I’m of the opinion that the Senate, as currently constructed, has outlived its usefulness:
The filibuster is in peril.
With Republicans expected to change the Senate rules to slash debate time on President Donald Trump’s nominees this week, it will mark the third time the “nuclear option” — changing Senate rules by a simple majority — has been triggered in just six years.
Each of those unilateral moves by a Senate majority to weaken the Senate’s age-old precedents centered on nominations, leaving the legislative filibuster and its 60-vote threshold unscathed. But some senators say it’s just a matter of time before even that Senate institution is more or less wiped away by a majority tired of seeing its big ideas blocked.
Though the Senate is up for grabs in 2020, neither party is expected to come away with a supermajority due to the limited number of competitive races. And that likely puts the supermajority requirement itself in jeopardy — particularly if one party controls the White House, House and Senate and wants to move its agenda.
I’m not completely up to speed on British politics, but maybe it is time to send the Senate the way of the House of Lords. Remake it so the Senate only deals with, I dunno, appointments. Leave everything else to the house. I dunno, but right now, all the Senate does is act like the House of Representatives with majority rule, but the majority is actually the minority viewpoint in the country. It does nothing to slow down the wishes of a radical majority, but instead pushes the fantasies and vulgar outlook of a minority of the country. A they’ve shown the past few years, they have no desire to act like a co-equal branch of government and serve as a check on the executive. All the Senate does right now is harm the country. Just burn it down.
gene108
Senate needs permanent rule changes, to keep another person, like McConnell from coming up and destroying it.
I’d prefer a Constitutional amendment to keep this from happening again.
Clearly Republicans no longer respect the legislative institutions – House and Senate – and just view them as vehicles to grab more power.
schrodingers_cat
The electoral college and the senate are symptoms, what is ailing America is the current iteration of the Republican party and the people who vote for it.
The Midnight Lurker
Damn these wet matches!
VeniceRiley
It’s a fantasy, but I’m all for it.
gene108
Also, if the House bothered to reapportion seating from the current 435, which was set in 1911 after the 1910 census, a lot of Senate fuckery would not be as much of an issue, because we’d get more representation in underrepresented urban areas, which tend to go for Democrats.
rikyrah
@gene108:
What number should it go up to?
Amir Khalid
I know what: appoint commenter Tony Jay to the front page. You need him.
Adam L Silverman
@gene108:
This is not true. The Senate has always been the enemy of the House regardless of which party controls each chamber. Other than joint resolutions, some required by law as we saw with the vote to prevent the President from reapportioning funds, the Senate is not required to actually act on any piece of legislation that the House passes.
Llelldorin
That understates the usefulness of the British House of Lords. In the UK the Lords are now largely an appointive body of leading industrialists, scientists, artists, and engineers, creating a pool of expertise that can usefully refine legislation passed by the Commons. By contrast, we have Inhofe throwing snowballs.
jl
McConnell has been playing Calvinball for a long time, and also a depraved cynical liar.
So, people should let their Democratic Senators what should be done.about it when they take back the Senate.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
California has 690k per house rep. Wyoming has 190k.
ETA, that’s the number per elector, not house member. Oops!
Level it. The House isn’t supposed to mimic the Senate, which is designed to give low-population states “equal” voice.
Nicole
@rikyrah: The Framers intended that each district have no more than 50,000-60,000 citizens. Currently, the average district contains 700,000 citizens.
I think 50,000-60,000 is a good average for a district size.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Or just promote his excellent comment downstairs to the front page. We’ve tried appointing you to the front page, but you resist.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I don’t even know why anybody calls it a filibuster anyway. It isn’t a filibuster at all. When there’s a real filibuster, somebody has to do something. Nobody even does anything. All it is is 41 people saying they won’t vote to end debate, only there never is any debate.
It would be one thing if people were standing up there, speaking. But they don’t do that. Nobody has to do anything; nobody ever has to pay any price. It’s just an excuse to let a minority of the Senate, elected by a minority of the country, stand in the way of every damned thing. It needs to go.
Jeffro
If we get rid of the Senate, who will be left to go on the Sunday morning talking head shows? It’s a real concern.
Btw Borowitz Report this morning noting that Germany is threatening to cut all ties to the U.S. unless trumpov retracts his claim that his dad was born there. You tell ’em, Angela!
trollhattan
@Nicole:
They’d have to meet in a stadium. ;-)
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: I second that nomination, if he’s willing. I find his takes on Brexit hilarious and informative. I also enjoy the respite from worrying about U.S. politics, though the fuckery involving both has similar and directly related roots/villains, so following the Brexit follies isn’t a completely escapist exercise for Americans…
Nicole
@trollhattan: Finally! A stadium for which I would support public funding!
Jeffro
On a serious note, I’m good with a Senate that only votes on administration posts, ambassadors, and federal judges…provided that by law, they MUST vote up or down (both in committee and then if approved in the full Senate) within 60 days of receiving any given nomination (upcoming election or no)
No need for them to vote on legislation, though, that’s for sure. And expanding the House is a great idea.
dm
@rikyrah: The NYT had a section on returning the House earlier this year.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expanded-house-representatives-size.html
They suggest 593. They also have some proportional representation suggestions that sound good.
