You've found my 'secret' politics page. As a history major (US history for two years), I think a lot about the state of politics in the United States. The unique circumstances the country faces in the twenty-first century, including political extremism, historically low faith in our institutions, and an inability across the political divide to agree on raw facts exacerbate weaknesses in our political system. (Cue Churchill's unsourced aphorism, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." House of Commons Nov 11, 1947)
I don't think there's a single stand-alone cure be it politician, law, or cultural revolution. But I would ask you to consider the following constitutional reforms, and how they would (positively) impact the political landscape.
For each proposal, I will do my best to lay out the current issue and its downstream effects. I'll then dig up expert and creditable polling information. And, finally, a proposal as to how we might improve via a constitutional amendment. All the topics are laid out below. I'll only tackle them one at a time, so come back for updates and new proposals. (If you want to email me about any of these, please contact me at perrierrobertl at gmail dot com.)
Congressional Term Limits
Expanded House Membership
Senate Allocation
Abolition of the Electoral College
Congressional Redistricting
Supreme Court Reform
Addition of States
Article I - Congressional Term Limits
It is no secret that elected members of congress, particularly House members working under the pressure of two year terms, are endlessly running for their office. From the day they are sworn in, they are running again. That means raising money, spending time with big donors (private or corporate), and splitting their attention between the job they have and the job nearly all desperately want to keep. I don't think it's at all controversial to say that nearly all citizens would rather have their elected officials working on improving our government rather than schmoozing and fundraising.
The House voluntary retirement rate hovers at about 5%. Doing the overly-simplified math, that means if not voted out or departed for other natural reasons, a 40 year tenure would be common before a voluntary exit! As of this article, 54 members have served longer than 20 years, 18 longer than 30, and only three longer than 40, but you get the point. While more highly tenured members of both the House and Senate do wield more power for their constituencies, it can also be argued that the more power a member accrues, the more powerful backers collected. And if you can outspend any opponent by multiples come campaign time, why bother with trivial complaints of constituents? [The last link is a bit of a deep dive, but it sites multiple Political Scientist who have found increased tenure leads to decreased constituent responsiveness.]
For decades, an overwhelming number of citizens have supported congressional term limits: 87% in late 2023. The most commonly heard counter-argument to this is that a certain level of seniority is required to navigate the rules and promote effective leadership.
Proposal: Total time served in congress (House, Senate, or combination) shall be limited to 24 years.
That's 12 terms in the House or four in the Senate. Plenty of time to learn the ropes and then some. 95 current House members would have exceeded their term limits (nearly one in four). The number is nine in the Senate. The change could reduce the role of entrenched money, increase the focus on both responsiveness and leaving a mark in a no-longer infinite amount of time.
Article II - Expanded House Membership
This will be one of the shorter arguments, as it's based largely on PolySci Cube Root theory, but I'll try to expound on why it makes sense beyond the theoretical. House members, our most directly elected representatives in the Federal Government, are intended to be responsive to their districts. In 1911 (the last time the House of Representatives was permanently expanded), each member represented about 215 thousand people. Compare that to the last census in 2021, where each member represents 763 thousand.
The goal is to have an optimal number of members in a legislative body to enable communication from constituent-to-member and amongst members in the body itself. The detailed science is linked from the article above, but the same responsiveness arguments as made in the Term Limit Article can be applied here as well.
An interesting benefit (side-effect) would be an equalizing in the power of each voter. Today, a voter in Montana (where I reside) has an outsized voice in the House, with each member representing just over a half million people. Whereas a Delaware representatives speaks for nearly one million. The same argument goes for the Electoral College (Article upcoming), where all the less populated states have an outsized voice in the presidential election system.
I'll admit this is not a popular proposal among the US population, but I'd hazard to guess that's at least partially due to a lack of understanding of the issue.
Proposal: As part of the census, the membership of the House of Representatives shall be reapportioned in accordance with the Cube Root law to the nearest odd number.
By using the Cube Root law, the US House of Representatives would have closer to 700 members. (Large for sure, but still manageable.) The inequality would largely balance out. More kinds of voices would be heard with Members representing smaller groups. And a handful of beyond-the-pale extremists would be less likely to have the the power to pull their party left or right or hold the House of Representatives hostage.
