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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Which leads to my next platform, quadruple the size of congress.. We're at something like 750,000 citizens per Rep right now, it was fewer than 200,000 in the early 1900's. It would become much more expensive to buy a sizable chunk of congress and would become untenable for many companies to set up operations in every district to corrupt politics.

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Why not increase the number of states? That way there is more political autonomy for smaller groups. There already exists a large political divide between, say, West and East Washington; upstate New York and NYC; Bay Area and other parts of California.

Instead of those population centers exerting their will upon the rest of the state, it would be better to have more & smaller political units that better represent their people.

I'll tell you why: Congress would be too big. I know this movie was absolutely horrible in several ways, but remember the Galactic Senate in The Phantom Menace? That's basically what you're proposing: it'll be so ridiculously huge that nothing would get done. You can't have a legislature with thousands and thousands of members.

What's needed is first to redraw the state borders. I have a post a little above this point outlining my plan for redrawing the borders in the northeast, which would effectively deal with the NYS-vs-NYC problem. Other state borders should also be redrawn. Metro areas should not span multiple states, ever.

For a good thought experiment on this idea, go read about "The 38 States" (google it). Some college kids in the 70s came up with this idea to redraw the borders more sensibly so that state borders reflected the local cultures better, and also to reduce the number of overall states for better administrative efficiency. It's only gotten worse since then, with metro areas getting so large and more urbanization of the population.

However, one big problem that would still remain is the urban vs. rural conflict. If we redraw borders so more city-dwellers are concentrated in their own city-states, this will give them less power in the Senate (their power in the House should stay the same as the number of Reps is assigned by population). Honestly, I don't know if that's good or bad. Sometimes I really wonder if we shouldn't just scrap our tricameral Presidential Republic form of government and switch to a Westminster parliament like every other advanced nation has. Those don't have the problem where the executive branch is at odds with the legislative branch resulting in a long government shutdown.

Love your ideas. I also had the same idea that a single elected body would serve us better. The existing parties would never go for it. What we need is to break down our existing parties into reasonable pieces, have one house, and have that house elect the president.

Another idea, Western oregon, Western Washington, and British Columnia should be combined into one state, or maybe their own country. We are pretty similar.

>Another idea, Western oregon, Western Washington, and British Columnia should be combined into one state, or maybe their own country. We are pretty similar.

Yep, I've heard of that before. They call it "Ecotopia" or "Cascadia". I think the standard idea is to take northern California (probably not including the Bay Area, just wine country), OR/WA east of the Cascades, most of BC, and also some of Alaska and make that into an independent nation. Good luck getting both the US and Canada to agree to that though...

Especially interesting when you consider that the founders thought 1:30,000 was an appropriate ratio. This was the only issue of the Constitutional Convention where Washington expressed an opinion (lowering it from 1:40,000).

Keep elections for president but draft people for Congress; keep pay and benefits the same as they are.

You could certainly corrupt some people randomly sampled from the American population, but you would also get the cops called on you, your face punched, sent to the ER with a cap in their ass, etc.

In the current system, you have to be the kind of person who can see the "clothes that belong to the Emperor" that are also "clothes that are invisible". If you pick out random people you will get some who call a spade a spade.

This was a fundamental part of Athenian democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

We trust it for juries, it's not too outlandish to think it could work for policy-making, too.

The size of Congress isn't the main problem with funding infrastructure, the Senate is. Your Senators aren't directly accountable to the people in your state making the budget. I get people stopped trusting their state legislator in picking their Senator, but that has caused a lot of conflict. I would suggest a better fix, given transportation and communication advances, to have the sitting Governor of each state act as the only Senator (thus saving the taxpayers about 1/2 on staff costs).

I think the granularity between executive and legislative power is useful. Mix them and the temptation for corruption skyrockets.

I would much rather change congress to be statewide elections to cut down on gerrymandering and make them proportional representation to put more states in play.

> I think the granularity between executive and legislative power is useful. Mix them and the temptation for corruption skyrockets.

I don't think mixing across levels is a bad thing. I want the Senate to be answerable to the people in the state doing the budget.

> I would much rather change congress to be statewide elections to cut down on gerrymandering and make them proportional representation to put more states in play.

I strongly disagree with this one. You basically make sure no rural area has any representation again. Its like basing a Presidential election on popular vote, you get campaigns that run in 20 cities and tell many demographics to pound sand.

As opposed to now where presidential elections are decided by three-four fairly unimportant states?

Which states do you feel are "unimportant"?

Since about 1980, only 10 states have been potential swing states. So those 10 get most of the attention (Ohio, Florida). We'd be far better off with direct vote for the prez.

I want to make house of rep elections be fore an entire state too, this is one of the few ways to break gerrymandering.

> Since about 1980, only 10 states have been potential swing states. So those 10 get most of the attention (Ohio, Florida). We'd be far better off with direct vote for the prez.

They are swing states because of how the population votes and divides between people in the US. We are based on states and a direct vote would be a nightmare and go against the principles this country was founded on (Federal, State, People).

> I want to make house of rep elections be fore an entire state too, this is one of the few ways to break gerrymandering

At the cost of no actual representation for rural areas of a state, no thanks.

You're right about the prez, but wrong about rep elections.

The whole point of having two houses in Congress is that they'll have a different dynamic. The Senate is supposed to be the more stodgy of the two that prevents crappy laws from getting passed, while the House is supposed to be the more agile one. The idea was copied directly from England's Parliament, with its House of Commons and House of Lords. The House of Commons directly represents the people and proposes most new legislation, while the House of Lords is full of unelected aristocrats who act like an overseer and limit what the other house can do. Over here, the House of Reps are directly elected by the people by "congressional district" and serve short terms, while the Senators were elected by state legislatures and served longer terms. The 17th Amendment changed it so Senators were elected directly by the people in each state. But the effect isn't that much different: they have longer terms, and they represent all the people in the state, not just a smaller district as Reps do.

Having the House members represent only their district is a good thing: if your district is a minority in your state (like if you live in rural, conservative California, or you live in liberal Austin, Texas), this means you're able to elect someone who represents you. If the reps were elected by everyone in the state, you wouldn't have any liberal Reps from Texas, nor any conservative ones from California. When you lump everyone together, it just creates disenfranchisement among minorities.

As for the prez, yeah, the current system with the Electoral College and first-past-the-post voting and party primaries is total crap. But personally, I think we should scrap the whole concept of having a President, and adopt something like Canada's system with a Parliament and a Prime Minister. With the PM elected by Parliament, there'd be little conflict between the executive and the legislative branches, and voters would concentrate only on voting for their own representatives and senators, and do a much better job of that than they do now.

But you're right, gerrymandering is a big problem. I wonder how other nations deal with that.

Your ignoring proportional representation it's not first past the post so most states will be contested. Senitors are still going by person, congress becomes vote for the party. As a bonus third party's can have a real shot in larger states.

Of note you would still want more people in congess.

That will quadruple the uselessness of Congress.

I feel fairly confident that the political industry would scale nicely to accommodate all those new puppets.

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