I think we should treat judges as mini-Constitutional amendments. Require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate (requires a change the Constitution to make this happen).
daveNYC
The House of Lords is a bit more useful than the Senate right now, and it’s not like the House of Commons is slathering itself with glory.
MattF
Speaking of Britpol– I made the error of reading Tom Friedman’s bloviation on that subject this morning. Actually, to be honest, his column wasn’t all that bad… but at one point Friedman quotes an opinionizer who says:
I mean, can you get any WTFier than that? Where do they find these guys?
Fair Economist
Any major change to the power of the Senate is going to require a Constitutional amendment, which requires 3/4 of the states, which means if we could pass it the Senate wouldn’t be a problem anyway.
We could redefine “advise and consent” so that the Senate could block an appointment only with an active vote, which would be a net benefit in an D leaning country with an R leaning Senate.
Mandalay
All good points, but they are not the reason the Senate should disappear. The core problem is its composition. The notion that in a major branch of government both Wyoming and California should get two seats is ridiculous.
Nobody would design things that way now, yet because it is has been around for so long, and has acquired a history, it becomes completely untouchable. So if we are to preserve the Senate then modify its composition to take some account of the relative populations of the states. If that means Wyoming gets one seat and California gets a gazillion, then so be it. At least the voters would have better representation.
Betty Cracker
@MattF: Christ on a crumpet! I’ve written and edited proposals for a global consulting firm, and even they would have been too ashamed to barf up that buzzword bolus, at least under my watch.
MattF
The Senate was designed to be undemocratic, and it is.
david
@Nicole: That would lead to a HoR with 6,600 people. Seems kind of unwieldy.
MattF
@david: Big enough to do a Wave, though.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah, @dm:
Something I read last year (too lazy to look it up now) said that if you took as the baseline one representative for the least populous state—Wyoming, population about 544,000—and scaled up from there you would end up with 600-700 members in the House. (The number was more exact, but I don’t remember what it was.)
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Betty Cracker: Third (at least; I didn’t read further down) that nomination. Please say yes, Tony Jay.
Steeplejack
@MattF:
That sounds like every dot-com mission statement ever.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@?BillinGlendaleCA: We’ve tried several times, as I recall, and I keep hoping he’ll say yes someday.
Thad Phetteplace
I’ve had this conversation with my wife (she’s British)… Would it be possible to move the US toward something more like the British parliamentary system? What we arrived at was basically something like 1) Reduce the President’s power so they are more of a figurehead / top diplomat (i.e. the Queen). 2) Greatly reduce the power of the Senate (i.e. it becomes the House of Lords). 3) The Speaker of the House is now basically the head of the government (i.e. the Prime Minister). Ok… this is never going to happen, but it was a fun thought experiment.
Betty Cracker
@MattF: You are correct, sir. And as much as I love the idea of overturning that undemocratic-by-design institution foist upon us by our all-too-fallible founders, that’s not going to happen without the attendant serious civil unrest that would make such an outcome thinkable to the people who benefit from the current setup. It may come to that but probably not anytime soon.
Nicole
@david: We’re a pretty big country. We’d figure it out. But hey, I’d be willing to start out with the using the least populous state as the baseline and keep improving the system from there, too.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Thad Phetteplace:
A lot of that would require constitutional amendments; unlikely to happen as you allude to. A civil war would probably be needed to smash the minoritarian institutional roadblocks in the way
oatler.
@MattF: “Keep up the patter until we bust into the bank vault.”
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Betty Cracker:
I could easily see this happening within the next 20-30 years. Climate change isn’t going away, not to mention several geopolitical challenges facing the US such as the PRC and the Russian Federation. Those aren’t going away anytime soon
Salty Sam
But…but…THE SAUCER THAT COOLS THE COFFEE!!!
low-tech cyclist
@VeniceRiley:
Same here.
What we CAN do is add new states to even things up. DC and Puerto Rico for starters.
Then turn California into a dozen states. While Article IV, Section 3 is a roadblock to doing it directly (“no new State may be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State”), if you do it in such a way that you add an acre of Nevada desert to each such new state, then as long as Congress and the legislatures of CA and NV approve, that same part of the Constitution says it’s perfectly kosher.
Sherparick
1. The Senate is one of the most Undemocratic Institutions and it would be great if it could be abolished.
2. Is not going to happen short of a political revolution because under the Constitution the Senate itself cannot be amended out of existence without the consent of the states.
“Article V also contains a clause that shields the first clause of Article I, Section 3, which provides for equal representation of the states in the Senate, from being amended. Unlike the other two shielding provisions, this provision does not contain an expiration date and remains in effect. The provision does allow for a state to lose equal representation in the Senate if that state consents to the loss of equal representation.”
