Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this.
It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
Exactly. This pattern I think accurately describes the state of the US economy in general over the last few decades. Wealthy extracting wealth from what’s left of the middle class and further extracting wealth from the already poor. The decline of the US is now openly visible and attempts to hide this through economic language / indicators / propaganda etc are now openly not reflecting reality and often come off as in a dark way comical. This applies to some other western nations like France, England and perhaps Germany.
> It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition.
That’s a big assertion that needs evidence. I’m strongly in favor of legalization but not deregulation. It was a pretty big loophole that allowed what’s essentially weed to sidestep the regulation their competitors faced - and there wasn’t great consumer awareness about the differences even though there were safety implications: https://drexel.edu/cannabis-research/research/research-highl...
This law seems pretty well targeted in its scope, bringing the 2018 law back to what was intended (easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there).
There was absolutely no federal regulatory framework for marijuana. none. It's just plain illegal. Unless you can get one of a handful of research licenses, which is almost totally irrelevant.
Hemp had some, fairly weak regulation. And theoretically, testing requirements, although they were deferred and deferred to the point they were basically done only privately with the idea the DEA would eventually get involved.
Instead they're just dumped now into the marijuana bucket which has no federal regulation at all, or alternatively, at the state level the states could always define their regulatory framework to be agnostic to THC content of cannabis.
So this does the exact opposite of what you had hoped.
Yet Kratom is legal, yt is recommending to me some product called "meth" (not joking) and there are a million new research drugs coming out every decade?
It's just old-school think of the kids and not in my territory. We don't know how to regulate and handle this because our politicians and more and more our citizens don't understand what is being voted on or has been happening in their own states for 7 years.
Have you used these products? It's a shame, the quality that I was getting just within the past 3 months was incredible and it is market not afraid to try new stuff.
I'm sad, flower from OR, NC, OK, IN, and others will never legally hit my lungs. Back to the cartels? Or perhaps I should overpay by $200 with the comfort of having 0 clue where it comes from, again?
>(easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there)
Your ignorance shows in spades. The arbitrary ban on THC and its analogues prevent chronic pain patients like me (a criminally underserved market) from becoming addicted to the big pharma system. The "other things in there" argument is the same as razorblades in candy, sanctimony to portray dissent as degeneracy.
In my experience it is also the other things in there which helps with the pain relief. Doctors in my country talk about the entourage effect and mixing strains as they reckon it's not just the THC which is helping.
I can imagine people in the future looking at us like idiots as they use cannabinoids in the same way we use paracetamol.
From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative. The difference between a life spiralling to nothing just about surviving on opioids compared to effective pain relief from cannabis and being able to work and be productive again.
One of the tragedies of the 20th and hopefully not the 21st century. So many people in so much unnecessary pain.
Looking at history I could quite easily come to the conclusion... ...due to racism.
> From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative.
Like all drugs, it’s sad it doesn’t work this way for everyone. I had to transition from cannabis to opiates and lyrica. I wish this was not the case.
They suspect it’s due to the source of the pain (spinal cord injury) and the cannabis is “exciting” my nerves in the wrong way, as it actually increases my pain; or at least my perception of it.
Selling it as a pain reliever I can't buy into personally based off my anecdotal experience. I've had chronic pericarditis for more than a decade now and THC amplifies mine as well, as I tend to focus more on the pain. I think it's a very subjective thing, depending on many factors; strain, type of pain, person, etc.
Corporations are eroding democracy with their powerful lobbies. They have too much money and influence. And yet too much of the electorate has been convinced it's good for the economy to just let them and the super rich have free reign.
Legal weed senators were voting for it because their constituents include people growing legal weed. The hemp product market competes with these constituents.
The anti-weed senators were voting for it because they are anti-weed.
Most senators who vote on this bill are not voting on the basis of the hemp thing in either direction. That's why all the headlines are about the tactic of sneaking it into a "too big to fail" budget bill.
There was an opportunity for this bit to be removed from the bill.
76 of 100 voted to keep it. This, is like, literally the entire point of discussion in this part of the thread? I don't understand where your confusion lies.
Are you saying it was an amendment? That it not what I get from this or any articles I've seen about it.
TFA:
> On Sunday, Senate leadership inserted a hemp-recriminalization clause into the must-pass funding bill
> ...
> Not a standalone bill. Not a debate on cannabis reform.
Seems like it wasn't a full Senate vote on a specific amendment, but the bill as a whole. I've elsewhere seen it stated as McConnell acting alone.
Edit: as I googled around, I found that Rand Paul attempted to use an amendment to remove the language, and it failed. But people vote on amendments for all sorts of strategic reasons. For example maybe they felt the amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate bills need to match, and the terms had already been negotiated.
> For example maybe they felt the amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate bills need to match, and the terms had already been negotiated.
I don't recall ever hearing of reconciliation being a deal-breaker.
Also, if Senate leadership inserted the clause, that means that it wasn't in the House's version to begin with.
The product being sold at your local dispensary is produced, marketed, distributed, and sold by an entirely different chain of businesses and people than the product being sold at your local head shop.
THCa/Delta8/similar products are produced under an oversight in the hemp legislation and different businesses are taking advantage of that than those involved in the legal marijuana trade.
Hemp is classified as below .3% THC (compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid 30%s). Hemp is male and female, and trash in potency, but THC and other products derived from it are fair game in some jurisdictions, or a grey area.
It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
> compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid 30%s)
These levels are still primarily based on THCa content, not Delta9 THC. Even your regulated legal flower is very low in D9 THC.
> It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
Much of it is literally the exact same. They are growing the exact same strains and cultivars as the regulated legal marijuana industry, just making sure to harvest and process them in a way that prevents the decarboxylation of THCa into D9 THC from going over .3%
> how is hemp competing with weed? Are these different plants?
I live in Wyoming, where weed remains technically illegal. The 'legal' weed is trucked in from Montanta and sold at farmers' markets. The hemp is sold at the liquor store check-out counter.
I'm surprised a lot of people missed this, but hemp growth actually causes thc plants to lower their cbd because of unexpected pollination. you can't grow them in the open near each other
The hemp products in question are not, like, hemp rope. They're just pot that is classified as hemp because they are harvested and processed in such a way that keeps the D9 THC below .3% at the time of testing.
If you were to go look at a growing operation for someone making THCa flower and then go look at a growing operation for someone making regulated legal marijuana, they would be virtually indistinguishable.
The humorous part though, is that the 'legal' growers screaming about the 'unregulated' competition and for this law, are actually the outlaws breaking federal law and totally non-scrutinized by federal regulation (other than the fact it's outright illegal).
It is the absolute worst case of gas lighting. The literal, federally unregulated criminals were screeching that the people obeying the law and following the regulations (even if in a way legislators didn't expect) were unregulated cowboys who were 'skirting the law.'
It's absolutely comical if you think about it. And somehow, this argument actually won.
Many of the state legalized programs do have significantly higher standards because they are explicitly regulating for things intended to be consumed by humans, while the federal regulations for hemp are focused in an entirely different area.
As a consumer, I would prefer to be purchasing the more stringently regulated state-legalized product. But that would require I live in a state that has legalized it.
Instead, my options are (at least for another year), purchase the less stringently regulated "hemp" products or the entirely unregulated stuff grown god knows where by god knows who with no recourse if it turns out they've been spraying their crop with leftover lead arsenate.
They are the same species, but it's a Brussel-sprouts vs Broccoli type situation where they started as the same plant but have been selectively bred for different purposes
The THCa/Delta8 stuff is not brussel-sprouts vs. broccoli. They difference is in timing around harvest and process. They're growing many of the exact same cultivars as what is sold in a proper dispensary (and indeed, much of what is sold in dispensaries would actually qualify because they actually have very low levels of Delta9 in them)
You can effectively just under-cure the exact same plant and get something that comes in under the limit.
They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for pesticides and such. When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
> They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes.
This is not at all what was happening. These aren't some special strains or cultivars where there is a remnant of THC that is getting squeezed out from a large quantity of plants to make a small quantity of product - they are same strains and cultivars being used by the legal dispensaries. It is a matter of timing and process - harvest and undercure the flower and it will not have converted enough THCa to Delta9 THC to hit the legal limit. In fact, many legal operations follow similar timing on harvesting and similar processing - the flower in your local dispensary is still mostly THCa, and a good chunk of it is likely under the limit for D9 THC as well.
Much if it is effectively the exact same thing under a different label.
> When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
I do agree here. There's no need for the unregulated market when a proper legal market exists.
I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it.
>I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it.
Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.
In most states with legalized cannabis, testing for a variety of harmful ingredients and the potency of specific products is required for those taking part in the legalized cannabis trade.
Those growing, packaging and distributing "hemp" products are not subject to such testing regulations.
That may not be nefarious, but avoiding such regulation increases the likelihood of harmful additives (chemical pesticides and other adulterants) and unknown potencies. This would likely increase the chances that unscrupulous vendors will sell (knowingly or unknowingly) harmful/dangerous products.
And given that the products are essentially the same, that gives those who don't have to pay for testing or go through the marketplaces defined by state laws, giving those folks an advantage over those who follow state law.
What's more, folks who avoid extant law through this loophole, are not incentivized to make safe, tested products.
So maybe not "nefarious," but certainly anti-consumer with perverse incentives to create and sell harmful products.
> Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.
My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.
As someone in a non-rec state, as much as I would prefer the dispensary option with stricter regulations, it's still much more regulated than "the dude whose house i show up with and venmo him some money and get a bag that came from god knows where"
>My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.
I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market. Even though I live in a (now) legalized state, there's still a thriving black market, both for folks who have been growing for decades who maintain a positive reputation among distributors/wholesalers, and those who purchase out-of-state product (that's tested and sold legally in those other states) without tax or records, and can then undercut the legal dispensaries.
I'm not familiar enough with the "hemp" growers/sellers, but IIUC, since it's not supposed to be used as a mind-altering substance, the testing and purity regulations may not apply.
All that said, things are a mess WRT to cannabis in the US. Some states are doing it well, others are not. And the Federal government, while not irrelevant, has not made progress in this area -- and that includes the "hemp" loophole which (and I could be mistaken here) isn't regulated at all.
Hopefully sometime in the future the states and the federal governments will get it right. Which is often how these types of issues are addressed in the US -- study the issue carefully, choose the path that is least effective and most harmful, then iterate, trying less bad and less harmful "solutions" as you go along.
> I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market.
Just basic laws around farming. For example, lead arsenate is banned in the US, and I trust the hemp farmers to not be using it as much as I trust any similar operation, but someone illegally growing stuff? They're already breaking the law. And who knows where it was grown to begin with?
And in general, there are companies behind all of this. There are names. Legal recourse if shit goes wrong. Who am I going to sue if I find out that the shit Bob has been selling me has been full of harmful pesticides or if the oil was full of some harmful additive, etc.?
Legal recourse is definitely an upside of not dealing with a black market. I agree.
I'm not familiar with the laws around hemp growing and/or the Federal loophole, but I hope you're right about at least minimal regulation (and legal recourse for) of non-consumable products, especially if they're being consumed (can you sue the makers of clothing or rope if you get sick eating or smoking their products?).
As I said, hopefully we'll eventually get to a sane policy regarding cannabis.
If it was a textile-style-hemp farmer getting the last few bucks out of their crop via a loophole, that I can understand. Not great, but I can rationalize it.
Someone growing the same plant that is regulated by California but decides they don't need testing or licenses is just plain anti-social. You can't not know you're doing something wrong in that case.
I don't understand how this has anything to do with federal hemp law, under federal law marijuana doesn't have any testing requirements either as it's just plain illegal. So what does California have to gain in testing by dumping hemp into the marijuana bucket at a federal level, neither of which improves the testing requirements in California? California could simply require hemp to be tested, but making hemp federally illegal does nothing on that point.
The only answer I can think of is that hemp grown outside of California was competing with california 'legal' weed, the testing angle is non-sensical since this change in law moves hemp from 'kind of required to be tested (but none of the DEA testing implemented, so it's done privately and sometimes not at all), but poorly' to 'illegal' and marijuana still at 'illegal'.
In general this kind of excuse is used by incumbents to pass laws to thwart competition.
You have some regulatory framework which has already been created by captured regulators, so it has a couple of rules that it ought to have (always the ones pointed to in order to justify it) and then others that exist merely to exclude competitors or make sure fixed costs are high enough that only large incumbents can meet them.
The latter set of rules are unreasonable so the market finds a way around them. The incumbents then call this a "loophole" and insist that the competitors be forced into the entire framework rather than just the subset of reasonable rules they'd be able to satisfy without being destroyed. Which destroys them, as intended.
All of this stuff is already built around loopholes.
> But the provision that was inserted into the government funding bill makes illegal any hemp product that contains more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container.
Now the online "hemp" industry will shift to selling gummies in "containers" that really equate to individually wrapped. You'll get bulk discounts for buying groups of 30 "containers", but what you get will feel like Japanese-style individual wrapping.
BTW: This was kinda-sorta what I encountered when I bought gummies in Ontario, Canada. The gummy was in a single "container" and had roughly ~0.4 mg THC.
0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together.
While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned).
> Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned)
In CA, WA and CO, almost every single individual gummie is 10mg (up to 100mg in the pack, the state limit, so usually 10 gummies in a pack). I rarely see individual servings under 10mg ever, its not common.
People in these states routinely consume more than 10mgs in a single sitting - its just two gummies.
10mg for an entire pack of edibles strikes me as extremely low - shared with friends, none of you are getting that high...
Think of it more like the store being forced to sell individual beers: At some point someone will figure out that they can sell them in a box of 6 in a way that complies with the law.
I usually eat 2 gummies (10mg) when I want to feel the effects, or a half gummy (2.5mg) when I want to microdose.
---
When my mom was in serious pain from cancer, I told her I use CBD for migraines. What I didn't realize was that she went to the dispensary in town, and they didn't have CBD-only products. She took a 5mg THC gummy and then called me up stoned out of her mind.
I wish I knew she planned on taking some, because I would have found the right kind for her.
I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about 2020 when I discovered it.
It's been quite the journey watching the industry boom and evolve and get better and better.
I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic.
Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night.
On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant.
I can find it on r/news but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning something very factual.
Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators voted for this ban to remain.
76 senators from across the political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
I mean, were you posting to draw attention to it? How would people know if the people who do know aren't spreading it? Most people don't read bills themselves and it's no news that US media is captured by billionaires and special interests...
Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated, but not class 1.
People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but how much does that really matter when wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, and have been for over a decade.
> wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress?
Because it's not "not considered by anyone".
Democrats have been demonstrably decriminalizing and legalizing weed all over the country, and the Democrats in the federal government have been pushing and submitting and trying to make it happen.
It's republicans. They are the ones that continually stonewall a measure the vast majority of their constituents support, and they are the ones that somehow still get elected despite that.
Show me the democrats preventing legalization of weed federally.
Show me the democrats who invite cop associations to talk at their meetings about how dangerous weed is. Show me the democrats who are taking money from cop associations or prison lobbying organizations who very explicitly want to keep weed illegal.
Stop overgeneralizing! It's literally how things are this bad! Blame who is actually at fault!
This law is about banning hemp companies from selling psychoactive products. It is about protecting weed companies from unregulated competition. The libertarians voted against it because they want to get rid of the regulation the weed companies face, not because they care more about legalizing weed,
I had read a while ago, and I struggle to really argue with it, that legalizing marijuana is simply the carrot on the stick.
Many Republicans are just against it out right, and many Democrats are either indifferent or know that promising to legalize it will mobilize a subset of voters who prioritize it above else (or may just not vote at all otherwise, over 30% of Americans don't vote after all).
It'd explain why there's been so many opportunities to reschedule the drug, and why in some states even when they had the numbers to pass legalization, they still don't. Or do so with extra incentives (often the actual sale of it) to come later (vote next cycle!).
If it's scheduled at all, you aren't getting it without a regular prescription from a medical doctor, and its production will be highly regulated, subject to DEA limits and quotas, and patients will need to carry their prescription with them at all times if they leave their home with marijuana on them.
That's not the same thing as legalization as it's implemented elsewhere in the US.
That seems to be an alcohol industry complaint. That it isn't taxed and regulated like booze
Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power, doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending money in their own states.
Why should cannabis be regulated at all? 99.99% of problems with marijuana that ive ever seen or heard of stem from its either its illegality or its overzealous regulation.
decriminalized cannabis can still be treated with dangerous pesticides or contain high levels of heavy metals or bacteria that cause serious illness.
i used to be of the mind that decrim was preferable to legalization but testing is a pretty important part of making sure you're getting the safest products.
a lot of people in favor of decrim are either bad actors or are under the mistaken belief that all their flower is coming from some nice hippies who only use organic fertilizer and good vibes.
the legacy market was pretty much exactly the same as any other black market: full of people who were in it for the money and didn't care what it took to produce the highest yield at the greatest margin.
now we have legacy actors gone "legit" AND opportunists who got into the market post-legalization who still have the same profit motive above all else.
Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1].
This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.
Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.
I don’t like massive omnibus bills, but at the same time it provides I suppose a “transaction commit” mechanism for lawmakers to group unrelated elements.
You support my bill, I support yours, we both win. In the case is one-bill, one-entry requirements it allows for bad faith negotiations and trickery.
Maybe there is some middle ground where we cap the number of unrelated entries on a bill to allow transactions but not the classic “we don’t have time to read” shenanigans.
To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.
>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,
And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?
That isn't how federal rules have historically been made, so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading statement.
Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.
That was during the Biden Administration. The Roberts Court now says the Executive can do anything. Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, Seila Law, the end of Chevron deference, and of course, immunity. Anything.
Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.
I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.
Yes, in the sense that now it will be illegal to ship cannabis seeds interstate. Under current law, which doesn't expire for a year, cannabis seeds can be shipped legally interstate across the US as they don't exceed the THC content. Doesn't matter if it's a hemp seed or marijuana seed as both are hemp under the old definition in seed form as long as they're under 0.3% THC.
The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that can produce a plant that doesn't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which the legal weed industry partially operates.
Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal' weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on prices because you could get better product for cheaper than going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what you were getting.
In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).
Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
This is a perfect example of the opportunity for federalism. Any state could —and many did— close the loophole. You mentioned emergency regulation from the Texas governor. New recreational substances are discovered and introduced to market continuously. States can use their legislative authority to address them. Delta-9, Spice, and other delta-8 THC analogues have been successfully addressed by states.
The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended consequences.
But I’m not aware of many (any?) states that chose to close the loophole with a ban. Most, even ruby red Texas, just passed a state regulatory regime that included testing and taxation, as well as a 21 year old cutoff for buyers.
Contact your representatives and let them know this is BS. [1] When Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was trying to ban that same "loophole" the business community had time to organize & lobby against it, but in addition, regular citizens sent in over 120k letters, there's footage of people moving boxes and boxes of letters into his office. [2] In the end, he folded and kept the law as it was despite a pretty big push from his party. Was that the reason he didn't end up acting on it? It's hard to know, but it definitely showed him public sentiment was against it.
Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an intern.
It's infuriating to take the time to draft & send a thought out email to my representatives only to receive a canned email 8 months later.
Most of the time the response is even something like "ok cool opinion but I believe the opposite so bummer" (obviously exaggerated but the meaning is identical).
I will try a letter at some point, email feels completely useless.
Time is of the essence, so I might just have a chatbot draft me something quickly and edit it or rewrite it to more what I want to say. Just emphasize the main points that even the linked article mentions - hugely bad for business, loss of taxes, bad for veterans, people will just go back to the black market for their needs, etc. I'm kind of surprised I'm not finding sites like NORML have any of those "take action" forms on their site you just fill in and it sends it out to all your representatives automatically.
Regardless, it doesn't need to be something you spend hours pouring your heart into.
Some representatives respond differently than others. I've gotten boilerplate letters back, and I've even had phone calls back with someone from their office. It really just depends.
EDIT: It's already been signed into law, so now they have 1 year to try and remedy the situation... :(
That's less because Bavaria makes beer, otherwise the wine states would also impede cannabis.
The problem is that Söder and his CSU are obviously following the old Nixon attitude of targetting cannabis to hit left-wings [1]:
> You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
And then you got the absolute deranged ones, like Marlene "Cannabis ist verboten, weil es eine illegale Droge ist" (cannabis is banned because it's an illegal drug") Mortler or Daniela "Cannabis ist kein Brokkoli" (cannabis ain't broccoli) Ludwig [2]. Imagine, these two utter failures were the official drug policy heads.
Bavarian attitude towards cannabis always bordered on authoritarianism, ever before weed legalisation became a political mainstream topic.
Police was infamous for kicking in your door if a random copper walked home and smelled weed. "You smell like you got some weed on you" was a popular excuse the cops used at Munich Central Station to fleece everyone they deemed to look like a punk or, worse, Black person.
And the latter, well, it's certainly not a coincidence that the cops asked for, and got, the weapon ban zones in train stations giving them back the authority to fleece people at will, right after the cannabis legalisation came in force last year.
It's not about cannabis, it's not about the guns, it's all about the ability of the fucking cops to abuse their power whenever they goddamn want to, and Bavarian police are notable in Germany for being particularly aggressive and ignorant.
Then you don't live, like me, in the Ballard neighborhood of seattle where there must be 50 microbreweries. Every few mornings the whole neighborhood smells like rotting bread. I'd be happy to run into someone smoking weed on the street during those times, I find that smell much more pleasent.
And? There is also always people smelling like shit, with perfume, driving combustion vehicles, using grills, or working in any of the numerous industries that create smells. Why is marijuana so special that it needs to be dealt with, but I can be assaulted by some petrochemical and whale barf cocktail fumes with no restriction?
> the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most part, a footgun.
It has accomplished everything its proponents hoped for and much more.
"You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”
- John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Richard Nixon
Typical war on the 'others' as championed by the Conservative party members: terrorists, Communists, immigrants, 'drug' users, hippies, ANTIFA, liberals, etc, etc, etc.
It is my understanding that neither Canada nor the USA allows for the importation of products containing THC, so I don't see this as having anything to do with Canada. Perhaps I do not understand what you mean to say?
Canada has pulled American liquor from sales as a tariff retaliation, so Kentucky bourbon sales have dropped considerably. Thus we have the senator from Kentucky trying to kill off domestic competitors for Kentucky liquor.
Since tariffs were placed on Canada, Canada has been boycotting American industries like whisky, specifically because they are significant industries in Republican-controlled states. I don't know whether this move against THC is a response to that pressure, but that's the reference.
You're missing the parent comment's point. Bourbon sales are way down significantly because the largest liquor importer on the continent (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) has banned the import of all American products. Many other provinces followed suit.
I disagree. Legalizing drugs has only created larger black markets in states like California and allowed cartels to legally get into the business and gain more power in other countries.
Yes, I can believe that. We have the same problem with tobacco in France because it is too heavily taxed (black market is massive nowadays).
But that's really a government problem. They always pretend to tax stuff because it will slow the consumption but it never works, people keep using as much or even more if they get served on the black market that doesn't have to answer to regulation and taxation.
All of this is very well known, you just can't regulate drugs consumption, the only thing that works it social pressure but since governments have no say/power in that they pretend otherwise.
It's all very hypocritical, the only reason they legalise some stuff is because they want the tax money. Cannabis is heavily regulated because it is so simple to grow that there would be very little tax money to be made. You would just need to know someone who grow some in his garden, like tomatoes and around the time of harvest you would get massive oversupply.
Fascinating. I don't doubt your experience but I wonder where you are and which segment you're in. What I've heard is that it's the opposite for growers in California. Where weed previously went for $4,000/lb, it now goes for $400/lb.
> I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-hand.
They don't. Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot. I might have a beer when I'm stoned, but only a very tasty one, and only one.
I think that extremely light pot smoking is killing alcohol sales. The tiniest bit of pot is just as pleasing as a mild alcohol buzz, and an alcohol buzz kills the effect of pot. I know I got in the habit for a while of smoking a tiny, tiny bit when I got home, with the effect long gone before I went to sleep. Back in the day (and sometimes still), I would have had one beer, or one glass of wine.
There are terms for the combined effects of drinking alcohol and smoking weed. Cross-faded in English, pachipedo in Spanish. I find these terms and the effects they refer to enjoyable.
>The party of small government killing a new, billion dollar industry because Mitch McConnell's state beverage is seeing declining sales.
McConnel sponsored the original bill. Kentucky is historically one of the largest hemp producing states. The whole thing just shows how inept the entire administration is. DJT 45 signed the original law himself, after it was drafted and passed by his Republican house and senate.
Let's be clear McConnel isn't writing or doing anything. The man has been in a 'Weekend at Bernies' state for at least a couple of years. He's on camera being literally held up by his aides and seemingly having moments where he goes completely no communicative IN FRONT OF CAMERS several times, and not in a "I just don't have anything to say way" but just straight up 'freezing' in place. Either because of dementia or some kind of seizure.
There is no party of small government in the US. Libertarians have a long-standing alliance with mainstream Republicans, but they are unambiguously the smaller and weaker member.
That has never really been true whenever they get power. Just like states rights, the deficit spending and federal overreach stops mattering. It's just a matter of which part of the government Republicans want to grow and have the funding (ICE for example).
Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the party in power. Amazing how that works.
Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently? I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the House at the moment.
At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again eventually) to make that argument.
I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to speed up major change the next time a party has a super majority, by planting the seeds early...
> Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently?
if you think it's recent, you haven't been paying particularly close attention
2021: The Senate Cannot Be Reformed — It Can Only Be Abolished [0]
2018: The Case for Abolishing the Senate [1]
2004: What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate [2]
and that's just from the first page of Kagi results for "abolish the senate". I have no doubt it goes back farther than that if I actually went digging for historical sources.
the imbalance of power is only going to get worse as time goes on, as well [3]
> By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate
> “David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states,” Seib wrote. “They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”
The Senate has been nothing but a non-population-proportional version of the House since the 17th amendment. The House was supposed to give voice to the people while the Senate saw to the needs of the nation. The requirement for the house and senate to work together would balance these often competing needs. Direct election of senators is a worst of both worlds situation - democracy where some people's votes count for more than others. Since the 17th amendment was ratified, the legislature has ceded tremendous power to the executive and judiciary as it has become steadily more ineffectual, and public perception of the institution has plummeted. This has only accelerated in recent decades. Abolishing the senate is only one potential form that reform could take, but I don't know how anyone could look at the current situation and not see the need for some type of reform to get the legislative branch back on track.
