[brndnmtthws]

There are only 100 seats in the US senate. How can 'we' participate in that? There are somewhere around 330 million people in the US, represented by just 100 people, who mostly act in their own self interest. How can one person properly represent on average ~3.3 million people?

What a sham.

[mondoshawan]

The Senate isn't supposed to represent the people. They were originally supposed to be the bulwark against the "rapid" (2-year) change of the House of Representatives to prevent mob rule. That is, until we amended the Constitution to make them elected by popular vote.

There are far more representatives in Congress than Senators, to the tune of almost 3:1, which is still too low.

The way we fix this is by fixing our local governments first. The States determine the number of Representatives based upon their districting and constitutions.

The answer is to fight to fix the districting and run as a representative.

[dragonwriter]

> There are far more representatives in Congress than Senators, to the tune of almost 3:1

It's very odd to describe exactly 4.35:1 (or 4.35:1.01, depending.on how you treat the VP) as “almost 3:1”.

[maxerickson]

The number of representatives in the house is set by the Federal government.

States create the districts they run in.

[wu-ikkyu]

It's funny you're being downvoted. How is it not in everyone's (except those currently exploiting the system) best interest to increase their share of representation?

[mondoshawan]

The problem with their statement is that Senate does not represent the people. The House does.

[wu-ikkyu]

The senate represents the people of their state.

>The Senate is composed of senators, each of whom represents a single state in its entirety, with each state being equally represented by two senators

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate

[brndnmtthws]

I think a lot of people in the US still have a strong sense of patriotism/nationalism. Nationalism is a trick dictators/tyrants/corrupt govs have used for decades to control people.

[maxerickson]

You aren't being fair to the Senators of large states that represent tens of millions of people.

I think your thesis is not correct though, the senate is less dysfunctional than the house, at least partly because they each answer to a broad constituency.

[thatcat]

The thesis seems to be that represenative democracy doesn't scale past a certain ratio. 10E7 : 1 is an extremely centralized system. Potential amounts for corrupt pay offs increases with the number of people you represent and ease of coordinating corruption increases as the number of represenatives decrease.

[brndnmtthws]

The senate has an excellent track record for protecting the corporate elite, not the broad constituency.

[8note]

the Senate was included in the legislative branch to avoid the government serving the broad consituency too well.

[Aaargh20318]

Maybe we could let people decide for themselves who represents them, that way they can choose someone they trust to do the job correctly.