Article I could perhaps be amended that would reduce the Senate’s powers so that it could return a bill to the House for a second vote, but if the House passes it again, it goes to the President for his signature. Similarly, the authority to advise and consent on Judges could be transferred to the House from the Senate. But the Senate itself is inviolate.
Meanwhile, it looks like a real monster has been elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins. Wisconsin is a weird state right now. Madison and most of the Southwest and Northwest parts of the state, along with Milwaukee and Door County (a place whose economy depends on clean water and declining pollution), lined up against the rest of the state where punishing the others for their lives being like shit is the predominate emotion. The underpeformance in Milwaukee speaks to the lack of outreach and perhaps racisim among white Democrats toward the African American community in Milwaukee.
Mandalay
@MattF: You make me feel dirty for defending Friedman, but he half-explained the terms two paragraphs earlier:
It’s not that Friedman and Hagel are wrong – they are absolutely correct – but I agree that they could and should have used more everyday language instead of academic/management terms used by the few.
Amazon would be a golden example of who they are talking about. If you visit their site and add a widget to your cart but don’t place your order, you may come back later and see that the price has increased or decreased. That might be due to a new supplier allowing them to lower the price, or they may be swamped with Christmas orders for widgets, allowing them to bump the price.
The key concepts are that there is no fixed price for a lot of stuff on Amazon, and that they may dynamically adjust their price (and your cost) due to changes in circumstances that are made accessible to them through “knowledge flows”.
TLDR: knowledge is power.
Sloane Ranger
Actually the House of Lords acts as a revising chamber. As someone upthread said it’s now primarily composed of people who have made a name for themselves in various fields and they use their expertise to improve and refine the Bills passed to them by the Commons. The Bills are then sent back to the Commons who can decide whether or not to accept the Lords amendments.
The Lords can, at the end of the day, refuse to pass a Bill (other than a money Bill, I think or anything that was in the Government’s manifesto) but, all that does is delay the Bill becoming law for 6 months.
NB. This was the position when I took British Constitution O’ Level. I don’t think it’s changed much since I was at school but I might have missed something. There have been periods when I lost interest and didn’t follow politics.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: China will still be there, but I really wonder if the Russian Federation will survive Putin’s passing in one piece.
sherparick
@dm: Also, tenure in Appellate Courts and Supreme Courts should be limited to 10 years, subject to reappointment with advice and consent both Senate and House. I would encourage States to adopt a similar rule in State Constitutions to eliminate judicial elections which when the turn partisan, like they have in Wisconsin, means the credibility of the judiciary.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@low-tech cyclist:
Hell NO, California works because it’s one state(it’s the Water).
White & Gold Purgatorian
@rikyrah: Here’s my take on the size of the House. Take the population of the smallest state and make that the equivalent of 1 representative. Reapportion all the other states based on whole numbers of that population metric. Add or subtract after every census. Not without problems — don’t know where they would meet and it would make the census even more of a political football — but it would be much fairer.
PJ
Sure, get rid of the Senate, but when you have a Republican President and Republican House, as we did from 2001 – 2007, what’s to stop them from getting rid of Social Security, and selling all federal land to their friends at bargain basement prices? I think it was Jefferson who said (I’m paraphrasing) that the Senate exists for the same reason that people put cream in their coffee, to cool things down. It is inherently less democratic (in a one man, one vote sense) and slower to change than the House, but when 51% of the country votes for arsonists, don’t you want an institution that will stop them from burning everything down?
And if you are getting rid of the Senate because it’s undemocratic, get rid of life-term Supreme Court justices, which is the most undemocratic aspect of federal government.
FlyingToaster
@Steeplejack:
Or took an average of the lowest 5 population states: which brings us to ~716K, and anytime your margin goes above 150% (1.075 million) you’d get another rep. That would bring the House up into the low 700s. Which is likely manageable; once you get more than 1K it’s likely to start being a problem. But it will grow a lot slower if you’re pegging it to the lowest 5 states, instead of the lowest 1.
We’d have to build a new building for the House to meet in; right now, a joint session shoehorns in the 100 senators and the 9 Supremes. No way you’re getting 700+ into a space that barely accomodates 550.
The other way to fix the Senate would be to make it a, say, quadruple of the population for the House per senator; ~3 Million per senator, at Xsenators + 4.5 million you get another senator. So Wyoming would only have one, Massachusetts would still have 2, and California would have 16 or 17. Still 3 classes and 6 year terms.
But I’d expect us to go the way of Neuromancer before we’d actually fix our government.
MattF
@Mandalay: Well, even if you try take what they’re saying seriously, it doesn’t make sense. The difficulty is that they’re talking about information flow and power growth, and you can’t characterize those items so blithely. Even in the steady-state, growth and flow are not the same thing as current values and need not obey similar rules.
Mandalay
@low-tech cyclist:
Good luck with that. Voters in Puerto Rico are not convinced that they even want to become a state, and I’m certain that our Republican friends can come up with a gazillion reasons why DC can’t become a state.
Why not just keep California, but give them 24 seats in the Senate instead of 2?
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
If nominated I will not accept, if elected I will not serve, if paid I will just waste the money on monkey-hookers and cheap blow.
