1/The Senate is badly broken. 51 Republican senators represent the 54M people who voted for them or their appointers; 49 non-Republican senators represent 79M people who voted for them. medium.com/@jameson.quinn…
2/Here's the graph.
The rot at the heart of the Senate is now threatening to irrevocably contaminate the Supreme Court.
Is it fixable? Not fully, but there are some things that would help.
The rot at the heart of the Senate is now threatening to irrevocably contaminate the Supreme Court.
Is it fixable? Not fully, but there are some things that would help.
3/First, offer statehood to DC and PR. Even though DC would be a small state, including it would reduce the bias of the senate, as measured by the gap between the countrywide mean and the median state, in many ways. In other words, it would reduce the chance of "minority rules".
4/Second, defend voting rights and increase turnout. Automatic voter registration, no felon disenfranchisement or onerous hoops for voters, voting day holiday, vote by mail, tax rebate. This would reduce Senate malapportionment only slightly, but it would reduce.
5/Those are the easy two. After that, there's possibilities, but all are very difficult.
Most obvious: constitutional amendment. Can't directly change senate representation, but still plenty of options if you're changing constitution.
Most obvious: constitutional amendment. Can't directly change senate representation, but still plenty of options if you're changing constitution.
6/Next: Splitting larger states into smaller parts. It would take very strong reasons to even contemplate this one, because of all the disruption. But yesterday was a very, very strong reason to me at least.
7/Finally, a wildcard idea that would not require constitutional change: requiring states to allow anyone who was born or lived there for over 10 years to register to vote for senate, even if they now live elsewhere. Turn rural->urban migration back. Again, sounds crazy, but...
8/...given the scale of the problem, I think it's worth discussing such "crazy" ideas now.
