I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
- No gerrymandering
- Longer terms mean that senators can spend more time governing, less time running for election, and they can take a longer view on the impact of their decisions
- Filibuster means that a tiny minority cannot force legislation through
I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority cannot force legislation through regardless of whether the filibuster exists or not.
I recognize that the filibuster isn't guaranteed, but it has served as a powerful tool for a very long time.
You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights to a Senate minority.
Yeah, I meant that 50.1% can't force legislation through. I should have said tiny majority.
States aren't gerrymandering because the people decide for themselves where to live.
The people can also decide for themselves where they want to live with respect to gerrymandered Congressional and other districts. So by your logic, gerrymandering doesn't exist at that level either.
You're not going to convince me that some procedural nonsense is more important than equal representation.
With the Missouri Compromise, when territories were admitted, their voters were being chosen for political reasons. Territories were admitted two by two, slave holding and free to maintain a status quo. This falls under your definition of gerrymandering.
There is no justification for this gerrymandering. There's nothing so great about Wyoming such that it should have such an outsized influence on the body politic while possessing the GDP of a mid-sized county.
American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and political control of elites.
The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim) and the imperial presidency.
To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
That can be stopped easily enough. The Constitution makes it clear that Congress is the ultimate source of power; the SCOTUS power of judicial review was granted to itself by itself. Congress can (and has, a few times, though not often) make legislation not subject to judicial review.
Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
It's not unlikely. It's just... I don't know. It's as if some Svengali is out there hypnotnizing you dolts to ignore it. No other explanation makes sense. Seriously, this could be down to 2-3 jackass state representatives in Iowa or New Mexico or Florida just getting a wild hair up their ass.
I agree, we seem to have perfected the art of splitting of the population into fairly stable tribes similar in size. Unless one side goes batshit insane (and even then, I think current evidence counters this idea) there is probably not going to be a supermajority in the foreseeable future.
If you're going to make inane comments about how ahckchtually everything in the world is a creation of the man who just wants to keep us down, you'll need to qualify the statements.
The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.
>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.
Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.
I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.