I’ll just keep on venting, the residue is the property of the BJ community. 8-)
tobie
@low-tech cyclist:
This has the virtue of being the right thing to do!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Tony Jay:
You’ll be perfect.
Amir Khalid
@low-tech cyclist:
Not sure how dividing California up would work. If you turned it into a dozen or so states of roughly equal population, the greater Los Angeles area alone would become, like, four states.
BobS
@schrodingers_cat: The senate seems to be working the way the slaveholders who invented American democracy intended it to.
FlyingToaster
@sherparick: Rather than 10 year terms for every judge, there’s a great argument (I’ve been having this one in meatspace) for having proportional terms to the number of judges on the appelate and supreme courts. The Supremes would have 9, one every two years, so every Preznit gets to appoint two, and the last two years every Justice gets to be Chief Justice. You could run that with all of the appelate courts, so it’d be around 12-15 years per apellate judge, and then 10 years for federal trial judges. So no presidential term could appoint more than 1/4 of anything. It’d slow down the reactionary hijacking going on now.
Betty Cracker
I know no one wants to hear this, but reducing the appeal of racist, sexist, xenophobic, god-bothering demagoguery where that appeal is most concentrated will be an easier lift than abolishing the senate or adding enough new states to balance things out. If that’s impossible, so is our ability to continue to function as a single nation long term. I don’t think it is impossible, but that’s just my opinion, and not a very strongly held one at that.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s a very good question. I don’t follow that stuff too much, so I don’t know if Putin’s even chosen a successor, yet.
China may actually collapse before this century is out. Climate change will affect them as well. Xi is also centralizing power around himself, making the regime less flexible to solve problems
FlyingToaster
@Tony Jay:
That’s not something that anyone here is likely to object to, seeing that we all read BJDickMayhew…
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
Pretty please?
trollhattan
@Tony Jay:
The most honest platform seen this decade. Monster Raving Loony, 2019!
Mandalay
@MattF: The concepts they are discussing are not entirely straightforward, and they were poorly explained, but they are very real. Some computer programming languages have been been enhanced to support easier access to streams of volatile information (e.g. constant fluctuations in a stock price, or inventory levels of a widget, or the weather in Omaha right now).
Just think of those constantly changing streams of information as “knowledge flows”, and accept that Hagel is correctly pointing out that successful companies will be making the best use of those “knowledge flows”.
eemom
So the House of Lords isn’t composed of actual Lords anymore? How does the appointment process work?
I am fascinated by all things Brit. They might be as fucked as we are politically, but they sound so much cooler. So Tony Jay should be an audio FPer.
James E Powell
@rikyrah:
According to census.gov, the average size of a congressional district based on the 2010 Census was 710,767, more than triple the average district size of 210,328 based on the 1910 Census apportionment. 1305 congress-creatures might be more than anyone can stand. How about 900?
PJ
@Betty Cracker: You’re right, but how to do this concretely is a hard thing requiring decades of work, and not likely to be taken up by commenters on an almost top 10,000 blog who are goofing off from work.
Amir Khalid
@MattF:
I resent the heck out of Tom Friedman. I slung exactly the same bullshit fot The Star that he did for The Fucking New York Times, and I got paid less in a year than he got in half a week.
eemom
@Amir Khalid:
Amir, do you speak English with a Brit accent?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: China has seen Rome come and go. China will still be with us long past the end of this century.
Amir Khalid
@eemom:
No lah. I definitely sound Malaysian.
Gravenstone
@Sherparick:
How many times do we need to correct you people on this issue?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@eemom: I don’t know about Amir, but the Malays* I’ve know to have a slight Brit accent.
*In grad school, my gf was a Malay.
James E Powell
@Sherparick:
I’d go a bit further and say that it’s not going to happen short of a violent, bloody, prolonged civil war/revolution that will leave the country forever divided and in some respects ungovernable.
MattF
@Mandalay: If we’re disagreeing about anything, it’s whether or not Friedman and/or Hagel really have a clue. I think ‘NO’… but I won’t insist.
FlyingToaster
@Betty Cracker: Every year, when I return to Massachusetts from Florida or Missouri, I ask how the fuck are we still in the same country.
One of my friends keeps repeating, “It’s called a Social Contract, goddammit!” And the perception of that hereabouts (pay your taxes so that the river trails and bike trails and summer swimming pools are free, and the schools have <400students/elementary school) versus where my mom and niece live — pay little or no taxes, but pay to park at every park, no bike trails or sidewalks, elementary schools with 1000 kids and HS's with 5000+ — is disheartening.
It's not like we in the Commonwealth expect the state government to do much more than collect income taxes, pay for the statewide agencies (CDR, MSP, etc) and redistribute the remainder to the towns as local aid. Local decisions are made at the municipal level, or via regional authorities (MWRA, MBTA). It's not a nanny state, despite FoxNoise propaganda.
And most parks have free parking.