I've been harping on this for years. My support for democratic, rational governance is non-partisan - if a majority of voters support the republican, that's their prerogative
I don't know what you're talking about, since abolishing the Senate (or at least making it the lesser of the two bodies) is anything but nonsense.
edit: Since I cannot respond due to throttling, I agree with the below idea of statewide house races, but by doing Proportional representation and a ranked/approval voting system.
If anything I think we need to make the House more like the Senate by making them run state wide. That would do a lot to get rid of the hyper partisan nutjobs since there's usually more ideological diversity across a state than in a given district. As a bonus it would also get rid of gerrymandering.
Yeah -- keeping population-based apportionment of representatives per state, while making representatives elected state-wide would be a huge shift of power, for the better, especially in the South (speaking as a southerner).
It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.
There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good.
It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.
Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation?
Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.
We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.
> We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken
You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative body and you'd still have the same problem.
You could abolish the Senate and have a unicameral House. But then we'd never have survived 250 years as a democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)
> I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought
The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].
The fact that the Senate can't pass things without a 60% majority, despite that not being a thing in the constitution, is just another facet of its undemocratic nature. The body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says.
And this is definitely not a necessary aspect of the system. Even if you want to argue that the Senate itself is essential, the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades.
I'd be fine with a bicameral legislature as long as both houses were actually representative. Maybe you'd have one with short terms and one with long terms. But having a body where California and Wyoming both get two representatives is just ridiculous.
I'm curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate. It looks to me like they're doing pretty much whatever they want aside from passing the recent spending bill, and to the extent that they aren't, it's because of a handful of Republican holdouts in the House, not because the Senate stands in their way. And if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either.
> body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says
All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
(Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
> the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades
Sure. Agreed. I'd honestly argue the concept of shutting down the government is dumber and setting a debt ceiling for already-appropriated and spent funds is unconstitutional.
> curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate
All the crap Trump is doing by fiat would have been passed into law. That, in turn, would strongly reduce the ability for the courts to call foul.
> if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either
The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
A fundamental aspects that makes the Senate different is each Senator is elected by more people, and thus must cater to more-diverse interests, than a Congressman, and they have longer terms. That means more people in the Senate must think about how what they're doing today will look after 2028.
> All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
You're missing the point. Of course they have rules. But to effectively make it so that you need 60% to pass anything is very different from ordinary parliamentary rules.
> (Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
Until recently, the Senate filibuster was completely different from what we have now. It used to be something that sometimes allowed Senators to make a show of delaying legislation. This thing where nearly nothing can be passed without 60 votes is new.
> The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
This means nothing. The rule isn't a secret. Things that couldn't achieve 60 votes will generally not be brought up in the first place, since it would be a waste of time.
If having a body where each representative represents more people and has longer terms is important, we can have that while still having it be reasonably proportional. The fundamental thing that sets the Senate apart is that it's meant to represent the states themselves, not the people. Thus each state is equally represented, and until the early 20th century they were not elected by the people. That no longer serves a purpose and that's what I'd like to see changed.
> Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.
Do you earnestly think this is a function of the rural-urban skew? In my view it is almost certainly due to the differences in number of people being represented by a senator and possibly term limit differences.
Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.
(Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)
The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population of the US would end up and how the system would act to give the minority far too much power rather than protect them from having too little.
Ah ok, I hadn't noticed there was also recent discussion on the Senate itself, wrt not being numerically representative.
People often say stuff like "the founders would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population would end up [wrt representation]", but they don't propose anything specific or constructive (short of federal-state litigation, secession or another civil war). How about a (neutral) commission to reapportion State boundaries every 10 years based on Census results (with some population formula between not-quite-linear and wildly disproportionate)? Or else, to periodically reapportion state counts of Senators to total 100. (Obviously these couldn't get ratified these days, but they just might have in the 1790s). If not, what's your specific suggestion?
Another thing people aren't currently discussing much is how badly break down if/when the Supreme Court gets captured by a dominant group that is both ideological and not independent. Look at how high the stakes will be for nominating the eventual replacement to Justice Clarence Thomas/Sotomayor/etc.
And of course the terrible Citizens Utd ruling muddies every consideration of representation.
And then there's also the parallel discussion of the Senate filbuster rule, remember though that if there was no filibuster, Citizens Utd would allow unlimited dark money to influence every vote, specifically all the action would focus on the Senators in the middle, think Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Manchin, Sinema. Seems near-impossible to reconstruct democracy under these constraints. (Look at the recent Senate stealth attack in the shutdown bill by lobbyists for newly-legalized CBD to try to ban Hemp).
Do you believe there's a distinction between giving the minority too much power versus protecting them from having too little? It seems like the same thing said two different ways.
Giving the minority (Christian extremists in flyover states) too much power has caused them to start revoking the rights of everyone not them. Forget about protecting minority groups from having too little power, the main concern now is wresting control of our government in line with the principle of "one person, one vote" instead of "hectares of corn and churches take precedence over people".
Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along with because it means more power for themselves and less restrictions on how they use it.
Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states into more smaller states, but big states don't like that because it means they have less power as individual smaller states. And we have already have congressman holding far more power than they were originally meant to because they froze congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives we are suppose to have.
The US political and legislative system has been corrupted beyond reason and this is just the next step to further consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
> people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt.
Or they want to live in a democracy where every single person is represented equally to every single other person. And not a system where some people are "more equal" to others.
That's not even getting into how this weirdly, strangely seems to align up with a history of slavery and racism in the US. Total coincidence that some people think it's fair those "urban people" get 3/5 of a vote compared to them, the enlightened farmers who need to save others from themselves.
And before you say "well the house and electoral college are proportional" - no, they absolutely are not since 1929. Try that talking point when the apportionment act is repealed.
Nor are districts even conceivably "local" anymore for those arguing about "personal governance".
This is a weird one. It absolutely should not be haphazardly added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except Delta-9.
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
It's night and day. It's also about access. The labs in legal states usually just test for more things. For a while, it was one or two labs plus a Cole extraction companies that were pushing the testing boundaries. Then, relation caught up and pushed the broader testing on to everyone. Then there were managed batch sizes (though these got too small in Oregon). Hemp does not have the same regulations, and unregulated states have way less infrastructure (including access to good labs).
Nobody wants to harm their customers, but it 100% happened in the early days. A lot of harm is/was not immediately obvious. Of was repeated exposure to harmful chemicals. Good intentions are great, but resources and incentives still matter. Nobodyv wants to get hacked, but building a new feature over hardening is what stops you from getting yelled at
is this the ongoing legacy of big pharma influence in government? there must be some reason why tapping this sign is not good enough for their purposes, maybe it’s too hard to enforce
is it conspiratorial to wonder that if enough of the owners are the same investment groups they can move alcohol industry pieces on behalf of other industries they also own, then they have token industries already tainted and ready to accept newly thrown tomatoes instead of the ivory ones
It's absolutely insane how unrelated provisions can be inserted into a CR instead of being debated and passed on their own merits (or bundled with related laws).
Regardless of what the measure is, or what party it's coming from, it's a significant flaw in the process.
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
> But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity
For better or worse.
I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the Federal level.
Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a culture. The more culturally people identify as "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian" etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the federal level expand, because that's what "the people" are asking for.
The problem with democracy is that people don't always vote or act in accordance with their objective best interests.
And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude towards democracy itself is indicative of my point. Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom" even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our roads?). But there are other matters that should never, under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups of people have rights).
> I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you.
This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is much easier to capture city or county government than it is state, and much easier to capture state government than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a more powerful federal government than we did 200 years ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read: rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state government cannot control it adequately.
There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be just as responsive as more local ones, other than an entire political philosophy and party that is committed to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally wrong.
It works well for everyone. The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
You're effectively saying that because you're worried about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government, you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face value.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps have interests outside of the country.
In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just make government farther removed for everyone. Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are all sacrificial lambs on offer.
> The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
No, this is not a problem with government for and by the people. It is, however, a problem in a system in which economic power (read: wealth) translates (often almost literally) into political power for individuals. Rich people deserve a vote just like everyone else - but nothing more.
> you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
You say "farther removed" - I say "larger, less dependent on local influence, and with more power". As I said, there is an entire political philosophy and party that insists that responsive federal level government is not possible; as I implied, I simply don't agree with this. Of course, if that philosophy/party has significant political power, then federal government will be less responsive, but that's not inherent.
Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
Do we need to be careful to not have the federal level squash deserved local variation? Yes, absolutely. But we also do not have to give in to the self-interested claim that federal government cannot serve the interests of the people well, either.
>Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
It boggles the mind that you can say this with a straight face. What do you think vesting more power at the federal level will do if not cause moneyed interests to work harder to capture it?
I think people are far too cynical. A highly visible federal government is in many ways more defensible from monied interests than many many small scale decisionmakers.
What do we have if not a highly visible federal government? And yet here we are talking about a hemp ban snuck into a funding bill at the behest of other industries.
I haven't argued for the federal level to override local variations, in fact I specifically said that it's an important problem to figure out how to avoid this.
The first problem is that city/county/state governments in general have completely inadequate power to confront national or trans-national corporations. The second problem is that some things (e.g. health insurance) really do work better when handled at the largest possible scale.
There are clearly things, like running the municipal rec center, where local government is better positioned than any federal government agency probably ever could be (though I stress "probably"). But there are lots of things where the opposite is true.
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well.
The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.
As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.
One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA.
I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
Huntington-Hill is better than nothing but it is still significantly worse than getting rid of the PAA and letting the House grow based on population size. Pressing my hand down on a bullet wound will slow the bleeding more than if I didn't, but not getting shot to begin with would sure be preferable.
This argues for just an increase to 700, and shows a ~5% swing in likelihood of Democrat control, and I would argue that just increasing it to 700 is still not where we want to be - a ratio similar to the UK would put us at closer to 3k representatives, and I believe this is still within reason (and is roughly the size of the equivalent chamber in China). Ideally we get rid of gerrymandering at the same time and redistricting is done apolitically by independent groups.
At 3k seats, every state is above their 1 rep minimum, representatives have 1/7th the number of constituents, population to representation at each state is much closer to 1:1, etc. Obviously not everything will end up on clean divisible lines so there's going to be some differences, but Wyoming would be more like .96:1 instead of .75:1 like they are currently.
Ideally the size should also be set to be revisited based on population on a periodic basis
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair.
If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair."
Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.
"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."
That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.
> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state
I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
"The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd."
Perhaps you can read the history then.
"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."
I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time.
I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
But even if it wasn't your local government, insurance companies do this sort of thing to deny claims even in tangentially related unapproved installations.
> The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it.
Asserted without evidence.
Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no building codes. Now many of them do (some still go without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design and construction standards, and we justify this with both public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own solar panels, under license from the state.
The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed. So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up to modern code or something.
Solar panels are generators that backfeed the line. Power utilities are going to take every opportunity to discourage/prevent/penalize the connection of generators to their lines.
Connecting your house to the grid poses more or less no threat to the grid or the linemen who work on it.
> The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
But since your house is (presumably) not a generator, no, that's still less connected to others than even a single solar panel would be.
What on earth do roof and [structural] building plans have to do with eletrical connectivity to the grid? You're losing the plot and trying to lead us down another sideshow, that is the things i called out as the specific things city dwellers forgot I dont have that they require for the solar permit. 'Society' already decided i don't need those for literally anything else residential but solar.
The most likely explanation is they simply forgot rural folks often don't have roof plans, and should have written an exception in such case that the solar permit could be issued without them.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.
But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else.
(*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.
I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
Good point - and also whoops on forgetting that, should have remembered from my DC history class where they drill in that we have a larger population than Wyoming and Vermont yet no rep
Surely you see the irony in the guy from DC wanting more direct democracy at a point in the nation's history when "drop a nuke on DC, see if things improve" would probably be a winning ballot measure in most states.
>>rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns
But effectively giving dirt a vote clearly isn't the solution. When voting maps are made weighted by strict land area they look one way, but weighted by population, they look entirely different, e.g., [0]
Or, should Wyoming, with a population of 587,618 as of 2024 [1] really have as many senators as the 39,431,263 people in California [2]? California has nearly five times the rural population of Wyoming [3], yet all rural and urban Californians get only 1.4% of the representative power of anyone living in Wyoming. Does a Wyoming resident really deserve 67X the representation of people in California?
I absolutely think rural concerns must be heard and met, but this setup is not right, and is clearly not meeting those concerns.
Because the rural folks think that "bad people" live in cities. (Don't ask them too many questions about what makes them bad; it's almost certainly bigotry.)
It has nothing to do with land. It's about the political subdivisions that are states, and how those states have differing concerns (can even be seen in the talks about different commerce and trade concerns when the country was formed).
Cities have no representation at the federal level, so we can leave those out of the question.
