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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Its intended, but it's still a problem. It gives disproportionate power to smaller states and it gets worse as certain areas grow and other don't.
Wyoming with a population of 581k in 2022 wields as much power in the senate as California with 39 million.
And if you control either the house or senate, you can pretty much stall almost anything.
THAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE SENATE. It is the reason Congress is separated in two the way it is.
In the Senate, every State is equal, regardless of physical size or population. A foundational pillar of our Union has always been State equality. The Senate is working EXACTLY as designed, it is there specifically to prevent large States from dictating what smaller States have to do. Larger States have their bigger voice heard in the House. The two serve very different purposes.
The real issue is the House needs to actually be proportional again. The cap at 435 means it cannot be properly representative with States like Delaware and California both existing. A representative in Delaware represents a fraction of the number of people as a Rep in California because the cap limits how that apportionment works. Without the artificial cap from the 1920s, and proper apportionment by population again, our House of Representatives would be more like 1,600 members and actually representative of this country instead of being a glorified pseudo Senate.
I really do get that, you don't have to try and explain it again, but it doesn't mean it's serving the country any further, just like the electoral college isn't severing the country or first past the post isn't.
Things change, and it turns out that this system is allowing for the tyranny of minority which is ironically is the opposite of the intended effect of it preventing tyranny of the majority.
I'm not offering a solution, I'm just saying its a problem just like the others. Everything can be reformed if there a problems.
But yes as I said, fixing the house would be a start.
Foundational pillars can be dumb and undemocratic. They were trying to pull together largely independent entities two hundred years ago during a fragile time that really needed unity, not setting out a perfect democratic system. There's a reason we don't just make copies of the American system when we regime change democracies into existence.