Amir Khalid
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Malaysians of my generation and older were taught a very British English in school, but nowadays the young’uns sound markedly American to my ears.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
After you, valued commentator. ;-)
(But really, what a terrifying prospect. People here are way too smart and ask too many good questions. I’ll leave that to people better suited.)
A Ghost To Most
@PJ: I’m not goofing off from work. I’m goofing off from retirement.
The Electoral College can be bypassed by the National Popular Vote compact. Only 89 electoral votes to go.
Fair Economist
@Mandalay:
This is one of the issues where Democrats should learn to just use power. The current Puerto Rico government supports statehood; the most recent referendum supported statehood (yes, there was a boycott; but statehood won); if we get the trifecta in 2020 just make Puerto Rico a state. We would have the power; just do it. Let the Republicans try to figure out a way to roll it back.
The iffy popular support within PR itself would transform immediately into overwhelming support for statehood because of status quo bias. We would immediately look prescient and the Republican disadvantages in PR would be further magnified as they spewed out ways to ***** over PR.
Sloane Ranger
@eemom: Each political party submits a list of candidates. Among the usual cadre of superannuated politicians (who make up the Government Ministers and Shadow Ministers in the Lords) there is a leavening of business people, social activists, scientists, athletes, academics to provide the knowledge base for the Bill revision process.
Each person is made a Life Peer by the Queen. This means they actually are Lords and Ladies but the title isn’t passed to their descendents. There are also a small number of hereditary peers still in the House. They are elected for life by all the hereditary peers.
James E Powell
@Gravenstone:
I’m open to learning more about the voter suppression, but I can’t help but wonder: a) how it gets close enough for that to determine the outcome and b) why, after all these elections, the Wisconsin Ds haven’t come up with a GOTV remedy.
An explanation without rancor would be most appreciated.
Mandalay
@MattF: Well you may have a point there. I have no way of knowing whether Hagel actually comprehends the words coming out of his mouth, and I’d trust Friedman as far as I can throw him. But regardless of all that, the concepts they are discussing are real and important (it’s part of how I make my living).
Amir Khalid
@Tony Jay:
I know. Jackals are a tough audience.
NotMax
Pro tip: Bird poop on the windshield and a full ashtray are not reasons sufficient to junk a car.
So old that can recall some here bellowing for Reid to scrap the filibuster rules.
burnspbesq
@low-tech cyclist:
Before you get serious about such a hare-brained scheme, take the time to understand the demographics of the state. The huge, permanent Democratic majority is packed into about seven of the state’s 58 counties. The empty parts are overwhelmingly Republican. As long as each state has two Senators, dividing California guarantees permanent Republican control of the Senate.
PJ
@Fair Economist: I have no insight into this, but I wonder if Puerto Ricans are wondering that if they had been a state, they wouldn’t have been shafted (as much) by Trump in responding to Hurricane Maria. But then Louisiana had been a state for a long time when Bush decided to let New Orleans die. (The connecting factor might have something to do with the numbers of non-white people in both.)
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Past performance is not indicative of future results ; )
It’s true China as a civilization is long-lived but that doesn’t mean that has to be the case forever, especially if unprecedented climate change is going to occur in a geologically speaking short time frame. Animals and insects are dying at terrifying rates. If we lose insects, we’re as good as dead, long-term.
Although, I might concede that Chinese civilization will continue in some form but the current ruling regime will not at some point in the not so distant future.
Mandalay
@Fair Economist: I love your ballsy approach, but this is the bit of your argument I’m not sure about:
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: My gf was the same generation as we are(I think you’re a year my junior).
plato
@NotMax: Yup. Such a short term memory around here.
Isn’t burn it all to the ground belief is what the bj’ers mock the rwnj’s for? Such hypocrisy.
Want to make a difference? Vote in every fucking election and turn the senate blue and keep it that way.
opiejeanne
@low-tech cyclist: No! The proposals to divvy California up into several states creates more red states than blue ones. California is a powerhouse economy because it is one single entity.
I see Bill in Glendale got here before me on the water issue.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: In the long term, we’re all dead.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Whiskey’s for drinkin’, Water’s for fightin’.
TomatoQueen
@eemom: A BBC series in repeats now on public tv in the DC area is “Meet the Lords” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h4ch1 which has a host of Bing/Google entries, is great fun, and shows how an ancient institution meets modern times–very often by doing what it has always done, act as a brake on those crazies across the hall. The appointment process is as it has been, the hereditaries, the C of E, and the soap and pickles group, which also includes peers from…across the hall. Worth a watch. The British Constitution is still unwritten, so depends on everybody just knows the rules.
A Ghost To Most
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Just the potential fights over water rights should banish thoughts of splitting Cali.
NotMax
The one major change I would like to see (and which, let’s face it, will happen sometime well after all of Hell is encased in carbonite) is to do away with Congressional pensions.
But a fella can dream.
West of the Rockies
The Republicans have been running their automobile of fear and hatred non-stop for decades. They’ve really been gunning the engine the last few years.
But the tires are bald, the low oil and check-engine lights have been on for the last few hundred miles. That car eventually will break down.
