Trump can have his ballroom as soon as we repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and expand the Capitol building to accommodate the 1500 representatives we should have using the average district size from the time.
It’s weird that far more helpful updates to our government like the above tend to get buried under what I consider rather a large and stupid distraction - the left seems to have mostly adopted discussion about a “gerontology” ( 🙄 ) and adopted the right’s drumbeat about “term limits”, sigh.
Sure, other things like voter suppression and making voting even more difficult seem to get attention, and that’s good but I don’t hear much about what you describe and it’s a well-known problem. I think dumb things like term limits and how many times a politician has traveled around the sun get orders of magnitude more attention.
Yeah several of the ideas that they’ve been suggesting have zero chance of going anywhere, often because they actually require constitutional amendments.
The Permanent Apportionment Act was passed by a simple majority. It can be removed with the same.
The House is sized for the population in 1910. It created a defacto second Senate, and essentially allowed gerrymandering to become an effective political tool. That Congressional screwup needs to be fixed, and it can easily. But that requires members of Congress to give up some of their individual power.
I mean do you support the presidential term limit? Then why shouldn’t there be one for senators? I mean you guys have a major problem where a bunch of old people with no skin in the game are running your country.
The two terms thing is fine in some cases; I would be fine with 4 terms or more for Obama, though.
I just don’t see how arbitrarily focusing on age or term limits solves one fucking thing. We have too much money in politics. We have cases where land has more rights than actual voters. We have no ranked choice voting. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, Republicans are actively trying to make it all worse.
I don’t see how having young douchebags in office would make it any better than old douchebags. In either case, they just do what the money says.
Talking about the age of representation is nothing but one gigantic distraction. If the voters think they are too old, by all means, they could show up to the primaries. If the voters think they have had too many terms, by all means, primary them.
Quite the opposite actually. Gerrymandering is only as effective as it is because of the limited seats. This allows maps to be drawn with wildly arbitrary lines to split districts to achieve razor thin margins. A byproduct of gerrymandering is that the districts it creates have very weak control.
Further, the larger number of districts allows for more potential candidate options. By splitting up everything even more, smaller candidates, and alternative parties have a greater chance. Political spending being forced to be split cross 3x the candidates can only be a net positive for us at this point as we try to fix this shit.
Plus, smaller districts means more personal connection to the candidates. John Smith from fucks know where can talk smack about the nameless immigrant neighbor 3 towns over, and you may not care, but when little Jimmy from your home town talks smack about Jose who invited you to be his daughter’s godfather, like hell will you vote for him. Them are fighting words.
Trump can have his ballroom as soon as we repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and expand the Capitol building to accommodate the 1500 representatives we should have using the average district size from the time.
It’s weird that far more helpful updates to our government like the above tend to get buried under what I consider rather a large and stupid distraction - the left seems to have mostly adopted discussion about a “gerontology” ( 🙄 ) and adopted the right’s drumbeat about “term limits”, sigh.
Sure, other things like voter suppression and making voting even more difficult seem to get attention, and that’s good but I don’t hear much about what you describe and it’s a well-known problem. I think dumb things like term limits and how many times a politician has traveled around the sun get orders of magnitude more attention.
Yeah several of the ideas that they’ve been suggesting have zero chance of going anywhere, often because they actually require constitutional amendments.
The Permanent Apportionment Act was passed by a simple majority. It can be removed with the same.
The House is sized for the population in 1910. It created a defacto second Senate, and essentially allowed gerrymandering to become an effective political tool. That Congressional screwup needs to be fixed, and it can easily. But that requires members of Congress to give up some of their individual power.
I mean do you support the presidential term limit? Then why shouldn’t there be one for senators? I mean you guys have a major problem where a bunch of old people with no skin in the game are running your country.
The two terms thing is fine in some cases; I would be fine with 4 terms or more for Obama, though.
I just don’t see how arbitrarily focusing on age or term limits solves one fucking thing. We have too much money in politics. We have cases where land has more rights than actual voters. We have no ranked choice voting. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, Republicans are actively trying to make it all worse.
I don’t see how having young douchebags in office would make it any better than old douchebags. In either case, they just do what the money says.
Talking about the age of representation is nothing but one gigantic distraction. If the voters think they are too old, by all means, they could show up to the primaries. If the voters think they have had too many terms, by all means, primary them.
And with gerrymandering, that won’t make even the slightest difference.
Quite the opposite actually. Gerrymandering is only as effective as it is because of the limited seats. This allows maps to be drawn with wildly arbitrary lines to split districts to achieve razor thin margins. A byproduct of gerrymandering is that the districts it creates have very weak control.
Further, the larger number of districts allows for more potential candidate options. By splitting up everything even more, smaller candidates, and alternative parties have a greater chance. Political spending being forced to be split cross 3x the candidates can only be a net positive for us at this point as we try to fix this shit.
Plus, smaller districts means more personal connection to the candidates. John Smith from fucks know where can talk smack about the nameless immigrant neighbor 3 towns over, and you may not care, but when little Jimmy from your home town talks smack about Jose who invited you to be his daughter’s godfather, like hell will you vote for him. Them are fighting words.