You are missing what my point was. It was simply to rebuff the claim that we already have a branch that has majority representation. That branch has been overridden by partisan gerrymandering that the Supreme Court allows.
So I was merely posting that in support of @MrGrumpy’s post.
WHY will 70% of Americans be living in just 15 states by 2050? Is it because many of the other 35 states will be covered in lava or sink into the ocean? Of course not. It’s because those 15 or so states will have the greatest concentration of the nation’s economic output. More jobs, more money, more options…thus more people.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. What we should focus on for the next 30 years is America’s economic and physical infrastructure. If you make it easy to move goods, services and resources into and out of a region, if you provide infrastructure that includes access to high speed bandwidth, efficient and abundant power and effective logistics and transportation, you will draw companies, people and money to a region. Improved national infrastructure will result in a redistribution of America’s economy across all of it’s regions, and with that will come a redistribution of America’s people, their wealth and their social and political views.
Completely destroying and recreating our nation’s political system is a pipe dream. It’s never going to happen. If you want to turn all those deep red states purple, the answer lies in Infrastructure. Redistribute the country’s wealth, jobs, money and population more equally, and you’ll destroy all the bastions of Trumpism and return the nation’s political system back to a battle over policy instead of ideology, while at the same time actually making America great for real.
While I still reject the notion of the ostensible purpose of this thread, the points of both absurd gerrymandering in the House and incongruous representation overall do lead me to believe we’ll see a shift of some kind in the future toward a more aligned approach. I just doubt it will be in my lifetime.
Quite sadly—because I think you’re 100% correct—I also think this is a pipe dream, at least anytime soon with our current and near-future job market.
Maybe, but it certainly seems odd to rig our entire demographic, economic and geographical composition based around the peculiarities of an 18th century document.
Less representation than what? That’s a remarkably strange way to frame what folks are saying.
Our founders are not alive to say whether they agree or not. What they did made sense at the time, but to try and say that they’d be in favor of it forever is a big leap.
As will the majority if they are under the heel of the minority. Someone’s gonna revolt eventually if things continue as is. So what’s your solution?
I agree with him on a little (help the poor, etc) but I prefer that my politicians NOT believe that the Ark Project is a historical monument. A little too religious for my tastes.
I’d vote for Kasich before almost any other Republican but after almost any Democrat. He’s mostly sane, but is still an anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-abortion, pro-military, pro-God, pro-oil and gas Republican. I don’t trust him on science or education or the environment. I certainly don’t trust him on choice.
I don’t have strong opinions about Kasich one way or the other, I just like teasing Timex about him because his fanboyism for him is (sincerely) adorable.
One wonders if this is a direct consequence of rising Nationalist tensions driven by fake news, lies and misinformation:
Timex is like the conservative Diogenes, looking for an honest Republican.
And I dig that about him!
Almost Kasich’s first act as a Congressman was to attempt to amend the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. The gist of his amendment? He would have removed all of the tax increases in that bill (for example, eliminating the part of the bill that removed the payroll tax cap for Medicare) and then replaced all those tax increases with entitlement spending cuts. He basically sought to transfer the pain of fixing the deficit from the wealthy to the poor and elderly. No thanks.
Possibly. But if we can spend trillions over a decade playing at failed nation building in the Middle East, we can spend those same trillions over the next decade doing actual nation building here at home.
I agree, but I just don’t think the “burn it all down” approach is achievable or desirable. Equal Representation is an inalienable right that is part of the American soul, and trying to revoke it, or even rework it extensively, will be met with fierce resistance from all sides.
Instead, working to make voter registration and voting itself easier for all Americans, undoing decades of redistricting and gerrymandering around the country, and improving the nation’s infrastructure so that the population is better distributed and more places are economically viable achieves a similar result without destroying an American ideal in the process.
The concentration of economic prosperity around urban centers is nearly as outdated as the 18th century document we’re discussing. The only reason for it is that in the 18th-20th centuries the best infrastructure was located around densely populated urban centers. In the 21st century and beyond, with all the science and technology we have available to us, there is no reason the United States cannot expand it’s infrastructure throughout the country and relieve the ridiculous housing/education/transportation problems faced by urban centers while bringing prosperity to formerly rural areas. Sure, it would take the creation of a New New Deal of sorts, and the cooperation or coercion of several powerful industries (Oil & Gas, Telecom, etc.), but is that really more far-fetched than torching and rewriting the Constitution?
But that power is grossly overstated by most.
In cases where the SCOTUS declares a law unconstitutional, the legislature can usually work around it by simply making better, more specific laws.
Now, what you guys more often want, is to have the SCOTUS step in and tell states that they can’t make certain laws… But you can also work around that problem, by not having those states pass those laws.
No, but the Senate is a manifestation of the reason we have states, which is that individual localities all need to have some say… not merely as a factor of there being X people there, but because there are needs and desires which are linked to regional differences. As government becomes more separated from the people it is intended to represent, it becomes less capable of serving those people. Local government is more representative than state government, which is more representative than federal government.
It’s a fuckton more work, but perhaps politically more feasible.
I would humbly submit that the reason we have states is because there were states before there was a federal government. Granted, the 37 that came after followed this pattern, but in essence the institution of the ‘state’ is an artifact of particular circumstances. Of course many nations begin as smaller entities that band together, and it would be interesting to compare the processes by which this happened. Usually I imagine it takes centuries, whereas in the U.S. it took a couple decades and some pen strokes. Of course, also, the states had already been already ‘united’ under the English crown, so maybe that simplified the process.
Yup! But that fuckton of work creates jobs, and those jobs create tax income, etc…
Honestly, as the economy changes, the viability of moving away from those huge urban centers on the coasts becomes increasingly viable for more people.
I mean, I dunno if you guys realize it, but it is CHEAP AS SHIT to live out here in the sticks. And it’s nice! I mean, despite the backwards environmental laws you might run into, it’s still way nicer out here than in any city, in terms of the environment. We got trees and rivers and mountains shit.
