Abolish the senate?

that's not carved in stone anywhere

that's a loaded question and I'm not sure how it helps with this discussion. If I say I am ambivalent about affirmative action people will say I'm a racist and if I say I'm for affirmative action that will inaccurately represent my thinking on the subject. so why do you ask?

 

what did the founders intend?

the necessity of having 25 amendments to the US constitution underscores the fact that
the founders did not think of everything​

the founders had intended to have checks and balance; there why they're there

when did the Central Gov not have fiscal power ?

if i remember my US history,

there was a group of founders, headed by Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a stronger central Gov administer fiscal and commercial policies directly


The US Financial System and Alexander Hamilton,
America's First Secretary of the Treasury
​

even during the colonial days, there were social programs to help/house the poor

eg, in 1751

The Pennsylvania Hospital is founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and Benjamin Franklin “…to care for the sick-poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia.”
​

 

no reasonable person would suggest that a state should not have a senator b/c their population isnt big enough. maybe remove the arbitrary state boundary line from the equation and allow for the possibility of a senate district being within more than one state.

it should be about population being equally represented...not some based off artificial boundaries that create a situation where the voter in wyoming has 80 times more power than the voter in california.

that might have worked when there were 13 states and they were trying to get everyone on board with a federalized system of government, but to base districts purely off a state boundary line instead of by population is outdated and unfair.

 

I'm not sure that saying "the voter in wyoming has 80 times more power than the voter in california" makes much sense. Voters have very little power, wherever they live. On the Senate representation question, it might be fair to say that a Wyoming voter individually has more "influence" on his or her state Senators than does a single California voter, I don't really think that translates into 80 times more power.

Wyoming only has one representative in the House; California has 53. Acting collectively in the House, California wields far more power than does Wyoming. Do we think that's fair and just? Sure. That is how the House is structured. The Senate is structured differently to accomplish different Constitutional and political aims.

I believe all this talk about abolishing the Senate is simply an elaborate game of sour grapes from (mostly) urban liberals who are unhappy that they can't have their way all the time.

 

it does in terms of population relative to senators, which is what i was talking about.

now youre just arguing semantics, but ok. a voter in wyoming has 80 times more "influence" than a voter in california.

yes, its fair to base representation on population. but like ive been saying, basing population off of arbitrary boundary lines leads to a situation where the minority rules over the majority.

ive never heard anybody ever advocate abolishing the senate until this article and like i said in my first post, im against it...but i would be very interested in hearing ways to make it more truly representative of the population. again, its unfair for people in one state to wield more "influence" (your word) than someone in another state.

 

again, we have a bicameral legislature. the principles you are articulating and advocating are embodied structurally in the House of Representatives. The Senate is purposefully structured differently for different reasons--and there is nothing necessarily unfair about that structure per se

 

I wasn't necessarily referring to you. Some quick searches on the question, however, yielded a fair number of those kinds of "analyses."

 

Regardless of The Big Issues of the Day, the American people could actively call for these reforms but don't because they are either too satisfied or too divided against the current political climate.

Who watches the Watchmen? No one, so water down laws on White Collar crime, insider trading (Georgia Barbie didn't do anything wrong...just stupid with how she did it), and even bribery (Sen. BOB Menendez).

Maybe then we'd retry the spirit of McCain Feingold in reducing the lure of outside money flowing into our system where dollars are more precious than the 3-100 "voting power" each voter garners per overall citizen.

Our current structural and societal ills are not all top-down issues. It's inherently bottom up where individuals are taking their voting rights for granted and let other people decide for them.

Democracy dies in...Apathy. It's more or less a newborn everyone has to care for.

 

I've skimmed through this thread and first off will say if there was a serious attempt at getting rid of the Senate that might actually lead to civil war.

Leaving that aside to address some points brought up. The US has never been a direct democracy nor was it ever intended too. The Framers greatly distrusted direct democracy and not without good reason given what was happening in France at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. While the convoluted structure of our Constitution has caused a lot of problems I would still say it's given us far more stability than many other countries especially for a country as large as ours. We couldn't have formed the US without a power sharing agreement between small and large states and likely the country would've fractured a few times without it. While the one civil war we did fight was over slavery in the mid 19th Century there were other secession movements including NE and NY wanting to secede over differences between them, other states and the Federal government.

Consider that out of other large countries the model they are adopting is more centralized power while a super state like the EU is held together with concessions to smaller states and even there there is constantly more clamoring for more power sharing and threats to leave.

Even besides the specter of secession having the unwieldy structure that we have has proved beneficial no matter which side of the ideological divide. While certainly Conservatives can look to control of the Senate as blocking much of a Liberal agenda without the Senate much of Trump and other GOP Presidents might have gotten more of their agenda passed.

Obviously in recent years it's the Liberal side frustrated with the things like the Senate and the EC but that's not always the case as it wasn't that long ago that CA was a red state while KS was a blue state. There is no guarantee without the Senate that that means the "Liberal majority" out there suddenly get's it's way and we have things like Universal Healthcare. Especially given that the House is more likely to be GOP controlled and gerrymandering makes that more likely. You can't gerrymander Senate seats and given that there are several states with strong rural urban divides where you could end up like GA with Democrat Senators but GOP House delegations. It's a strong possibility that by 2025 you could end up with a Republican House and Presidency while the Senate is still in Democrat hands. Even without a majority individual Senators can do a lot and doing away with the Senate would also take away staunch powerful Liberal Senators from small states like Sanders (VT), Whitehouse (RI), Reed (RI), Coons (MD) and Leahy (Vt).

 

I would say getting rid of the Senate or changing it to be apportioned by population would require at a minimum a Constitutional amendment, and possibly an entirely new Constitutional convention. The very premise under which the states joined the Union was that they would be represented by both a body composed of equal representation for each state (the Senate) and a body with representation apportioned according to population (the House of Representatives). You cannot simply change that representation scheme against the will of 40 states to benefit 10.

 

I understand the point you wish to make, but framing it in rights language is the wrong approach. There is no "right" to equal representation. Equal representation is perhaps a principle that is sometimes embodied in political structures, but terming that principle as a "right" states the principle a bit too forcefully I think.

 

one might think of residents of the District of Columbia for example

 

got it

 

I didn't mention parties, I mentioned states. Right now, Wyoming controls 2% of the Senate votes and <0.25% of the House votes. If the Senate were changed to proportional representation, they would control <0.25% of the Senate vote as well (or zero or 1, depending on factors like if it remains 100 Senators and if there is a minimum number per state or there is a minimum population to get 1 Senator). As Wyoming entered the Union under the provision that they get proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate, as guaranteed in the Constitution, it would be unfair and unconstitutional to change the system so they get less representation in the Senate. Wyoming's interests are not going to be as strongly represented with less power in the Senate.

 

We are a Republic... so yes it's not compatible with a pure democracy. Republics are there to ensure the masses don't do something r****ded like install communism when one side promises the moon on a stick at the cost of the nation's prosperity.

 

that would never happen