Why have states? Why indeed!
One answer: to create a level of governmental organization smaller than the federal one that can act as a set of laboratories for legislative and legal experimentation.
Another answer: to reflect the fact that not all laws and regulations make sense across a diverse range of climate and geography and demographics and economies.
Neither of those answers, however, require states to be considered inviolable sovereign entities, and a lot of us born after 1880 don't think of them that way.
I'm not going to do the math, but California has a larger rural area, a larger rural population, and a larger number of rural communities than, oh, I don't know, the ten least populous states combined? So at this point we have fewer rural communities overriding more rural communities just because of where state boundaries are draw.
Urban concerns are steamrolled by the rural concerns. Rural people literally hate and attack urban living people and urban people are supposed to smile and treat them nicely.
"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.
Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.
A bunch of states wouldn't have entered the union without the compromise on slavery.
But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason that equal Senate representation, or even general state "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
>why do you think your opinions can outweigh other’s?
I don't see where this is implied. I took the implication of "your opinion did not sway my own"
>Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
The "logic" is "larger states in a democracy should have more power because they represent more people". Which naively makes sense. I'm sure game theory would show some consequence of this formation though as a bunch of smaller states coalition around each other and make a two party system based on land, as opposed to ideology.
It wouldn't male sense, but an opinion in this case is the argument, no? You can disagree with an opinion and also think your own isn't necessarily superior.
In much of internet discourse, your goal isn't even to convince the person to reply to, it's to give more viewpoints to the silent majority who lurk and never comment. Whether they think an opinion is better or worse is up to them.
I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
By your logic if I replied with that to every comment chain in every HN post adjusting X to each topic… then I would become the most productive HN user of all time.
>I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
Yes, I browse reddit every now and then. It's a shame the Alt-Right pipeline hijacked this. They realized that being loud is better than being correct.
I'm a bit confused on how we got onto a tangent about productivity, though. All I was talking about came down to "opinions are arguments, and restating an opinion (in good faith) often means you aren't convinced of another opinion". They're opinions, they aren't inherently right or wrong.
I interacted with someone from Wyoming once. She made this point: Wyoming has a lot of Native Americans, and it struck her as contradictory when people would say "native Americans are underrepresented" alongside "Wyomingites are overrepresented." Of course there's nuance but it was interesting in any case.
Wyoming has 16k native americans. California has 762k native americans (if you agree with self-id, which I don't). Your friend clearly must be in favor of disenfranchising these native americans if she thinks her Wyoming vote should count for 67 native american votes in California.
In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly compelling.
If you could read you'd see (A) I didn't refer to her as a friend and (B) I didn't mention her political affiliation. In fact your assumption is wrong.
It wasn't a very political conversation but yes it could be used that way. I'll say this though. Isn't that what Native Americans need? They are in fact a tiny percent.
no, i don’t think we should move towards some sort of race-based confessional system. minority rights, sure - but the color of your skin should not impact your vote share.
If we truly believed in a capitalistic system, wouldn't the US become a hyper aggressive competiton to make the most citizens settle in their given state? It would bring down home prices, offer amenities, fight cut throat for the best labor laws, and so much more.
But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic when it came to this matter instead.
I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that some people / land area are simply far more important than others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is more meaningful as a matter of state, but there positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw value than others.
The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly your food production, natural resource extraction, and logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of the country to function.
You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that premise, it is immediately undermined by California.
California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.
Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?
Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.
So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?
>I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers
Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.
I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.
> most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers
Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.
>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
But we aren't talking in economic terms. We are talking in political terms. The economy is an offshoot of the functioning political system. Contextually they are different things although logically intertwined, but resources and their management / allocation is what gives rise to the idea of governance and that governance implements the economic system etc. Without the resources there isn't really anything to govern. The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this way because we have a very functioning system, most rural people don't even use the food and resources that are extracted around them anyway as we import and move things around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level. You literally can not support the cities without the rural output, even if the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban area.
I use economics because I don't know how to politically measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.
>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".
> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.
California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.
I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
But per-worker productivity is higher in larger states - so there goes that maker vs. taker justification of up-weighting rural areas. Regardless, plenty of other countries continue to produce adequate amounts of food despite a much more central approach.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
Er, why?
I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have something that compensated for the increased power the larger states had due to their population.
But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions. They still have some independent power but it's not a lot. And there's no option to leave the union.
We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power from the current form of the Senate also have disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.
The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually selected by the states (or rather, their governments). Direct election of Senators only came about in the early 20th century with the 17th Amendment.
And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).
In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.
The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...
2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%.
2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.
Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.
Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.
For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
Before 1913, State's legislatures would elect their US Senators. Since 1913, Senators are directly elected but to longer terms than their peers in the House, as a way to make them less beholden to the whims of the zeitgeist and more stable in their consideration of "what serves the state" in that they do not face elections immediately and the results of their work are meant to be evaluated over a longer period. -- this is the intent, reality may bear out differently
> What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51 seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous state (California) receives two, just like a very small state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here refers to population, not land area]
If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2 senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a simple majority, all by themselves.
Also, states have their own militaries. Some states even have multiple. All states have an Army National Guard and some have and Air National Guard. Those militaries can be federalized, but normally pertain to the state. Some states even have other military branches such as Texas, which has a State Guard which cannot be federalized.
>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
Point is, they would not have different roles, but instead work as a single house which votes on issues and laws and then delegates the result to the executive branch. No dual ”clubs” or houses with separate votes or separate elections.
Part of the point of the split when the US Congress was designed was to intentionally make it difficult for bills to pass, because they had to pass votes in two independent houses, that (presumably) were focused on differing agendas.
This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try to assure that only bills which had strong support overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would make it through the double gauntlet.
You have essentially described the current US Senate/House as it was originally set out in the constitution.
One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to each state part.
A second group with the number of seats determined directly by population (the House). This is "the rest set ... according to census data on population".
One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
> One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
Thankfully, the Permanent Apportionment Act is not actually a constitutional amendment and could be corrected with the passing of legislation rather than needing to go through a full amendment process.
Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as
I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
Congress as a whole? I don't know if there's anything unique it solves. It's merely the US's compromise to balance between a monarchy and a weak federal government with little control over the coalition of states.
The big issue is that our House of Representatives stopped being proportional to the population some 90 years ago. I believe analysts suggested that a House today would have over 1000 members, as to the 435 seats today. So that only increases representation of smaller states.
Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population") and senate ("guaranteeing each state X seats") already do what you suggest.
Amazingly some guys thought it up hundreds of years ago. Is your issue that it is bicameral? If so what advantage would one house have?
> Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population")
This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no longer actually true.
The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed seats mean that low population states have more power per capita in the house to a significant degree.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
Very few legislators have expertise in anything except demagoguery, pandering, and graft. Having more of them to form more subcommittees to mess up more areas of the law... no thanks.
We need merit-selected technical committees of non-representatives to advise politicians and tell them clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the technical committees should be independent and able to make their case on the internet and social media.
Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by politics. For example, China's vaunted "political meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the government will find a way to skew an "independent" technical committee to suppress those facts.
The main reason I think this is wrong is that the sheer amount of different things the government needs to pay attention to in the modern world is staggering. In my view, it is well beyond what a few hundred reps can pay attention to. I think if you scale it, what you end up with is that representatives can be more specialized in ways that align with their constituency instead of being bad generalists.
I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people"
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts.
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
> The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
It explicitly does not due to Permanent Apportionment Act. It is more proportional than the senate, but the hard cap on the size of the House and it no longer growing with population still fundamentally skews more power per capita to lower population states.
Whether people do or do not move based on voting influence is irrelevant to my argument. In fact, if people did move based on where they have voting influence it would be much less of a problem.
Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.
I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
There's a widespread misunderstanding about what congresspeople do.
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.
The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to hell.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
So you’re saying popular votes are not sufficient to avoid flip flops on contentious issues, and popular voting also can step on minority groups recognized rights on a whim?
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
It doesn’t require most people to be stupid. It just requires people to have other things they need to do, and pay attention to, and limited ability to give a shit.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
> would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out.
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
There is on average over 1 new bill a day that gets voted on in Congress. Those are the bills that get past committees.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
I don't know what I expect the voting process to look like, but you seem to be assuming the worst without even thinking it through very much. I'm not an expert, I just don't think we should throw out ideas based on poor strawman implementations.
I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.
Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).
That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
The problem is too much centralization of power in the federal government, when the entire purpose of the constitution was supposed to be to LIMIT the power of the federal government so that states could mostly govern themselves.
California should make it's own laws, Montana should make it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the rules on how they talk to each-other.
States Rights are supposed to be the protection against political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.
So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.
I think there is very little our founding fathers would recognize about today's american government, in a wide variety of ways.
Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.
Senators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Intended to, but due to the Permanent Apportionment Act, does not do so in actuality.
Congress is currently structured so that both chambers provide outsized representation to lower population states. With how the electoral college works, this also provides them with outsized representation in presidential selection, as well.
If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not invest so much power into higher population states, then it is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so much power into lower population states as well.
The Senate
- Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators
- Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together
The House
- Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC
- All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
- Ranked choice voting everywhere
Maybe the territories get less representation.
The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
> The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people
The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state.
It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.
The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council.
The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.
The US democratic system was inspired by this.
Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.
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On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
> The House of Representatives represents the people.
The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.
The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones.
The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones.
Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
Equal State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I propose a workaround:
Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely.
This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before.
i think we should just swear in every US citizen as a supreme court justice and then have 157,382,103-50,373,281 rulings on whatever issues we want to put to a plebiscite
I don't think the senate is necessarily the _biggest_ flaw, but it's close.
A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100 years.
Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
The issue is that post WW2 (and perhaps Great Depression) gave the federal gov’t too much power (and money), resulting in a lot of low level meddling.
It’s why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the state (or even lower) level.
I could say the same thing about the House of Reps, which has been frozen since 1929 and represents 3x more people per politician than it did then, is not equally distributed, and holds far more power and rights today than it ever did in the past.
Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
Opinions on this whole topic seem to revolve around how you conceive of the states in the US. Do you seem them as legitimate and important power structures, or essentially arbitrary boundaries which are relics of the past?
To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and administrative functions based on the census, with no municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
Only takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at will.
The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the class it represents, House of Lords.
In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government. Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our dominant language, legal code, ….
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
- 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
The filibuster is not a feature inherent to the Senate and could be removed at any time with a simple majority, just like it has been done for the filibuster for several types of nominations, and was threatened during this past shutdown.
I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority cannot force legislation through regardless of whether the filibuster exists or not.
The States are a gerrymandering. Five states have populations less than a million and three wouldn't even qualify for Member of Congress by census. Yet they get two Senators, a Member and three Electoral College votes.
You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights to a Senate minority.
> 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.
“No gerrymandering”. Wut? The Senate is the most egregious example of anti-democratic systems in any country you could reasonably call democratic. It’s far worse than the worst examples of gerrymandering.
I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at least every 10 years the congressional district you live in may change without you having any say. So it is definitely worse though I think the lopsided representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
> voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose
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.
The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
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.
The problem is that it is far, far more difficult for the legislature to "fix" a decision by SCOTUS than it is for SCOTUS to "fix" an unconstitutional law.
Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
The funny thing is that the discussion we're having, about congressional representation, already has an amendment out there floating around, waiting to be ratified. Already has 11 or 12 states who have ratified it (I forget). It can't be canceled or expired or cockblocked. If you live in a state outside of New England, you could petition your state legislators to ratify it tomorrow. And if even one state were to ratify it, others would notice and follow.
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.
> Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen
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.
People that say this are only looking to ensure the repression of those at the bottom of the totem pole remain oppressed! It's a direct path to fascism, and it is designed entirely to massively accumulate wealth at the top of the pyramid while ensuring all others starve and suffer!
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.
>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will
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.
Please don't fulminate or make personal attacks on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here, and we've had to ask you several times to try harder to observe them. We eventually have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this.
I think OP is arguing that because they literally said "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body."
Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people. So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
> Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people.
I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people.
> So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people."
I know that's what he typed, I'm asking what he meant. The Senate does not represent 350 million people. It has never represented people. It was never meant to represent people. Of course it's a ridiculous way of representing people, in the same way that a hammer is a ridiculous tool for heating something up. It's a completely nonsensical statement.
The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again.
many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system.
The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.
As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.
I don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the primary target of where I would support redistributing resources from richer more productive states.
Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.
This is going to be controversial because it steps into the shutdown blame game.
I think I am more interested in the mechanics of how this happens. Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation? What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
Single subject bill amendment. Several states require single subject bills in State legislature. The same must be required at the federal level. The pushback has always been "then nothing will get done". From where I am standing that would be a good thing. No more sneaking shit in at the last minute. Vote on every single issue. People will still try to sneak stuff in. I remember seeing a video of a Minnesota legislator admonishing his colleges for trying to do omnibus bills after they passed a single subject amendment.
To get such an amendment passed it would have to come from the States. Nobody that is already in congress is going to vote for this. It is a huge restriction on their power to spend our money.