Article III - Reapportion the Senate
The population of California is over 39 million while Wyoming has about 580 thousand. Yet, both these states have two senators. There is much to be said for a deliberative body like the US Senate; a smaller group of senior officials committed to discussion and consideration, but in terms of democratic values it's easy to see how the current state of affairs is broken. There have been a number of scholarly papers written on how a reapportionment might be accomplished. This one, written in 2018 by a Wharton Professor, which in addition to its own arguments has a wide variety of excellent links to other thoughts on the subject, has significant similarities as well as differences to this site's proposal. Note: there are a number of articles/opinion from scholarly sources advocating for the elimination of the Senate.
As with the previous proposed reform of the House, there isn't much in the way of polling. However, in the few studies I could find, the support is limited to about 1/3 of respondents being in favor.
Beginning with a single Senator per state to maintain the federal principles on which the Senate was created, enables opportunities for a more fair distribution of representation. It also results in an evening out of the Electoral College (should it continue to exist) and a lowering of the bar (objections) for the addition of states to the union. Those who say such an action would favor a single party might be surprised to see that while California, New York, and a few other Democratic states would benefit, so also would Texas, Florida, and others. The net makeup would not be dissimilar to what we see today depending on the exact method (see below for the results of my simplified approach).
Proposal: As part of the constitutionally mandated census, Senators will be allocated to the states with a mandated single Senator per state. All remaining seats will be assigned by population to a total of 100 Senators. Current seats would serve out their terms, at which time they would be phased out as determined by the first re-allocation.
My own simplified method (one per state with the remaining 50 assigned to states based on straight population) would assign seven seats to California, five to Texas, four each to Florida and New York, three seats to six states, 19 states would remain at two, and 20 states would be reduced to a single Senate seat (From Utah with 3.2 million citizens down to the aforementioned Wyoming). The likely new senate makeup would be Democrats 53 to 55 and Republicans 45 to 47 - a two to four seat change from the time of this article.
If Puerto Rico, DC, or a collective Pacific Island State were to join, seats would be re-allocated with Connecticut, Oklahoma, and Oregon likely going from two seats to one in that order.
I don't think there's a single stand-alone cure be it politician, law, or cultural revolution. But I would ask you to consider the following constitutional reforms, and how they would (positively) impact the political landscape.
For each proposal, I will do my best to lay out the current issue and its downstream effects. I'll then dig up expert and creditable polling information. And, finally, a proposal as to how we might improve via a constitutional amendment. All the topics are laid out below. I'll only tackle them one at a time, so come back for updates and new proposals. (If you want to email me about any of these, please contact me at perrierrobertl at gmail dot com.)
Congressional Term Limits
Expanded House Membership
Senate Allocation
Abolition of the Electoral College
Congressional Redistricting
Supreme Court Reform
Addition of States
Article I - Congressional Term Limits
It is no secret that elected members of congress, particularly House members working under the pressure of two year terms, are endlessly running for their office. From the day they are sworn in, they are running again. That means raising money, spending time with big donors (private or corporate), and splitting their attention between the job they have and the job nearly all desperately want to keep. I don't think it's at all controversial to say that nearly all citizens would rather have their elected officials working on improving our government rather than schmoozing and fundraising.
The House voluntary retirement rate hovers at about 5%. Doing the overly-simplified math, that means if not voted out or departed for other natural reasons, a 40 year tenure would be common before a voluntary exit! As of this article, 54 members have served longer than 20 years, 18 longer than 30, and only three longer than 40, but you get the point. While more highly tenured members of both the House and Senate do wield more power for their constituencies, it can also be argued that the more power a member accrues, the more powerful backers collected. And if you can outspend any opponent by multiples come campaign time, why bother with trivial complaints of constituents? [The last link is a bit of a deep dive, but it sites multiple Political Scientist who have found increased tenure leads to decreased constituent responsiveness.]
For decades, an overwhelming number of citizens have supported congressional term limits: 87% in late 2023. The most commonly heard counter-argument to this is that a certain level of seniority is required to navigate the rules and promote effective leadership.
