[dsr_]

You've almost got it, but you need to go one step further.

Congress isn't democratic. Congress is overly concentrated.

To begin with, the Senate is absurdly anti-democratic. The 710K residents of Washington, DC don't get a vote there at all. The 600K residents of Wyoming get the same 2 votes as Vermont (620K) and California (39 million). Anything that says that Texas and West Virginia are equal to each other in some mystical sense of having equal weight in decisions that affect the whole country is an ideology not compatible with democracy.

Then, the House of Representatives is (a) absurdly gerrymandered and (b) absurdly undersized. One rep per 750,000 people on average, up from one rep per 210,000 people in 1909 and up from one per 34,000 in 1800.

Any Constitutional "originalist" who thinks that the House of Representatives is just fine at 435 reps is a hypocrite. At one per 34,000, we need about ten thousand reps to meet the standards of representation that the founders thought was reasonable.

Oddly, that would solve the other major problem with the House of Representatives: the 2 year term is fine if the rep only has to persuade the majority of 34,000 people or so. A small campaign can win. A simple requirement that all districts must be compact, convex and allocated according to a geographic/population algorithm would cure the gerrymandering, too.

[alex_sf]

> Anything that says that Texas and West Virginia are equal to each other in some mystical sense of having equal weight in decisions that affect the whole country is an ideology not compatible with democracy.

It's completely compatible with democracy, and makes perfect sense under federalism. The federal government was not meant to have the expansive powers it does; the problem is that via things like the commerce clause it's massively overstepped the boundaries that were supposed to contain it.

[dsr_]

If you want to argue "meant to", you must reference that to a time when the USA was about 17 states, all of roughly equal power, economy and population. 1803, just before the Louisiana Purchase. There were 12 Constitutional amendments.

"supposed to" is in the same light. The system that worked pretty well for about 5 million people in the pre-industrial age (and assumed that everyone not male, white, and a land-owner was distinctly second-class) does not work so well 200 years later in a world power of 330 million people.

[alex_sf]

> If you want to argue "meant to", you must reference that to a time when the USA was about 17 states, all of roughly equal power, economy and population. 1803, just before the Louisiana Purchase.

This is blatantly false. The 1800 Census has Virginia with a population of 676k persons (~340k free), with Delaware and Rhode Island having only 64k and 69k respectively. Their economies and 'power' (state militias?) were also nowhere near equal.

The senate was setup specifically because of that disparity, and was designed to prevent larger states from imposing their will on smaller states.

Every individual state is _supposed_ to be sovereign. They hold equal legal status to each other. That's why they are explicitly granted equal suffrage in the Senate.

The fundamental disconnect here is that people from your perspective view the federal government as 'the government', when it was never intended or designed to be that. The federal government was supposed to operate in a much smaller capacity than it has for the past hundred years, with the vast majority of its current responsibilities handled by the states.

> "supposed to" is in the same light. The system that worked pretty well for about 5 million people in the pre-industrial age (and assumed that everyone not male, white, and a land-owner was distinctly second-class) does not work so well 200 years later in a world power of 330 million people.

Says who? There is plenty to criticize about the US government at all levels, but, as someone who no doubt regards American Exceptionalism as an outrageous trope, how else do you explain the success and dominance of the US worldwide? It is, without question, the most powerful, wealthy, and successful country to have ever existed in history.

The US is not exceptional or unique in its history of slavery, natural resources, population, or landmass. As one of the few things unique to the US, it's entirely reasonable to attribute at least part of that success to our form of government.

edit: And, by the way: slave-owning states favored proportional representation in Congress. They were growing at a much faster pace than the northern states.

[dsr_]

> This is blatantly false. The 1800 Census has Virginia with a population of 676k persons (~340k free), with Delaware and Rhode Island having only 64k and 69k respectively. Their economies and 'power' (state militias?) were also nowhere near equal.

That's a single order of magnitude from top to bottom.

The smallest states are now the population of VA in 1800, and the largest are now two orders of magnitude larger than that.

> how else do you explain the success and dominance of the US worldwide? It is, without question, the most powerful, wealthy, and successful country to have ever existed in history.

It is:

* Exceptionally large. Russia is twice as large. China, Canada and the US are all approximately the same size. Next is Brazil and Australia, and then there's another factor of 2 drop.

* Exceptionally gifted in natural resources. Between ocean ports and navigable waterways, transportation was easy to exploit. During the agriculture-first age, huge herds of bison roamed free. Oil and gas and coal are available. Most metals and minerals are here. The climatic zones available for year-round habitation are huge, and the deserts are not.

* Exceptionally un-invadable by the powers in the world at its birth. The native Americans were devastated by disease and weapons. Every other human threat needed to lug their troops over an ocean before starting to invade. The War of 1812 was an expensive fizzle for the British.

* Compound effects from the above produced a robust economy.

* Being across an ocean meant that the US could pick and choose when to enter the World Wars. Even after Pearl Harbor, FDR could delay entry until industrial processes were engaged to a wartime footing.

But the American domination really started at the end of WWII, with all the European countries and Russia and China and Japan facing major rebuilding efforts, while the US was largely unaffected.

None of that requires the Constitution to be exactly the way it is. Would it have worked better as a multi-party parliament? I think so. Would it be less effective as a theocratic fascism? I hope we're not about to find out.

[josephcsible]

Isn't the way the US was meant to work basically the way the EU does work today?

[josephcsible]

> Any Constitutional "originalist" who thinks that the House of Representatives is just fine at 435 reps is a hypocrite. At one per 34,000, we need about ten thousand reps to meet the standards of representation that the founders thought was reasonable.

How is that hypocritical? The Constitution says "The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative". The fact that we're not near the upper bound doesn't make it unreasonable. If they thought a reasonable representation would have required some lower bound other than 1 per state, they would have written that.