Here is Alaska's single bill requirement:
The Alaska Constitution Art II, Section 13. Form of Bills reads:
Every bill shall be confined to one subject unless it is an appropriation bill or
one codifying, revising, or rearranging existing laws. Bills for appropriations
shall be confined to appropriations. The subject of each bill shall be
expressed in the title. The enacting clause shall be: “Be it enacted by the
Legislature of the State of Alaska.”
Hmm, I've never heard of this. My initial gut reaction is that this sounds good but the definition of 'single subject' is dubious. With enough leeway and creativity, anything can be a single subject.
Frankly, there are a ton of laws that seem dubious and underspecified to a person with an engineering mindset. This is by design, and it is the reason we have so many judges - because writing laws that clearly specify how they apply to every possible situation is often impossible. The law tries to make its intent clear, tries to lay out reasonably specific outlines, but necessarily must rely on the interpretation of those who judge the application of laws to cases.
Alaska is effectively a one-party state. At the federal level, you almost always need compromise to clear a filibuster, and it's easier to find compromise if you can draw on more subjects. Maybe the Democrats get cheaper health care while the Republicans get a giant bust of Trump installed on the former site of the Lincoln memorial. Neither measure would pass in isolation, but together they might.
So they could agree to pass two bills. This would require the two "sides" to trust each other, but it could (ideally would) also function to build trust, which would be a good thing.
Assuming there was enough trust to "guarantee" that one bill would pass right after the other, then what's the point of having the single subject rule in the first place? Sounds like you still have riders but with extra steps (and an opportunity to betray trust).
Because it becomes harder to "hide" things - like, the provisions being bargained for, or politicians' actual convictions about particular measures. There are items which now get passed in omnibus bills, bargained for behind closed doors by leadership, which couldn't (whip votes as ye may) be passed in up-or-down votes on their own merits. Those are, in my opinion, corrupt bargains, and shouldn't happen. I like legislative horse-trading - it's an important part of the democratic process - but I'd like it to be open and above board.
You say that like everybody that is in one party agrees on everything. That is absolutely false.
It is also an inaccurate portrayal of Alaska state politics. While historically the State Legislature has been majority republican it has been more even since 2015ish. Which is coincidentally when weed was made legal.
Of course you don't have to agree on everything, but the whole point of joining a party is to coordinate action to maximize power. Whether you agree with the party policies doesn't matter if you vote for them anyway to gain political currency with your party that you can hopefully spend later on your own priorities.
That said, I guess the Alaska legislature is a lot more balanced than I assumed. If the single subject rule works there, bravo. Congress is a different beast, though.
The biggest benefit of single subject bills is that it is infinitely easier for citizens to understand what is being passed and hold legislators to account on the next election if necessary.
It makes things like the Patriot Act and Inflation Reduction Act impossible.
This can have interesting consequences, because politicians are going to be politicians.
> The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, arguing that the omnibus bill, whose original title is over 300 words before it keels over in repetition of the word “subdivision,” violated the single-subject rule.
It works just fine for the vast majority of US states, including all the largest ones (California, New York, Texas). I don't think the federal government is special here.
The federal government has grown immensely since the early 20th century due to the interpretations of the commerce clause allowing more and more federal legislation and rules to broadly be applied to essentially override state legislation.
The 10th amendment exists for a reason. The system wasn't intended for congress to even control something like this in the first place.
We definitely are straining the rules. I think we actually want a federal government like this. The reality on the ground is that most people want things like FDA and FCC at the federal level.
Maybe we just need to change the constitution--which I know is technically possible but im practically it's frozen. It's like a legacy API no one wants to touch.
Playing devil's advocate, the positive of allowing legislation to include unrelated riders is that it promotes compromise. And compromise is how a healthy democracy should operate.
The compromise should be on the content of the bill specific to the subject. It is not a compromise to allow a rider that funnels money to some pet project. That is buying votes.
Oftentimes there can be no compromise on the specific subject. So the bill is either DOA or just immediately passed without any debate.
Allowing several issues to be passed as a singular unit provides opportunity for an agreement to be made about several issues at once. Think of it like a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
You don't need to have a bunch of unrelated riders to compromise. If the bill is healthcare funding, the compromise could be something like who receives the assistance, whether there are any cutoffs, how to implement it, etc.
Or if that's really impossible, you could compromise on separate bills. If people ever break promises, that's a reason not to trust them in the future and it's a lot more clear to the public about who voted which way rather than having a rider which no one really understands where it came from.
As others mentioned, unfortunately the last bill allowed for some large loopholes and emboldened underground growers (also due to more lax state laws) to grow and flood the market with sub-par or even poisonous product. It’d a billion dollar market that state actors and cartels alike are using to launder money (and ruin lives). Very informative video on this: https://youtu.be/3qC4c-zNxTg?si=oy4ab6kuo27fJqcx
Our state similarly tried to get it outlawed by using these excuses but ignoring the many shops where they are just selling quality product, not allowing kids, etc.
These are all just symptoms. The underlying vulnerability is the median US culture, which permits venality, scamming, skuldugery, shenanigans and crime in its ruling class.
We need to be careful with that sentiment. It plays into the hands of those who want to give the President and the current Supreme Court all the power. Congress was set up in the Constitution to be the branch that represents the people. It's supposed to be fully independent and wield the most power.
You mean like the current president that has been skipping over congress for a number of things, and the supreme court that has been doing little to stop him? Our institutions aren't failing they've already failed.
And that can change over the next couple of elections. What the current regime would like is for the electorate to think Congress is useless and not bother voting the majority out of power. There's already enough apathetic and disaffected voters who think voting doesn't matter.
Congress is directly responsible for causing this problem. Elections aren't going to change it because they redistrict to prevent it. They're a bunch of elites only interested in enriching themselves and holding office until they die. True regardless of party.
This nonsense of tacking bills onto other bills needs to end. As does this nonsensical fearmongering of Hemp and Marijuana. Absolutely none of it is actually evidence-driven from what I remember. I know the CDC has (had?) side effect stuff but I think it might be very heavily exaggerated.
Yep, it did. If I have the right bill (H. R. 5371), it's SEC. 781 if you want to see the actual text. (The table of contents is horribly bad though, and only covers divisions and titles and nothing beneath it though.)
I guess all those involved in burgeoning hemp trade are just in time for the mines to re-open. We're ruled by sociopaths and we don't live in a democracy.
What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading the bill they were going to pass.
The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to loot the treasury is even more egregious.
This is what always happened with Republican shutdowns too.
- You get nothing
- Eventually everyone understands they're going to get nothing, so they ask some sacrificial lambs to vote to end it while they posture and pretend they would have "kept fighting"
With Republicans this was called "RINOs" and "tea party" but it's the same thing now.
This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible. I really worry where this is going.
This whole process was the epitome of anti-democratic principles by design: the Senate is expressly an anti-democratic institution (wildly different levels of representation/power for different voters in different states), and the whole standoff centered on protecting the filibuster, which makes the anti-democratic senate even less democratic by allowing a tiny group within that tiny group to shut down the entire lawmaking process.
It's exactly what the founders, who all read Plato's Republic and its warnings about republics devolving into democracy, wanted.
Hard disagree, I think time has proven that the filibuster (or some process like it) is necessary as a stabilizing effect on democracy. Making legislation easier to block than pass makes it so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy. The minority party being able to, with effort, stop certain pieces of legislation they find abhorrent by raising the bar to it passing is a good thing.
The Veto is also profoundly undemocratic in exactly the same direction and it's also a good thing.
It hasn't done a good job stabilizing for decades in this case. The power of the people was stripped unilaterally and none of these mechanisms stopped it.
Not clear on what we’re disagreeing about: yes, anti democratic mechanisms have a stabilizing effect on democracy. They accomplish this by thwarting democracy.
I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad, it is what it is, but these anti-democratic mechanisms are intentional.
The Senate is already an antidemocratic brake/stabilizer. Adding a brake to it is stultifying.
> so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy
Exactly, and this is bad. Voters should all know that every vote matters. The current setup creates the false impression that both parties would fundamentally steer the ship the same way ("uniparty"). The path to a government that is more responsive to the needs of citizens involves allowing winning parties to actually govern.
I would argue that we want a more responsive, dynamic government that attempts to represent us. The filibuster is in direct direct opposition to all of that.
The GOP won the last national elections. They should be allowed to end SNAP, ACA, EPA, Labor Dept, NSF, Dept. of Education, FDA, all science grants, Medicaid, put armed military checkpoints on every city block, end legal immigration, and zero out federal funding to any school that is closed on the federal MLK Jr holiday[1]. (And to the extent that those things are not legal now, they have the votes to make them legal.)
And then in '26 and '28, voters should decide whether they agree with that vision for how the country should be run.
The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
1 - taken loosely from the 2024 GOP party platform and administration statements from this year
> The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
Or an overwhelming switch the other direction, just as chaotic and unpopular, continuing to swing back and forth every four years.
Who knows, maybe the overreach of the current party in power (even though "won the last national elections" meaning less than 50% of the cast vote, but that's another discussion) will cause a swing the other direction so hard that the opposition party gains a supermajority in congress. Things will be more stable in that case, if not universally popular, because well-crafted legislation is a good bit harder to reverse than executive orders.
IMHO - a step in right direction would be abolishing first-past-the-post voting system, together with electoral college. Finally USA could get a feel for multi-party system, instead of always voting for lesser evil. MAGA could be their own party, but they will need to deal with coalition instead of having total chokehold on all institutions of government.
Not sure how to break Senate and highly unequal representation it gives.
Though realistically I don't think this will ever be possible.
Was there every a real clean bill offramp available early in the shutdown?
I think the Democrat's mistake was as much as they were backing a popular policy, they didn't have the "clean bill" high ground, the Republicans are less concerned with government services, and they were backed into an end date with Thanksgiving travel coming up, so it would always get earmarks attached.
What the Democrats got right was they wanted a fight, and at first, the majority was on their side.
What I learned is Democrats don't have the guts for a shutdown, and Republicans do.
Republicans are completely willing to make people suffer in order to take away their health care.
Democrats are unwilling to make people suffer temporarily in order to protect health care.
So I don't see how a shutdown should ever happen again. Democrats are going to roll over, even when it's politically beneficial to them and to the country to keep pressure on.
Using farm bill hemp to produce CBD and THC is not the intended point of that bill. Plenty of states have set up actual, real legalized cannabis industries that benefit from regulation (like required mold testing).
The products created from this oversight are a dumb loophole. If you want cannabis, just vote for people to legalize it, it's really not hard. The only reason it continues to be illegal federally is the GOP, and most of their voters say they want it at minimum decriminalized. Even my brother who thinks we shouldn't give addicts narcan (let them die) thinks it's dumb that we punish people for smoking weed.
But they vote for people who want to keep it illegal so....
> Plenty of states have set up actual, real legalized cannabis industries that benefit from regulation (like required mold testing).
None of that cannabis is federally legal either, and relies on the same precarious position that 'hemp' industry will still be in of operating a massive ongoing criminal enterprise. It's just that rather than legalize the 'real' cannabis the big cannabis lobby and their politicians settled for swiping at their hemp competitor and make them go on the black market too so they could better capture the profits, as evidenced by the fact even 'legal' weed state senators voted to put 'hemp' in the same illegal category their illegal 'legal' weed sits in.
In fact, under the old hemp rules, there was pending federal regulatory framework for testing hemps products (they were still operating under deferred DEA testing regime, so currently testing is largely being done privately with COAs being furnished by most CBD farms, if you have even the slightest concern you can order from a vendor with full contamination reports and chemical breakdown). For marijuana, absolutely no federal requirement as it's just illegal with no provision. So the situation is the exact opposite as you had concerned, with regard to the part of government we are speaking of.
The ACA was literally dreamed up by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. This idea that it was some partisan thing Democrats forced on the country is hilarious. It was always a bending-over-backwards compromise solution to maintain the for-profit system.
There’s a reason that, after 15 years freaking out about it, Republicans still have no plan for replacing it. Virtually any change, outside of more socialization, will make health outcomes worse.
There's always been a plan to replace it with the only economically viable plan that can reduce the cost of healthcare. The same plan Dr. Ben Carson has been talking about for years.
It's the only solution proposed by anyone from either party that would work.
Yes. Along party lines. Why do you think every Republican voted against the conservative think-tank produced healthcare bill? I certainly have my theory...
Yes. Carson introduced that "plan" in 2015, right? Why do you reckon Republicans have not pushed it forward once in over the past 10 years despite twice controlling all parts of the federal government? Because it's D.O.A. flawed.
It does what basically every other non-starter contemporary Republican health insurance idea does: willfully misunderstands how health insurance works to appeal to rich healthy folks whose costs will be reduced at the expense of the poor sick saps who inevitably will die as a result. It's a straightforwardly eugenicist plan that would make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.
Controlling is not the same as filibuster proof majority (as we just saw with the shutdown), which is what it would take to do this.
Why did every Republican vote against it? Because it was terrible legislation that nobody even got to read before voting on it. As Pelosi famously said, "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."
And the reason that you didn't get single payer is because you didn't have support for single payer among Democrats, who did hold a filibuster proof majority.
This idea that the ACA, Obama's signature legislation is some how a conservative push is not based in reality. It's a talking point to give it the appearance of bipartisan legislation, which it is not.