Proposal: Total time served in congress (House, Senate, or combination) shall be limited to 24 years.
That's 12 terms in the House or four in the Senate. Plenty of time to learn the ropes and then some. 95 current House members would have exceeded their term limits (nearly one in four). The number is nine in the Senate. The change could reduce the role of entrenched money, increase the focus on both responsiveness and leaving a mark in a no-longer infinite amount of time.
Article II - Expanded House Membership
This will be one of the shorter arguments, as it's based largely on PolySci Cube Root theory, but I'll try to expound on why it makes sense beyond the theoretical. House members, our most directly elected representatives in the Federal Government, are intended to be responsive to their districts. In 1911 (the last time the House of Representatives was permanently expanded), each member represented about 215 thousand people. Compare that to the last census in 2021, where each member represents 763 thousand.
The goal is to have an optimal number of members in a legislative body to enable communication from constituent-to-member and amongst members in the body itself. The detailed science is linked from the article above, but the same responsiveness arguments as made in the Term Limit Article can be applied here as well.
An interesting benefit (side-effect) would be an equalizing in the power of each voter. Today, a voter in Montana (where I reside) has an outsized voice in the House, with each member representing just over a half million people. Whereas a Delaware representatives speaks for nearly one million. The same argument goes for the Electoral College (Article upcoming), where all the less populated states have an outsized voice in the presidential election system.
I'll admit this is not a popular proposal among the US population, but I'd hazard to guess that's at least partially due to a lack of understanding of the issue.
Proposal: As part of the census, the membership of the House of Representatives shall be reapportioned in accordance with the Cube Root law to the nearest odd number.
By using the Cube Root law, the US House of Representatives would have closer to 700 members. (Large for sure, but still manageable.) The inequality would largely balance out. More kinds of voices would be heard with Members representing smaller groups. And a handful of beyond-the-pale extremists would be less likely to have the the power to pull their party left or right or hold the House of Representatives hostage.
Article III - Reapportion the Senate
The population of California is over 39 million while Wyoming has about 580 thousand. Yet, both these states have two senators. There is much to be said for a deliberative body like the US Senate; a smaller group of senior officials committed to discussion and consideration, but in terms of democratic values it's easy to see how the current state of affairs is broken. There have been a number of scholarly papers written on how a reapportionment might be accomplished. This one, written in 2018 by a Wharton Professor, which in addition to its own arguments has a wide variety of excellent links to other thoughts on the subject, has significant similarities as well as differences to this site's proposal. Note: there are a number of articles/opinion from scholarly sources advocating for the elimination of the Senate.
As with the previous proposed reform of the House, there isn't much in the way of polling. However, in the few studies I could find, the support is limited to about 1/3 of respondents being in favor.
Beginning with a single Senator per state to maintain the federal principles on which the Senate was created, enables opportunities for a more fair distribution of representation. It also results in an evening out of the Electoral College (should it continue to exist) and a lowering of the bar (objections) for the addition of states to the union. Those who say such an action would favor a single party might be surprised to see that while California, New York, and a few other Democratic states would benefit, so also would Texas, Florida, and others. The net makeup would not be dissimilar to what we see today depending on the exact method (see below for the results of my simplified approach).
Proposal: As part of the constitutionally mandated census, Senators will be allocated to the states with a mandated single Senator per state. All remaining seats will be assigned by population to a total of 100 Senators. Current seats would serve out their terms, at which time they would be phased out as determined by the first re-allocation.
My own simplified method (one per state with the remaining 50 assigned to states based on straight population) would assign seven seats to California, five to Texas, four each to Florida and New York, three seats to six states, 19 states would remain at two, and 20 states would be reduced to a single Senate seat (From Utah with 3.2 million citizens down to the aforementioned Wyoming). The likely new senate makeup would be Democrats 53 to 55 and Republicans 45 to 47 - a two to four seat change from the time of this article.
If Puerto Rico, DC, or a collective Pacific Island State were to join, seats would be re-allocated with Connecticut, Oklahoma, and Oregon likely going from two seats to one in that order.
