> 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.

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.

> Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.

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.

I think you're referring to "abolish the Senate filibuster rule"? recent lobbying.

Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.

(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.

Do you believe there's a distinction between giving the minority too much power versus protecting them from having too little? It seems like the same thing said two different ways.

Giving the minority (Christian extremists in flyover states) too much power has caused them to start revoking the rights of everyone not them. Forget about protecting minority groups from having too little power, the main concern now is wresting control of our government in line with the principle of "one person, one vote" instead of "hectares of corn and churches take precedence over people".

Ah ok, I hadn't noticed there was also recent discussion on the Senate itself, wrt not being numerically representative.

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).

Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along with because it means more power for themselves and less restrictions on how they use it.

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.

> people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt.

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".

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