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by Silfen 2795 days ago
You should extend more generosity to the point GP makes. You can believe in adjusting the system so that representation is more equal without doing away with the protections for small states. For example, you can greatly increase the size of the House. It's the original first amendment! http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/its-ti...
1 comments
jki275 2795 days ago
The house already adequately represents the people, that's how it was designed.

Expanding the house doesn't change representation.

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dragonwriter 2795 days ago
> The house already adequately represents the people

By what standard?

> that's how it was designed.

That may have been the design goal, but it's debatable whether the original design met the goal, and key elements of the original design (the original representation ratio) were not fixed in the Constitution or preserved over time.

> Expanding the house doesn't change representation.

It changes both the equality of representation (reducing quantization artifacts) and the proximity of Representatives to the represented, both of which are key elements of representation.

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Latteland 2791 days ago
The house doesn't represent the people in the sense that the party that got a significant majority of the votes has a significant minority of the seats because of gerrymandering.
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jki275 2790 days ago
It's an interesting argument, but the house isn't a monolith that represents the entire US as a bloc - it's a regional thing that represents individual regions, and actually the vast majority of those areas in the US do not belong to the minority party. Overall popular vote is not how we elect the house.

You can argue about gerrymandering all day long, both sides do it and have done it since the beginning.

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