| > I still tend to think though that such fiddling is only necessary if we insist on single-member districts with first-past-the-post systems. You can solve this using a cardinal voting system (e.g. STAR voting) even with single member districts, because FPTP is what produces a two-party system and if there are multiple parties then there are no safe seats because e.g. a left-leaning district would still have a race between the Democrats and the Green Party. Which also thwarts gerrymandering because if an extremist party draws the lines to try to give themselves more seats, they dilute their base and lose them all to a moderate party, but if they try to concentrate their base they don't get many seats. And you can also implement that in the US without major constitutional changes. > It makes sense to have sub-jurisdictions insofar as they can set local policy, but if a legislative body is going to make laws for the whole US it should, as a whole, be accountable to the whole US. The premise of this stuff is supposed to be checks and balances. Single member districts in the House would be fine if we used STAR/score/approval voting instead of FPTP. The original purpose of the Senate was to represent the states in the federal government; Senators were originally elected by state legislatures. The idea being that the state legislators would send people inclined to temper populist federal overreach. And it worked pretty well until the people who wanted to do a big round of populist federal overreach changed it to cause Senators to be directly elected. And that's what messed up the US Presidency. The original design was to have an extremely limited federal government and have the states do most everything, and then if the federal government doesn't do much, having only a single elected position in the executive branch makes sense. Meanwhile states have elected positions for everything from sheriffs to comptrollers to dogcatchers. There wasn't supposed to be a federal-level SEC or FDA -- that's state stuff -- so the US Constitution doesn't establish any elected position to be the head of it even though there ought to be if it's going to exist. |
In theory yes, but in practice I think we cannot. That is, the system you describe is allowable under the current constitution, but the path to realize it is not achievable under the current constitution, because the current constitution has led us into a dead-end which I don't think can be unblocked without wholesale reform.
> The original purpose of the Senate was to represent the states in the federal government
That was a bad idea. There is no reason for organs of government to be represented in other organs of government. That is the dead-end we've gotten into now, because the constitution does not actually give anyone any full-fledged rights (only restrictions on government action) and instead sets up a procedural game which has now reached a stable stalemate end-state characterized by gerrymandering, corporate money, etc. There is no way out because the constitution, in all its checks and balances, provides no direct mechanism for the citizenry to check or balance the legislature. This has enabled the creation of a nonrepresentative government with no way out.