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by kelnos 1496 days ago
In the US, the Senate directly causes the tyranny of the minority that we're currently experiencing.

The House also has representation issues: since the total number of representatives in the House hasn't increased over time as population has increased, there's a "floor" on the number of per-state representatives that causes smaller states to have outsized representation.

The article doesn't really deal with any of this, though: it assumes each "district" has the same number of people in it, which isn't the case for House or Senate seats when you consider the entire country. The article is more about considering the representation within a single US state, based on its division into districts.
1 comments
colechristensen 1496 days ago
I have a hard time with this because it's not like the tyranny of 20% of the population, elections are all pretty damn close to 50:50 overall much of the time. People have a hard time accepting that about half the population voted for things they really hate and choose instead to attack the small percentage of difference as the unfairness responsible for all their woes instead of the other high-40s percentage of people who want want happens when the majority loses.

Currently, arguably, democrats in power in the senate had fewer popular votes than republicans. (48 dem + 2 independent popular vote was about 1.5 million less than the 50 republican senators, with VP deciding ties... well it's just not so clean cut a minority-in-power situation)

(I blame most of the current situation on democrats being bad at politics and not having the guts to do things they should have.)

There's no way to be completely fair, the current setup is there in order to prevent several kinds of runaway power processes and really it has worked quite well for a very long time (unless you expect people to just be angels then go pick a dictator you think will be good).

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dane-pgp 1496 days ago
The real test for your hypothesis will be what happens the next time the Republicans get the presidency, the house, and 50% of the senate.

If the senate still acts as a moderating force (and doesn't push through extreme new legislative and judicial changes that tilt the system to further their advantage) then the wisdom of the current system will be empirically validated.

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