The Heritage Foundation influences were from a 1989 proposal that talked about the an individual mandate and health insurance exchanges. The Heritage Foundation itself has gone as far as to totally disavow any association to the ACA.
Ben Carson has been talking about a variety of half baked plans for years. He has gone back and forth over and over on who is funding the health savings accounts, what he plans to do with medicare and medicaid, etc. None of these ever-shifting plans have ever been able to answer all of the questions, which is why they are ever shifting.
The ACA was very much a compromise that Republicans wanted over a better healthcare bill supported by the Democrats. It's basically a big cash present to insurance companies, who were free to jack up premiums and get paid by the Governement for it. Now that's gone, and the jacked up prices are now falling into the regular folk.
The GOP has zero plans to improve healthcare in this country, their messaging focuses on self-medication through their four magical products: raw milk, methylene blue, horse dewormer and Hydroxychloroquine. They are very much anti-vaccines and anti-science, in that they defeunded most health research and prefer an holistic/esoteric understanding of medicine to it.
Ultimately, I think this is good. The GOP is completely uninterested/unable of running this country. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we can be rid of them.
The crazy thing is that the ACA actually is bad -- it's Romneycare, a giveaway to the private health insurance industry thought up by a conservative think tank -- but the Democrats get to take the blame for it being actually bad, and Republicans get to point at it being actually bad even though any changes they would make are actually worse. It was an act of long-term political suicide by the Democrats under the Obama administration, which they doubled down on by ratfucking Bernie twice.
More than a decade later, the GOP has still yet to present an alternative healthcare plan to the ACA. Actual leftists have continued to push and argue for a true single payer system.
The ACA Is far from perfect but it was a significant step up from what we had before, and the party that spends all of their time trashing it has never made any sort of serious attempt at creating any sort of alternative.
A principled "small government" alternative would be ... nothing. Their view is that the federal government should have no role in providing health insurance.
Sure, but that's not actually the position of the GOP or their constituents, or even the pre-ACA situation.
The amount of people that actually want the government to have no role in providing health insurance or health care in this country is vanishingly small.
Which is a very nice view, until the federal government has to start getting involved anyway because someone has to scrape the rotting corpses off the streets.
Ultimately the health and life of the citizens is one of the most foundational concerns of any nation. You literally can't just ignore it. You have to face it, whether you want to or not.
Ben Carson has not put forth anything even remotely resembling a practical replacement for the ACA. He hasn't even been able to put forth any sort of consistent plan.
This wasn't about ending that system, it was about preserving that system and further entrenching it at a more substantial cost to the end users of healthcare, who tend to be some of those least able to afford it.
This idea that there's just left and right is very quaint. The bigger divide today is pro- and anti-establishment, plenty of the 'right-wing' Trump voters were also celebrating what happened to Brian Thompson.
Meanwhile, the ACA was quite frankly a love letter to conservatives.
It kept the US profit-driven system on life support, and it's a form of the same system proposed by Nixon, and again by republicans during the Clinton administration's push for healthcare reform, and the system enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
The only reason republicans opposed it on party lines during the Obama administration was politics: they were forced to denounce the system they loved due to their status as the opposition party. In another universe they would've celebrated their president signing it into law.
Actual leftists are probably fine with ending the current system because it will bring so much pain to the voting public that it might actually get them off their asses to bring in single payer. As the saying goes: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else."
8 individual Democrats. Don’t lump in the rest who held the line.
You are “both sides”ing this when the GOP is the only side that worked tirelessly to end healthcare subsidies and allow America’s poorest to go hungry.
8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
I blame the rest of them because of their reaction. House is torching the ones who caved. Not much commentary from the actual colleagues who "opposed" this maneuver.
I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person who would just offer something for nothing.
They either aren't rerunning or aren't on the 2026 ballot. Some are taking an exit package. Others hope this blows over when 2028 or even 2030 come for reelection.
If you believe the commentary of one of the defectors, he said (Paraphrasing) "I got my first good sleep since the shutdown began... I didn't have to worry about people eyeing me as I walked into work". So if you take that at face value it was everyday interactions that had him fold. Easier to crush the hopes of the invisible population you represent than look uncouth to your visible peers.
Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.
And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.
Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.
The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.
If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.
When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.
The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.
Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”
By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.
>Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them
Cool, so we're hoping for a Christmas Carol to come in and show them the error of their ways in a dream?
Its the rest of the senator's responsibility to convince them. As it is their constituents. We're all a bit at fault here.
>When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
The evil within will always be worse than the evil you know. No one expects the devil to turn another leaf, but will chastise Judas for betraying Jesus.
Meanwhile the GOP has embraced the evil. They made things very easy for themselves.
Was it actually a cut or was it not renewing something that was expiring? A bill to fund the government seems like the wrong place to be debating new spending.
I don’t know what the news rhetoric on all of this is, I haven’t seen it mentioned on here or on news articles, and I’m not on the socials/don’t watch tv. IIRC the initial ACA bill always had this cliff in order to make the numbers work for the bill to pass.
Like most long-term financial bills, everyone just assumed the cliff won’t hit and new legislation will pass.
This is the actual crux, no? “We expected the funny numbers to pass again” as opposed to “we should have addressed this before Biden left office”
While true, at least in the Senate there are questions as to whether those 8 were selected to fall on their swords by Democratic leadership because they either aren't running again or aren't up for re-election in 2026. These questions are coming from the progressive part of the party and progressive supporters.
The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the representative look good to his own state by throwing herself under the bus.
I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but this is what politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming to advance leadership's agenda. Not individual politicians voting for what they think is best.
> And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul’s efforts.
> His “shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately balanced deal to reopen the federal government,” a Nov. 10 letter from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal weed states.
Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.
No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.
History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this.
It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
Exactly. This pattern I think accurately describes the state of the US economy in general over the last few decades. Wealthy extracting wealth from what’s left of the middle class and further extracting wealth from the already poor. The decline of the US is now openly visible and attempts to hide this through economic language / indicators / propaganda etc are now openly not reflecting reality and often come off as in a dark way comical. This applies to some other western nations like France, England and perhaps Germany.
> It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep out most the competition.
That’s a big assertion that needs evidence. I’m strongly in favor of legalization but not deregulation. It was a pretty big loophole that allowed what’s essentially weed to sidestep the regulation their competitors faced - and there wasn’t great consumer awareness about the differences even though there were safety implications: https://drexel.edu/cannabis-research/research/research-highl...
This law seems pretty well targeted in its scope, bringing the 2018 law back to what was intended (easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there).
We are speaking of federal law here.
There was absolutely no federal regulatory framework for marijuana. none. It's just plain illegal. Unless you can get one of a handful of research licenses, which is almost totally irrelevant.
Hemp had some, fairly weak regulation. And theoretically, testing requirements, although they were deferred and deferred to the point they were basically done only privately with the idea the DEA would eventually get involved.
Instead they're just dumped now into the marijuana bucket which has no federal regulation at all, or alternatively, at the state level the states could always define their regulatory framework to be agnostic to THC content of cannabis.
So this does the exact opposite of what you had hoped.
Yet Kratom is legal, yt is recommending to me some product called "meth" (not joking) and there are a million new research drugs coming out every decade?
It's just old-school think of the kids and not in my territory. We don't know how to regulate and handle this because our politicians and more and more our citizens don't understand what is being voted on or has been happening in their own states for 7 years.
Have you used these products? It's a shame, the quality that I was getting just within the past 3 months was incredible and it is market not afraid to try new stuff.
I'm sad, flower from OR, NC, OK, IN, and others will never legally hit my lungs. Back to the cartels? Or perhaps I should overpay by $200 with the comfort of having 0 clue where it comes from, again?
> I'm sad, flower from OR, NC, OK, IN, and others will never legally hit my lungs
You have the power to elect people that will actually represent you.
>(easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren’t other things in there)
Your ignorance shows in spades. The arbitrary ban on THC and its analogues prevent chronic pain patients like me (a criminally underserved market) from becoming addicted to the big pharma system. The "other things in there" argument is the same as razorblades in candy, sanctimony to portray dissent as degeneracy.
In my experience it is also the other things in there which helps with the pain relief. Doctors in my country talk about the entourage effect and mixing strains as they reckon it's not just the THC which is helping.
I can imagine people in the future looking at us like idiots as they use cannabinoids in the same way we use paracetamol.
From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative. The difference between a life spiralling to nothing just about surviving on opioids compared to effective pain relief from cannabis and being able to work and be productive again.
One of the tragedies of the 20th and hopefully not the 21st century. So many people in so much unnecessary pain.
Looking at history I could quite easily come to the conclusion... ...due to racism.
> From personal experience suffering from chronic pain cannabis is absolutely transformative.
Like all drugs, it’s sad it doesn’t work this way for everyone. I had to transition from cannabis to opiates and lyrica. I wish this was not the case.
They suspect it’s due to the source of the pain (spinal cord injury) and the cannabis is “exciting” my nerves in the wrong way, as it actually increases my pain; or at least my perception of it.
Selling it as a pain reliever I can't buy into personally based off my anecdotal experience. I've had chronic pericarditis for more than a decade now and THC amplifies mine as well, as I tend to focus more on the pain. I think it's a very subjective thing, depending on many factors; strain, type of pain, person, etc.
> I've had chronic pericarditis for more than a decade now and THC amplifies mine as well, as I tend to focus more on the pain.
This is a very apt description. It’s like it narrows my entire focus into the pain and it seems to become more…in focus.
THC is for getting high.
> The arbitrary ban on THC
You clearly haven’t read either the original law or this one.
> That’s a big assertion that needs evidence.
It really doesn't. It's well a well-established fact that heavy regulations favor larger enterprises over smaller ones.
Corporations are eroding democracy with their powerful lobbies. They have too much money and influence. And yet too much of the electorate has been convinced it's good for the economy to just let them and the super rich have free reign.
76/100 senators voted to keep this provision.
Legal weed senators were voting for it because their constituents include people growing legal weed. The hemp product market competes with these constituents.
The anti-weed senators were voting for it because they are anti-weed.
Most senators who vote on this bill are not voting on the basis of the hemp thing in either direction. That's why all the headlines are about the tactic of sneaking it into a "too big to fail" budget bill.
There was an opportunity for this bit to be removed from the bill.
76 of 100 voted to keep it. This, is like, literally the entire point of discussion in this part of the thread? I don't understand where your confusion lies.
Are you saying it was an amendment? That it not what I get from this or any articles I've seen about it.
TFA:
> On Sunday, Senate leadership inserted a hemp-recriminalization clause into the must-pass funding bill
> ...
> Not a standalone bill. Not a debate on cannabis reform.
Seems like it wasn't a full Senate vote on a specific amendment, but the bill as a whole. I've elsewhere seen it stated as McConnell acting alone.
Edit: as I googled around, I found that Rand Paul attempted to use an amendment to remove the language, and it failed. But people vote on amendments for all sorts of strategic reasons. For example maybe they felt the amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate bills need to match, and the terms had already been negotiated.
> For example maybe they felt the amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate bills need to match, and the terms had already been negotiated.
I don't recall ever hearing of reconciliation being a deal-breaker.
Also, if Senate leadership inserted the clause, that means that it wasn't in the House's version to begin with.
Rand Paul's vote was, like, specifically for this, and the house is clamoring for the hemp stuff even less.
This is Mitch McConnell's crusade.
Honest question but how is hemp competing with weed? Are these different plants?
The product being sold at your local dispensary is produced, marketed, distributed, and sold by an entirely different chain of businesses and people than the product being sold at your local head shop.
THCa/Delta8/similar products are produced under an oversight in the hemp legislation and different businesses are taking advantage of that than those involved in the legal marijuana trade.
Hemp is classified as below .3% THC (compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid 30%s). Hemp is male and female, and trash in potency, but THC and other products derived from it are fair game in some jurisdictions, or a grey area.
It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
> compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid 30%s)
These levels are still primarily based on THCa content, not Delta9 THC. Even your regulated legal flower is very low in D9 THC.
> It is certainly a different market than legal, high potency THC, as well as medical.
Much of it is literally the exact same. They are growing the exact same strains and cultivars as the regulated legal marijuana industry, just making sure to harvest and process them in a way that prevents the decarboxylation of THCa into D9 THC from going over .3%
It is quite literally the same and the distinction between hemp and marijuana is entirely arbitrary as defined by a shitty and ignorant law.
> how is hemp competing with weed? Are these different plants?
I live in Wyoming, where weed remains technically illegal. The 'legal' weed is trucked in from Montanta and sold at farmers' markets. The hemp is sold at the liquor store check-out counter.
I'm surprised a lot of people missed this, but hemp growth actually causes thc plants to lower their cbd because of unexpected pollination. you can't grow them in the open near each other
There's a lot of confusion here.
The hemp products in question are not, like, hemp rope. They're just pot that is classified as hemp because they are harvested and processed in such a way that keeps the D9 THC below .3% at the time of testing.
If you were to go look at a growing operation for someone making THCa flower and then go look at a growing operation for someone making regulated legal marijuana, they would be virtually indistinguishable.