And then all they will have is a broken-down husk of over-heated rhetoric, corruption, and bad ideas.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@A Ghost To Most: I see someone read my recent OTR featuring the Mulholland Dam.
West of the Rockies
@West of the Rockies:
To further the analogy, they’re driving a big red Ford F350 with Rolling Smoke exhaust fumes pouring out. They’ve been maintaining that truck on liquid rage and lies and fear and resentment. Now Trump is at the wheel, but he’s the equivalent of a .25 B/A driver. The ride won’t end well.
Barry
@NotMax: Getting rid of pensions would mean that only rich or well-bribed people could afford to be in Congress. We are already too far down that road for good government. That would accelerate the process quite a bit.
germy
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
The number of members of the house should be set so that every member has the same number of constituents, within reason. So the least populated state might have one rep, the rest of the states would have a number that is their population devided by the population of the smallest, rounded down.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Yup. The sweep of the pendulum may vary but its movement doesn’t halt. Projecting the problem of those composing an institution as equivalent to a problem intrinsic to the institution is short-sighted.
Gravenstone
@germy: Useful tool is useful – for some people. Just not Democrats.
Amir Khalid
@germy:
Let me just fix that for the tweeter:
There. Much more accurate.
germy
@Gravenstone: So much for solidarity with the Democrats. I know it’s not a debate, it’s a townhall, but I still thought fox was being boycotted.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: As Amir noted, the patron saint of Burlington is not a Democrat.
tarragon
@Tony Jay:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there.
At least respect yourself enough to go with quality blow.
germy
@Amir Khalid: He thinks he’ll win everyone over, but he’ll be walking into an arena stuffed with audience gotcha questions and moderators who’ll frame everything from a conservative perspective.
Wait… that’s like every major network townhall…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@tarragon: He was factoring in Balloon Juice wage rates.
NotMax
@Barry
On the contrary, I would posit that in the absence of term limits it would lead to more frequent turnover and/or encourage people to serve for a time, return to the private sector to vest in a pension/work on building a retirement nest egg there and then run to return to Congress after that if they so choose.
A Ghost To Most
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Not that I remember, but maybe. I was extrapolating from CO. It would cause chaos here, and probably much worse in Cali.
Amir Khalid
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m glad to see an American who can distinguish Malaysian nationality from Malay ethnicity. I’ve met a few who were unaware of the difference, and applied the term “Malay” to any Malaysian. In the wrong context it is potentially very offensive, as you know.
Michael Cain
One of the hurdles to increasing the size of the House, even up to say 700, is that they’ll have to move their meetings out of the Capital. Subject to interpretation, Article I Section 5 may mean that the Senate would have to go with them.
A friend suggests regularly that the federal government ought to give DC back to Maryland (except for a small national monument) and buy the land for a new federal district somewhere in the middle of the country. I always suggest North Platte, Nebraska. The land would be cheap, they could size the House chamber more appropriately, they could include nice apartments for the members this time, and given the general lack of amenities (ie, opera, museums, etc), there’s a chance that Congress would attend to its business in six months each year, like they used to.
J R in WV
@Thad Phetteplace:
Like that’s working out SO well for the British people right now!!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: Soft or hard term limits is a disaster, it increases the influence of lobbyists because they become the only group with institutional knowledge.
NotMax
@Michael Cain
Government by recess appointments. Oh goody. //
Also too, anything other than the Eastern time zone is inherently inferior, don’tcha know. :)
Kelly
As a late rising left coaster thank you Tony Jay and thanks those that pointed back to Tony Jay’s epic rant on the earlier thread.
I’m stealing “Syphilis on a national scale” as a descriptor for our US right wingers.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Yep. It is very difficult to come up with rules or procedures to damper bad behavior if one party (the goddam Republicans) is committed to misrule.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid:
Dating a Malay for two years will do that. I think the confusion(other than ignorance) for Americans is that British Malaya became Malaysia.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Please note I expressed no opinion pro or con as to term limits, rather a method attempting to make Congressional service less financially lucrative as a lifetime career option.
A Ghost To Most
As long as we’re spit-balling Constitutional changes:
Any state with less population than the average congressional district gets only one senator; that extra senator goes to the state with the largest population with only 2 senators.
The Moar You Know
@low-tech cyclist: Then you’ll have three blue states and nine red ones.
California is blue only because the immediate coasts are. Go twenty miles inland, and save for the accents and desert, you’ll think you’re in Alabama. Most of this state, area-wise, is Republican. Population-wise, just the opposite.
Bye, all.
Tony Jay
@tarragon:
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker: Oh buzzwords. It’s always good when explaining something makes someone ask, “Sorry. What the fuck are you talking about?”
Knowledge flows? WTF? Are those like ice floes?
J R in WV
@A Ghost To Most:
When you’re retired it isn’t “goofing off” — it becomes your occupation!!!
different-church-lady
Which is great as long as Republicans don’t have the house.
eemom
@Sloane Ranger:
Thank you! Makes much more sense to me now.
different-church-lady
If you’re worried about the size of the House: you just need to leave everything as is and wait for the food shortages caused by climate change to drastically reduce the population.
