this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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I'm not inherently opposed to the Senate as a concept, I think it can serve as an important check/balance, but for it to exist while the house has been capped and stripped of its offsetting powers is completely asinine. I also think that attempting to get anything done in the house with 1,000 members may also be unproductive however. Perhaps capping the house to a reasonable number of representatives while also adjusting voting power to proportionally match the most current census could work. Some representatives may cast 1.3 votes while others may cast .7 votes.
Kind of the opposite.
The less people, the more power each one has.
So if you need a couple votes you add some things people personally want that are completely unrelated to get them on board.
With twice the people, that becomes twice as hard. So the strategy would have to pivot to actual bipartisan legislation and not just cramming bribes and personal enrichments in there till it passes.
The thing about our political system, it's been held together with duct tape so long, there's nothing left but duct tape. We can keep slapping more on there and hoping for the best, at some point we're gonna have to replace it with a system that actually works.
We might have been one of the first democracies, but lots of other countries took what we did and improved on it. It makes no logical sense to insist we stick with a bad system because we have a bad system.
If America gets a chance to rebuild it will probably make some changes to be more democratic.
Well, the good news is regardless of what you thought of accelerationists plans a couple weeks ago...
We're all about to find out if they were right or not.
So we got that going for us.
Yup. We get to be the data points in an experiment to test a hypothesis that has no historical data to support it and whose majority of subjects have not consented to participate in.
What?
America is already the result of accelerationism...
What do you think the Boston Tea party was?
England seized smuggled tea, it would have put smugglers out of business.
Smugglers threw legal tea off British ships in response. Now the colonies had to choose expensive legal tea or expensive smuggled tea.
And that was used as a way to make people made at the King, when if the smugglers hadn't of destroyed the legal tea, colonist would be paying the same price they always had, except instead of a small group of smugglers, the taxes went to the government that ensured the colonists safety (somewhat).
Our country is fucking built on accelerationism, there's tons of historical data from here and all over, like France obviously.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.
And what countries not ruled by a wealthy oligarchy as well as providing sustained increased levels of equality and justice to all peoples compared to before have resulted from accelerationism? The US has never not been a slave state, unlike other nations that did not see violent revolutions or wars of independence.
In addition, tea, while a staple at the time, is a bit incomparable to freedom from violent repression, self-determination, and general human right to live, all of which and more have been offered up, without regard for the people who will involuntarily see great harms because of it. It's the ideological equivalent of "Some of you are going to die but that's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make."
It really bears repeating that destruction of non-essential foodstuffs is not anywhere near equivalent to willingly sacrificing the lives and well-being of vulnerable populations. Even if the Boston Tea Party can be concretely tied to US independence, there is no evidence to suggest that increased levels of negative pressure would correlate to increased levels of resistance or embrace of revolutionary ideals. Especially in a populace conditioned to be anti-revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong, at this point the train is already in motion so, I hope that the accelerationists' unproven ideas pan out with minimal human suffering. But, with the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples, as well as women and LGBTGQ+ already being fed into the hopper of the Genocide-Machine-That-Will-Totally-Result-In-A-Better-World-Trust-Me™, I'm not confident that it's holds any more plausibility than other "Pie in the Sky when you die" ideas offered by major religions. Add the impending acceleration of damage to the biosphere and I must say that I'm pretty pessimistic about the future of the human species and suspect that accelerationism will only make the end of the species more filled with unnecessary misery and suffering.
The silver lining though, is that it is extremely unlikely that humans can end all life - there are too many resilient little beasties on the planet that can survive everything short of atomization of all matter on Earth.
Nice application of the selectorate theory.
1,000 members? The original plan was for 1 house member for every 30,000 people, eventually changing to 1 in 50,000:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
Doing that now, on a population of 330,000,000 would give us between 6,600 and 11,000 congress critters.
China has a system where you have an obscenely large legislative body (almost 3,000 members) select a standing committee of a more reasonable size which actually does the bulk of the legislative work on a day-to-day basis. I think this is a good system to copy or take ideas from.
Or at least, that is how it is supposed to work on paper. In reality the standing committee is staffed with the most loyal and powerful Government cronies and the National People's Congress is a rubber-stamping body rather than a venue for genuine political debate and expression.
also, with 3k MPs, that's one for every... half a million people.
that would give most countries a government small enough to fit in a classroom.
It isn't a big concern as none of them represent any constituents in any meaningful way. Their job is to smile, wave, and clap. And wear an ethnic costume if you're a designated token minority. Each member of the National People's Congress represents zero citizens.
of course it doesn't really matter in that particular case. i was more thinking about how it would work in a country with an actually functioning government.
If we allow the least populous state, Wyoming, to have three representatives, then that gives about 192,000 constituents per representative. So the House of Representatives would have about 1,720 members. Some substantial remodelling of the Capitol may have to be done. This would be enough people to fill a concert hall, but that's not undoable.
Fill the standing body by collecting nominations. Each member can nominate exactly one member to the standing body. A member who collects exactly ten nominations will sit in the standing body. This means the standing body has 172 members.
A praesidium would be elected by the standing body's political groups consisting of a president and several vice-presidents. In a proposed American system, they would probably have the title "speaker" and "deputy speaker". In China, the praesidium consists of 178 people which is far too many. Nine is a more manageable number—one speaker and eight deputy speakers. The praesidium is an administrative body responsible for scheduling votes and establishing the rules of debate. It's likely that the standing body is the only place where legislation can be introduced and debated, and then it is presented to the larger body for ratification.
The speaker is the presiding officer of the entire assembly, but the members of the praesidium can rotate presiding over the standing body. This is intended to ensure the political neutrality of the praesidium (useless in China's case because everyone is a Communist but probably more effective in a hypothetical American adaptation).
In China, the standing body is plenipotentiary (has full legislative powers) when the entire Congress is not in session. This could also be the case under the American adaptation but the US Congress is almost always in session anyway. The standing body is in permanent session.
In essence, this creates a tricameral legislature.
There are some other powers that China's Standing Committee has that the American version wouldn't. Under the Communist principle of unified power, the Standing Committee also has the power to interpret the constitution. This is incompatible with the Western concept of separation of powers so it would be left out.
the US? what part of "functioning" did you miss?
(/s, obviously)
The Wyoming Rule would only increase the size of the house to 574, still a totally manageable number.