The humorous part though, is that the 'legal' growers screaming about the 'unregulated' competition and for this law, are actually the outlaws breaking federal law and totally non-scrutinized by federal regulation (other than the fact it's outright illegal).
It is the absolute worst case of gas lighting. The literal, federally unregulated criminals were screeching that the people obeying the law and following the regulations (even if in a way legislators didn't expect) were unregulated cowboys who were 'skirting the law.'
It's absolutely comical if you think about it. And somehow, this argument actually won.
I see both sides of it.
Many of the state legalized programs do have significantly higher standards because they are explicitly regulating for things intended to be consumed by humans, while the federal regulations for hemp are focused in an entirely different area.
As a consumer, I would prefer to be purchasing the more stringently regulated state-legalized product. But that would require I live in a state that has legalized it.
Instead, my options are (at least for another year), purchase the less stringently regulated "hemp" products or the entirely unregulated stuff grown god knows where by god knows who with no recourse if it turns out they've been spraying their crop with leftover lead arsenate.
It's the same plant, but hemp refers to the leaves and plant matter that isn't the THC-rich flower buds.
They are the same species, but it's a Brussel-sprouts vs Broccoli type situation where they started as the same plant but have been selectively bred for different purposes
The THCa/Delta8 stuff is not brussel-sprouts vs. broccoli. They difference is in timing around harvest and process. They're growing many of the exact same cultivars as what is sold in a proper dispensary (and indeed, much of what is sold in dispensaries would actually qualify because they actually have very low levels of Delta9 in them)
You can effectively just under-cure the exact same plant and get something that comes in under the limit.
Both Senators in California, my state, voted for the ban. Neither has explained why.
Newsom recently banned hemp-based THC at the state level anyway, so there's no real change in California.
https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/us-states/california/n...
They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for pesticides and such. When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
> They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes.
This is not at all what was happening. These aren't some special strains or cultivars where there is a remnant of THC that is getting squeezed out from a large quantity of plants to make a small quantity of product - they are same strains and cultivars being used by the legal dispensaries. It is a matter of timing and process - harvest and undercure the flower and it will not have converted enough THCa to Delta9 THC to hit the legal limit. In fact, many legal operations follow similar timing on harvesting and similar processing - the flower in your local dispensary is still mostly THCa, and a good chunk of it is likely under the limit for D9 THC as well.
Much if it is effectively the exact same thing under a different label.
> When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
I do agree here. There's no need for the unregulated market when a proper legal market exists.
oh, I didn't know that. That's even more nefarious than I thought. Thanks for the info!
I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it.
>I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and results in a significantly better product for those choosing to consume it.
Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.
In most states with legalized cannabis, testing for a variety of harmful ingredients and the potency of specific products is required for those taking part in the legalized cannabis trade.
Those growing, packaging and distributing "hemp" products are not subject to such testing regulations.
That may not be nefarious, but avoiding such regulation increases the likelihood of harmful additives (chemical pesticides and other adulterants) and unknown potencies. This would likely increase the chances that unscrupulous vendors will sell (knowingly or unknowingly) harmful/dangerous products.
And given that the products are essentially the same, that gives those who don't have to pay for testing or go through the marketplaces defined by state laws, giving those folks an advantage over those who follow state law.
What's more, folks who avoid extant law through this loophole, are not incentivized to make safe, tested products.
So maybe not "nefarious," but certainly anti-consumer with perverse incentives to create and sell harmful products.
> Perhaps "nefarious" is too strong a term, but the intent (at least in states that have legal cannabis) AFAICT, is to avoid the regulations around testing for adulterants, potency, etc.
My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.
As someone in a non-rec state, as much as I would prefer the dispensary option with stricter regulations, it's still much more regulated than "the dude whose house i show up with and venmo him some money and get a bag that came from god knows where"
>My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that the majority of the sales are happening in the 26 states without recreational marijuana, however, and that many consumers in the recreational states are still choosing to go with the dispensary product vs. head shop/liquor store/etc.
I don't know if that's the case, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market. Even though I live in a (now) legalized state, there's still a thriving black market, both for folks who have been growing for decades who maintain a positive reputation among distributors/wholesalers, and those who purchase out-of-state product (that's tested and sold legally in those other states) without tax or records, and can then undercut the legal dispensaries.
I'm not familiar enough with the "hemp" growers/sellers, but IIUC, since it's not supposed to be used as a mind-altering substance, the testing and purity regulations may not apply.
All that said, things are a mess WRT to cannabis in the US. Some states are doing it well, others are not. And the Federal government, while not irrelevant, has not made progress in this area -- and that includes the "hemp" loophole which (and I could be mistaken here) isn't regulated at all.
Hopefully sometime in the future the states and the federal governments will get it right. Which is often how these types of issues are addressed in the US -- study the issue carefully, choose the path that is least effective and most harmful, then iterate, trying less bad and less harmful "solutions" as you go along.
Presumably we'll get there eventually.
> I'm not sure what you mean WRT "hemp" being more "regulated" than the black market.
Just basic laws around farming. For example, lead arsenate is banned in the US, and I trust the hemp farmers to not be using it as much as I trust any similar operation, but someone illegally growing stuff? They're already breaking the law. And who knows where it was grown to begin with?
And in general, there are companies behind all of this. There are names. Legal recourse if shit goes wrong. Who am I going to sue if I find out that the shit Bob has been selling me has been full of harmful pesticides or if the oil was full of some harmful additive, etc.?
Fair enough.
Legal recourse is definitely an upside of not dealing with a black market. I agree.
I'm not familiar with the laws around hemp growing and/or the Federal loophole, but I hope you're right about at least minimal regulation (and legal recourse for) of non-consumable products, especially if they're being consumed (can you sue the makers of clothing or rope if you get sick eating or smoking their products?).
As I said, hopefully we'll eventually get to a sane policy regarding cannabis.
If it was a textile-style-hemp farmer getting the last few bucks out of their crop via a loophole, that I can understand. Not great, but I can rationalize it.
Someone growing the same plant that is regulated by California but decides they don't need testing or licenses is just plain anti-social. You can't not know you're doing something wrong in that case.
Most of the sales are in states where marijuana has not been legalized, from my understanding.
I'm more concerned with ending an absurd prohibition, personally.
I don't understand how this has anything to do with federal hemp law, under federal law marijuana doesn't have any testing requirements either as it's just plain illegal. So what does California have to gain in testing by dumping hemp into the marijuana bucket at a federal level, neither of which improves the testing requirements in California? California could simply require hemp to be tested, but making hemp federally illegal does nothing on that point.
The only answer I can think of is that hemp grown outside of California was competing with california 'legal' weed, the testing angle is non-sensical since this change in law moves hemp from 'kind of required to be tested (but none of the DEA testing implemented, so it's done privately and sometimes not at all), but poorly' to 'illegal' and marijuana still at 'illegal'.
In general this kind of excuse is used by incumbents to pass laws to thwart competition.
You have some regulatory framework which has already been created by captured regulators, so it has a couple of rules that it ought to have (always the ones pointed to in order to justify it) and then others that exist merely to exclude competitors or make sure fixed costs are high enough that only large incumbents can meet them.
The latter set of rules are unreasonable so the market finds a way around them. The incumbents then call this a "loophole" and insist that the competitors be forced into the entire framework rather than just the subset of reasonable rules they'd be able to satisfy without being destroyed. Which destroys them, as intended.
I didn't want to believe you so I went to the source: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
wtf.
That’s not all that was added in there
I'm not sure how this relates to the above comment.
EDIT: I'm assuming this is to point out it's a bipartisan effort. Well, yes, there isn't exactly a pro-people party.
It says that weed supporting stats voted for this. They did.
All of this stuff is already built around loopholes.
> But the provision that was inserted into the government funding bill makes illegal any hemp product that contains more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container.
Now the online "hemp" industry will shift to selling gummies in "containers" that really equate to individually wrapped. You'll get bulk discounts for buying groups of 30 "containers", but what you get will feel like Japanese-style individual wrapping.
BTW: This was kinda-sorta what I encountered when I bought gummies in Ontario, Canada. The gummy was in a single "container" and had roughly ~0.4 mg THC.
0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together.
While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned).
> Most people aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-sactioned)
In CA, WA and CO, almost every single individual gummie is 10mg (up to 100mg in the pack, the state limit, so usually 10 gummies in a pack). I rarely see individual servings under 10mg ever, its not common.
People in these states routinely consume more than 10mgs in a single sitting - its just two gummies.
10mg for an entire pack of edibles strikes me as extremely low - shared with friends, none of you are getting that high...
> https://app.leg.wa.gov/Wac/default.aspx?cite=314-55-095
> https://cannabis.colorado.gov/responsible-use/safety-with-ed...
Think of it more like the store being forced to sell individual beers: At some point someone will figure out that they can sell them in a box of 6 in a way that complies with the law.
Uhm, you can take 2 or 3.
I usually eat 2 gummies (10mg) when I want to feel the effects, or a half gummy (2.5mg) when I want to microdose.
---
When my mom was in serious pain from cancer, I told her I use CBD for migraines. What I didn't realize was that she went to the dispensary in town, and they didn't have CBD-only products. She took a 5mg THC gummy and then called me up stoned out of her mind.
I wish I knew she planned on taking some, because I would have found the right kind for her.
I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about 2020 when I discovered it. It's been quite the journey watching the industry boom and evolve and get better and better.
I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this topic. Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this last night. On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant. I can find it on r/news but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning something very factual.
Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators voted for this ban to remain. 76 senators from across the political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
> On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics, r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant.
There were at least 3 posts on /r/all yesterday.
I mean, were you posting to draw attention to it? How would people know if the people who do know aren't spreading it? Most people don't read bills themselves and it's no news that US media is captured by billionaires and special interests...
Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated, but not class 1.
People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but how much does that really matter when wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, and have been for over a decade.
> wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress?
Because it's not "not considered by anyone".
Democrats have been demonstrably decriminalizing and legalizing weed all over the country, and the Democrats in the federal government have been pushing and submitting and trying to make it happen.
It's republicans. They are the ones that continually stonewall a measure the vast majority of their constituents support, and they are the ones that somehow still get elected despite that.
Show me the democrats preventing legalization of weed federally.
Show me the democrats who invite cop associations to talk at their meetings about how dangerous weed is. Show me the democrats who are taking money from cop associations or prison lobbying organizations who very explicitly want to keep weed illegal.
Stop overgeneralizing! It's literally how things are this bad! Blame who is actually at fault!
I'm confused, only 22 democratic senators tried to stop this, plus Paul and Cruz. They just did outlaw it only because it is not called "marijuana".
Is it necessary to recount how this entire split is partially due to racism, anyway?
This law is about banning hemp companies from selling psychoactive products. It is about protecting weed companies from unregulated competition. The libertarians voted against it because they want to get rid of the regulation the weed companies face, not because they care more about legalizing weed,
I had read a while ago, and I struggle to really argue with it, that legalizing marijuana is simply the carrot on the stick.
Many Republicans are just against it out right, and many Democrats are either indifferent or know that promising to legalize it will mobilize a subset of voters who prioritize it above else (or may just not vote at all otherwise, over 30% of Americans don't vote after all).
It'd explain why there's been so many opportunities to reschedule the drug, and why in some states even when they had the numbers to pass legalization, they still don't. Or do so with extra incentives (often the actual sale of it) to come later (vote next cycle!).
AKA, the system at work and our issues just become bargaining chips for influence by the parties.
The DEA started hearings on rescheduling marijuana last year. It’s currently on hold pending an appeals court case.
If it's scheduled at all, you aren't getting it without a regular prescription from a medical doctor, and its production will be highly regulated, subject to DEA limits and quotas, and patients will need to carry their prescription with them at all times if they leave their home with marijuana on them.
That's not the same thing as legalization as it's implemented elsewhere in the US.
That seems to be an alcohol industry complaint. That it isn't taxed and regulated like booze
Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power, doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending money in their own states.
Why should cannabis be regulated at all? 99.99% of problems with marijuana that ive ever seen or heard of stem from its either its illegality or its overzealous regulation.
decriminalized cannabis can still be treated with dangerous pesticides or contain high levels of heavy metals or bacteria that cause serious illness.
i used to be of the mind that decrim was preferable to legalization but testing is a pretty important part of making sure you're getting the safest products.
a lot of people in favor of decrim are either bad actors or are under the mistaken belief that all their flower is coming from some nice hippies who only use organic fertilizer and good vibes.
the legacy market was pretty much exactly the same as any other black market: full of people who were in it for the money and didn't care what it took to produce the highest yield at the greatest margin.
now we have legacy actors gone "legit" AND opportunists who got into the market post-legalization who still have the same profit motive above all else.
I want the drugs I buy to be tested, is all
Each and every character inserted in a Bill must have an owner: who inserted that character.
Google Docs can do this. Why can't the Congress??
I agree with the sentiment in general, but in this case it seems extremely well known:
https://www.lpm.org/news/2025-11-11/mcconnell-paul-clash-ove...
Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1].
This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow...
> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.
"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.
Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.
I don’t like massive omnibus bills, but at the same time it provides I suppose a “transaction commit” mechanism for lawmakers to group unrelated elements.
