You're viewing a single thread.
I think the Senate would be fine if it was in charge of a Veto instead of having to also pass the legislation, also if it had a lot more senators to some multiple of 3 at a minimum.
IE doing nothing is just letting everything pass automatically and that cooling pan shit is something senate leaders have to pursue actively with (qualified) majority support.
My ideal procedure. House passes a law, Senate vetoes it with a majority meeting or beating the passing margin of the law in the house, but also representing a majority of all americans, house can override the veto by meeting or beating the population margin the senate's Veto represented.
You may note that there is no president involved in this process. That is because I believe the independent executive is an inherent threat to democracy and that it should be subject to complete erasure and power division to save the republic.
More senators gives more power to the smaller states.
The whole idea is ass-backwards anyway. Assigning representation based on lines that were cooked up centuries ago over reasons that are mostly lost to time. It was a compromise to appease the southern Democratic Republicans who feared proportional representation meant they would get trampled on.
And maybe they would. But maybe that also just means that they should. They were worried about tyranny of the majority (i.e. democracy), and now we have tyranny of the minority.
Just gonna skip right on past that reduced threshold to overturn the Senate veto, the having to act on everything they want to halt, and the qualified majority bits huh? Also how in the hell does more senators automatically make small states more powerful? Giving more voice to minorities within small states would technically undermine state level bigwigs trying to have a partisan lock on their senate delegations.
Hawaii is a small state, DC would be a small state, Delaware and most of New England are small states. You really want a one off Republican Majority to be able to just smash Hawaiian autonomy and indigenous rights to pieces without any checks or balances?
This model of the Senate is basically a parliamentary takeover of the role of head of state, only more powerful than the king of england in the sense that it'd be able to invoke the right of veto without instantly causing a constitutional crisis and sparking a revolution.
Small as in population, not small as in size. Most of the states in New England have a bigger population than Wyoming, SD, ND, etc.
Wyoming has a population of 581,381, with 2 senators and 1 rep. That's 581k people per rep, 193k people per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 145k:1
Massachusetts has a population of 7 million, with 2 senators and 9 reps. That's 777k people per rep, 636k per congressperson/EC vote. With another senator, that ratio is 1:583k.
More senators would give more power to imaginary lines and not to people.
You want to fix Congress, reapportion the house and abolish the senate, or at least severely neuter it. Way too much power granted to way too few people, especially when you consider the committees and the EC.
The concept is outdated. State boundaries mean diddly when we've got instant communication, rapid transportation, and a real loose interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.
ETA: Hawaii, and indigenous rights in particular, are a really terrible example.
Again, just gonna ignore the qualified majority rules huh?
Oh man wait till you learn about Hawaii and how it's autonomy and indigenous people's rights were smashed to pieces when we made them a state
You mean by granting it the most autonomy out of all the states when we made them into a state? They even get to set their own importation laws to maintain their ecosystem.
The annexation was a shit deal but statehood gave them more rights than most explicitly designated ethnic autonomous zones around the world have today.
To achieve its originally intended purpose the Senate should only be able to legislate on interstate matters, not be an equal to the house.
I'd say my idea is less about equality and more about difference in purpose.
The Senate in my model only vets legislation, and even then, if they don't do it within a reasonable time frame the law passes anyways, and even if they do take the issue up, it can only act by matching or beating the house's vote to pass the law, and do so with a coalition representing a majority of all americans, so if there's 3 senators per state, one californian senator would count for a third of California's population towards this count, aaaaand just to make certain that we're certain it isn't becoming a cornfield court, while the senate can override by matching the house's voting margin, the house can override by matching the population margin the Senate vetoed with.
It's a veto that a wise senate leader would only try to invoke if they knew it could make it stick, or if they felt what had arrived on desk was so egregious it was worth picking the fight over regardless of certainty. As opposed to right now where the Senate just never does anything because of filibusters. Now just sitting on their hands actively reduces their ability to intercept policy or nominations and the theoretical state of debate only lasts as long as until the bill automatically becomes to law for lack of a veto passing under the described conditions.