A Ghost To Most
@J R in WV:
Thanks. I’m still learning.
MattF
Oh, well, and OT: just filed my taxes. Got slaughtered by the new tax law. Had to take the standard deduction, and in a high-tax, high-property value state like MD that’s a big deal. I believe that the rules have been eased this year, so I don’t have to pay estimated taxes, but that’s a small relief. Le sigh.
Martin
@low-tech cyclist:
Whoa. California might just be the most functional state in the nation right now. How about we merge Alabama and Mississippi instead?
Martin
@Ruckus: Why should these things be geographically bounded anyway? It’s not like you need to reach your constituents on horseback. You can Skype now. Have Wyoming and Montana split a pair of Senators, or share a congressional district.
I’d argue Montana and Wyoming have more in common than Orange County and Imperial County, anyway.
NotMax
@NotMax
That said, I’d be amenable to term limits on the order of, say, the full term equivalent of 24 years (to take into account appointed senators and special elections, their partial term would count as a full term), whether served consecutively or not, with time in office in either chamber counting towards the total.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: Well, they do share Yellowstone.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: We have term limits, they’re called elections.
Kelly
@different-church-lady:
In my dark moments I wonder how big a crisis it will take to pull people over to the party of justice and collective action. Something on the scale of the Great Depression?
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
I’m enjoying this junior constitutional convention in the comments.
But you got to be careful with suggested improvements.
So, your Senate would not be involved in matters of impeachment?
Cheryl from Maryland
@eemom: Yes, the idea that Ian McKellan, Judy Dench, Mick Jagger, Emma Thompson, Zadie White, Hilary Mantel could be advising the UK government is exciting to me. I could go for an upper house comprised of Willie Nelson, Steven Spielberg, Tim Cook, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Patti Smith, Jumpha Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Melissa Etheridge, Bruce Springsteen, Melinda Gates, Abigail Disney, Laurence Fishburne, Ava Du Verney, Gloria Estefan, Shelia Johnson — I mean, so much talent and vision and creativity rather than these nothing thinkers we have in the US Senate.
A Ghost To Most
@Martin:
I like this. Suggested new names:
– Alassippi
– Missabama
– Darwin’s Waiting Room
J R in WV
I too think a larger House of Reps would be a good thing. They could build an arena-sized hall for both houses, with enough room for many thousands of citizen observers. Don’t give them private offices, give them working space on the lower part of the arena, surrounded by the observer citizens, who will be able to live blog what the Reps are up to, who they’re meeting with, etc.
Like a longer and fancier Rupp Arena, where I have only been once for Pink Floyd concert, which was excellent. Mushrooms and wonderful companions. Scientists now! But room for up to a couple of thousand Reps, and maybe 10,000 citizen observers with maxxed out Wi-Fi, or even fibre-net.
In the other end, the same set up, but a slightly smaller lower section of the arena with the Senators, room to grow to maybe 200 or so. I think all those protectorates, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also, should all become states, and then maybe worker slavery would end out in the Pacific.
And what about all those Native American nations? Shouldn’t they have some representation in the congresses? I dunno… but it’s a thought.
But first we would need the Legislative Hall, and turn the current capitol into a museum of political hackery. The cane used to kill the abolitionist, for example. McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the Know-Nothings, the laws passed in contradiction of solemn treaties, etc.
I’m obviously just spit-balling here. But the Legislative Hall is something we would need to enlarge the House, for sure. And why would all those Reps need private offices if they have work space for assistants right there on the floor? They should be there at least 6 hours a day, 5 days a week! An empty house means they don’t need to be there working!! That’s just wrong.
Rants over now, gonna stir lunch, beans and left over Cuban meat sauce, yum!
Salty Sam
@PJ:
Ya think?
trollhattan
Very fine people, finding one another somehow.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@A Ghost To Most:
You’d have to include Floriduh for that one.
A Ghost To Most
@J R in WV:
Sounds like “The Phantom Menace”. That was an awful movie.
eemom
@Cheryl from Maryland:
I dunno, a change that drastic might explode the chamber. Maybe do it in increments, with the first step up from the current group being 100 second graders visiting congress on a field trip.
Bill Arnold
(Don’t see this linked, sorry if repost, well not, it’s an important article.)
A long and quite interesting Rupert Murdoch article for anyone who has missed it. (NYTimes gets positive points for this one.).
How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World (JONATHAN MAHLER and JIM RUTENBERG, APRIL 3, 2019)
Part 1: Imperial Reach Murdoch and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. What do they want?
Part 2: Internal Divisions President Trump’s election made the Murdoch family more powerful than ever. But the bitter struggle between James and Lachlan threatened to tear the company apart.
Part 3: The New Fox Weapon The Disney deal left the Murdochs with a media empire stripped to its essence: a hard-core right-wing news machine — with Lachlan in charge.
via
9 Juicy Details From the Times’ Deep Dive Into the Murdoch Family and Fox News (Adam K. Raymond, April 3, 2019)
I suspect that the Murdoch family is not happy with this article. It will do damage to their brand.
J R in WV
@Kelly:
Yes, I suspect it will be called the Great Famine. I’m old, I may not live to see it. So far having a successful retirement !! after working hard and saving a lot.
trollhattan
@Bill Arnold:
Rupert will get his revenge by buying the Times. That’ll show ’em!
Perusing the list of News Corp assets in Australia is a mindboggling exercise. Utter media domination.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
We’ve seen the “worst diaspora since WWII” over the last few years in North Africa and the Middle East. The coming climate diaspora will make it trivial in the extreme.
noname
@The Moar You Know: I see you’re still popping in occasionally ? What you said applies to NY as well, in some cases (Staten Island) a lot closer to the “coastal elites” than 20 miles.
MCA1
@david: If we continue to be wedded to the idea that our House members need to be full time D.C. residents, yes. But there could be some positive unintended consequences here, too. Perhaps it would allow us to get comfortable with having our representatives be normal people who spend a few years serving their community in the House, but do so mostly from their home state. They could vote from afar, and House sessions could be virtual. I could imagine a decrease in the influence of lobbyists and money, a decrease in the percentage of time Representatives have to spend raising money and campaigning due to the two year cycle, etc. Some nice swamp draining upshots.
On the other hand, I sort of think this nation and its economy are far, far too complex and massive to be governed by that many amateur legislators, with massive turnover every couple years. There’s a benefit to having people like Pelosi in D.C. for decades learning how shit works and how to use the levers of power efficiently.
On the third hand, I mean, we’ve already got Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz and that moron from Louisiana still looking for Cohen’s boxes of evidence in the House. How much worse could it get?
Librarian
@PJ: I agree, getting rid of the Senate would be a big mistake. I distinctly remember, when the House had a GOP majority, the Senate stopping or slowing down much right wing fuckery. Without the senate, who knows what would happen.
Kent
Republicans have figured out to get everything they really want through the Senate on a simple majority vote.
All the judges including the supreme court now go through on simple majority votes.
Tax cuts now go through on simple majority votes through reconciliation (as does repeal of Dem legislation such as Obamacare.
Trashing of existing progressive laws is mostly accomplished through executive branch regulations and doesn’t even go through the Senate.
The only thing that really requires 60 votes anymore is new legislation for new programs and that is mostly stuff that Dems want not the GOP. Even things they claim to want such as immigration reform, they really don’t care about in terms of policy, only in terms of having a issue to campaign against. There isn’t really a damn thing that Trump and the GOP wanted to do in 2016-2018 that was blocked by the filibuster.
Dems are damn fools if they insist on maintaining the filibuster when it really only constrains new progressive legislation and doen’t do a damn thing to restrict pretty much any part of the GOP agenda.
matt
@Librarian: This would be more of a democracy, and when people elected leaders their agenda would be enacted, which people would be free to reward or punish with their votes.
Kent
@The Moar You Know:
Well, not so much Alabama. More like Texas. Fresno and Bakersfield are pretty indistinguishable politically and culturally from cities like Abilene, Lubbock, or Amarillo.
Rand Careaga
@NotMax:
Congressional pensions are not as lavish as Facebook memes might lead you to believe. They’re in line with the rest of the Civil Service pensions (FERS, which replaced the more generous CSRS, which predated Social Security, during the reign of Ronaldus Magnus). In any case, the withdrawal of Congressional pensions would seem likely to serve as an incentive for Representatives and Senators to accumulate markers during their terms in office, markers that might be redeemed in later life for, ah, other income streams from parties-at-interest, know what I’m sayin’?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kent:
I agree with you. It’s time to end the “filibuster” once and for all.
trnc
@Jeffro:
The House under Boehner and Ryan voted over 40 times to repeal Obamacare. If the senate had no vote on legislation, the ACA would have been murdered on the first vote in 2011. The most popular benefits of the ACA were still a couple of years out, so there probably would have been little political consequence for killing it at that time.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
How many people vote for McConnell? How much damage does he do?
There are downsides to any system, the goal should be to minimize them. And that will/can always have consequences, good and bad, depending on your perspective. But power abused will always hurt the most people in one way or another.
Ruckus
@Martin:
If we completely pie in the skying how about starting with a completely clean slate?
We have a system that works OK, when we actually have people running it who want it to work. Right now, half our political class and nearly half our citizens don’t actually want it to work, except possibly only for them. And they don’t mind at all if we pay for it and they don’t pay anything. And the world is just a bit different today than over 200 years ago. It is possible that some things need to be adjusted to reflect that.
J R in WV
@Bill Arnold:
How can it do that? Like talking of damage to a 1976 Ford truck that’s been standing in the barnyard dead for 25 years…
Steeplejack
@A Ghost To Most:
Wymondakodaho. Two senators plenty.
Tokyokie
@Amir Khalid:
Amir,
And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you didn’t marry the heiress to a shopping-mall fortune, either.
different-church-lady
@Kelly:
Something on the scale of a great extinction.