You support my bill, I support yours, we both win. In the case is one-bill, one-entry requirements it allows for bad faith negotiations and trickery.
Maybe there is some middle ground where we cap the number of unrelated entries on a bill to allow transactions but not the classic “we don’t have time to read” shenanigans.
To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.
>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,
And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?
That isn't how federal rules have historically been made, so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading statement.
Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.
That was during the Biden Administration. The Roberts Court now says the Executive can do anything. Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, Seila Law, the end of Chevron deference, and of course, immunity. Anything.
Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.
I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.
Or, updated: https://hightimes.com/news/politics/trump-signs-shutdown-dea...
I feel like I am missing something here, and it is around it being called "hemp".
Does this actually have any impact on legal dispensaries, their products, farms, etc?
Does this make it harder to eventually de-schedule pot.
Yes, in the sense that now it will be illegal to ship cannabis seeds interstate. Under current law, which doesn't expire for a year, cannabis seeds can be shipped legally interstate across the US as they don't exceed the THC content. Doesn't matter if it's a hemp seed or marijuana seed as both are hemp under the old definition in seed form as long as they're under 0.3% THC.
The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that can produce a plant that doesn't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which the legal weed industry partially operates.
Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal' weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on prices because you could get better product for cheaper than going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what you were getting.
Only indirectly (see other comment).
In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).
Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
This is a perfect example of the opportunity for federalism. Any state could —and many did— close the loophole. You mentioned emergency regulation from the Texas governor. New recreational substances are discovered and introduced to market continuously. States can use their legislative authority to address them. Delta-9, Spice, and other delta-8 THC analogues have been successfully addressed by states.
The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended consequences.
But I’m not aware of many (any?) states that chose to close the loophole with a ban. Most, even ruby red Texas, just passed a state regulatory regime that included testing and taxation, as well as a 21 year old cutoff for buyers.
Contact your representatives and let them know this is BS. [1] When Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was trying to ban that same "loophole" the business community had time to organize & lobby against it, but in addition, regular citizens sent in over 120k letters, there's footage of people moving boxes and boxes of letters into his office. [2] In the end, he folded and kept the law as it was despite a pretty big push from his party. Was that the reason he didn't end up acting on it? It's hard to know, but it definitely showed him public sentiment was against it.
Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an intern.
[1] Find and contact elected officials https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
[2] 120,000 Texans send letters and petitions against THC ban to Gov. Abbott https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-06-03/austin-tx-thc-ban-la...
It's infuriating to take the time to draft & send a thought out email to my representatives only to receive a canned email 8 months later.
Most of the time the response is even something like "ok cool opinion but I believe the opposite so bummer" (obviously exaggerated but the meaning is identical).
I will try a letter at some point, email feels completely useless.
Time is of the essence, so I might just have a chatbot draft me something quickly and edit it or rewrite it to more what I want to say. Just emphasize the main points that even the linked article mentions - hugely bad for business, loss of taxes, bad for veterans, people will just go back to the black market for their needs, etc. I'm kind of surprised I'm not finding sites like NORML have any of those "take action" forms on their site you just fill in and it sends it out to all your representatives automatically.
Regardless, it doesn't need to be something you spend hours pouring your heart into.
Some representatives respond differently than others. I've gotten boilerplate letters back, and I've even had phone calls back with someone from their office. It really just depends.
EDIT: It's already been signed into law, so now they have 1 year to try and remedy the situation... :(
Trump Signs Bill To Recriminalize Hemp THC Products, Years After Approving Their Legalization https://www.marijuanamoment.net/congress-passes-bill-to-recr...
Citizens United
The more money you allow in politics, the more politics becomes about money.
I remember being lectured about how this needed to be a "clean funding bill".
The party of small government killing a new, billion dollar industry because Mitch McConnell's state beverage is seeing declining sales.
A similar thing can be observed in Germany: the most anti-cannabis state is the state that produces the most alcohol (Bavaria)
That's less because Bavaria makes beer, otherwise the wine states would also impede cannabis.
The problem is that Söder and his CSU are obviously following the old Nixon attitude of targetting cannabis to hit left-wings [1]:
> You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
And then you got the absolute deranged ones, like Marlene "Cannabis ist verboten, weil es eine illegale Droge ist" (cannabis is banned because it's an illegal drug") Mortler or Daniela "Cannabis ist kein Brokkoli" (cannabis ain't broccoli) Ludwig [2]. Imagine, these two utter failures were the official drug policy heads.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
[2] https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/legalisierung-von-c...
In my experience (of friends who drink and/or smoke weed) weed isn’t replacing drinking wine, it’s replacing drinking beer and booze.
Bavarian attitude towards cannabis always bordered on authoritarianism, ever before weed legalisation became a political mainstream topic.
Police was infamous for kicking in your door if a random copper walked home and smelled weed. "You smell like you got some weed on you" was a popular excuse the cops used at Munich Central Station to fleece everyone they deemed to look like a punk or, worse, Black person.
And the latter, well, it's certainly not a coincidence that the cops asked for, and got, the weapon ban zones in train stations giving them back the authority to fleece people at will, right after the cannabis legalisation came in force last year.
It's not about cannabis, it's not about the guns, it's all about the ability of the fucking cops to abuse their power whenever they goddamn want to, and Bavarian police are notable in Germany for being particularly aggressive and ignorant.
You realize that this statement was completely fabricated by a legalization proponent, correct? No historian takes that "quote" seriously.
Best of luck to them! I am not forced to inhale beer while walking down the street, yet there is seemingly always a pothead around.
Then you don't live, like me, in the Ballard neighborhood of seattle where there must be 50 microbreweries. Every few mornings the whole neighborhood smells like rotting bread. I'd be happy to run into someone smoking weed on the street during those times, I find that smell much more pleasent.
Or never encountered the drunks on Alki during the summer.
And? There is also always people smelling like shit, with perfume, driving combustion vehicles, using grills, or working in any of the numerous industries that create smells. Why is marijuana so special that it needs to be dealt with, but I can be assaulted by some petrochemical and whale barf cocktail fumes with no restriction?
I thought that was because of the tit-for-tat with Canada.
I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-hand.
Personally, I don't drink or smoke, but I think the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most part, a footgun.
> the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most part, a footgun.
It has accomplished everything its proponents hoped for and much more.
"You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”
- John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Richard Nixon
Typical war on the 'others' as championed by the Conservative party members: terrorists, Communists, immigrants, 'drug' users, hippies, ANTIFA, liberals, etc, etc, etc.
It is my understanding that neither Canada nor the USA allows for the importation of products containing THC, so I don't see this as having anything to do with Canada. Perhaps I do not understand what you mean to say?
Canada has pulled American liquor from sales as a tariff retaliation, so Kentucky bourbon sales have dropped considerably. Thus we have the senator from Kentucky trying to kill off domestic competitors for Kentucky liquor.
Since tariffs were placed on Canada, Canada has been boycotting American industries like whisky, specifically because they are significant industries in Republican-controlled states. I don't know whether this move against THC is a response to that pressure, but that's the reference.
You're missing the parent comment's point. Bourbon sales are way down significantly because the largest liquor importer on the continent (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) has banned the import of all American products. Many other provinces followed suit.
They can blame Trump, not go after Hemp farmers.
I disagree. Legalizing drugs has only created larger black markets in states like California and allowed cartels to legally get into the business and gain more power in other countries.
Can you explain how legalisation created larger black markets? Got some stats for that?
Sure. Black markets are cheaper than legal weed, because they don't have to pay taxes due to heavy regulations.
There have been multiple studies in Colorado and California that have shown that black markets aren't shrinking, but expanding.
Legal weed and other drugs creates more demand, and the black market picks up these extra customers.
This was easily predicted by me and many other people, before legalization.
I suppose it's why I'm making more money than ever in this economy and most other people are getting laid off.
Yes, I can believe that. We have the same problem with tobacco in France because it is too heavily taxed (black market is massive nowadays).
But that's really a government problem. They always pretend to tax stuff because it will slow the consumption but it never works, people keep using as much or even more if they get served on the black market that doesn't have to answer to regulation and taxation.
All of this is very well known, you just can't regulate drugs consumption, the only thing that works it social pressure but since governments have no say/power in that they pretend otherwise.
It's all very hypocritical, the only reason they legalise some stuff is because they want the tax money. Cannabis is heavily regulated because it is so simple to grow that there would be very little tax money to be made. You would just need to know someone who grow some in his garden, like tomatoes and around the time of harvest you would get massive oversupply.
Fascinating. I don't doubt your experience but I wonder where you are and which segment you're in. What I've heard is that it's the opposite for growers in California. Where weed previously went for $4,000/lb, it now goes for $400/lb.
> I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-hand.
They don't. Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot. I might have a beer when I'm stoned, but only a very tasty one, and only one.
I think that extremely light pot smoking is killing alcohol sales. The tiniest bit of pot is just as pleasing as a mild alcohol buzz, and an alcohol buzz kills the effect of pot. I know I got in the habit for a while of smoking a tiny, tiny bit when I got home, with the effect long gone before I went to sleep. Back in the day (and sometimes still), I would have had one beer, or one glass of wine.
There are terms for the combined effects of drinking alcohol and smoking weed. Cross-faded in English, pachipedo in Spanish. I find these terms and the effects they refer to enjoyable.
In my experience, there is no such nullification.
I. am. not. strunk.
> Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot.
???
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l11hARAnpcM
>The party of small government killing a new, billion dollar industry because Mitch McConnell's state beverage is seeing declining sales.
McConnel sponsored the original bill. Kentucky is historically one of the largest hemp producing states. The whole thing just shows how inept the entire administration is. DJT 45 signed the original law himself, after it was drafted and passed by his Republican house and senate.
Let's be clear McConnel isn't writing or doing anything. The man has been in a 'Weekend at Bernies' state for at least a couple of years. He's on camera being literally held up by his aides and seemingly having moments where he goes completely no communicative IN FRONT OF CAMERS several times, and not in a "I just don't have anything to say way" but just straight up 'freezing' in place. Either because of dementia or some kind of seizure.
It won't take effect for a year. Plenty of time to stock up.
There is no party of small government in the US. Libertarians have a long-standing alliance with mainstream Republicans, but they are unambiguously the smaller and weaker member.
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If you're anywhere near Cherokee, North Carolina ... it's definitely worth the drive / prices.
These natives certainly know what they're doing with their dependant-domestic sovereign nation.
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That has never really been true whenever they get power. Just like states rights, the deficit spending and federal overreach stops mattering. It's just a matter of which part of the government Republicans want to grow and have the funding (ICE for example).
Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the party in power. Amazing how that works.
Jobs stop mattering when they get power too. It all makes a lot more sense when you realize that party doesn't want economic growth.
76/100 senators voted to keep this provision in the bill.
> The party of small government strikes again
The GOP hasn't been a party of small government since W. Bush. And it hasn't really claimed to be as much since Trump 1.
>The GOP hasn't been a party of small government since W. Bush. And it hasn't really claimed to be as much since Trump 1.
That's not even close to being true. The "Two Santas" strategy[0] has been in place since at least Reagan's first term.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently? I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the House at the moment.
At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again eventually) to make that argument.
I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to speed up major change the next time a party has a super majority, by planting the seeds early...
> Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently?
if you think it's recent, you haven't been paying particularly close attention
2021: The Senate Cannot Be Reformed — It Can Only Be Abolished [0]
2018: The Case for Abolishing the Senate [1]
2004: What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate [2]
and that's just from the first page of Kagi results for "abolish the senate". I have no doubt it goes back farther than that if I actually went digging for historical sources.
the imbalance of power is only going to get worse as time goes on, as well [3]
> By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of the Senate
> “David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states,” Seib wrote. “They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”
0: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abolish-us-senate...
1: https://www.gq.com/story/the-case-for-abolishing-the-senate
2: https://harpers.org/archive/2004/05/what-democracy-the-case-...
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...
I suggest scholars such as Bednar.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287234169_The_Robus...
It's way, way more complicated than these articles suggest.
The Senate has been nothing but a non-population-proportional version of the House since the 17th amendment. The House was supposed to give voice to the people while the Senate saw to the needs of the nation. The requirement for the house and senate to work together would balance these often competing needs. Direct election of senators is a worst of both worlds situation - democracy where some people's votes count for more than others. Since the 17th amendment was ratified, the legislature has ceded tremendous power to the executive and judiciary as it has become steadily more ineffectual, and public perception of the institution has plummeted. This has only accelerated in recent decades. Abolishing the senate is only one potential form that reform could take, but I don't know how anyone could look at the current situation and not see the need for some type of reform to get the legislative branch back on track.
I've been harping on this for years. My support for democratic, rational governance is non-partisan - if a majority of voters support the republican, that's their prerogative
I don't know what you're talking about, since abolishing the Senate (or at least making it the lesser of the two bodies) is anything but nonsense.
edit: Since I cannot respond due to throttling, I agree with the below idea of statewide house races, but by doing Proportional representation and a ranked/approval voting system.
If anything I think we need to make the House more like the Senate by making them run state wide. That would do a lot to get rid of the hyper partisan nutjobs since there's usually more ideological diversity across a state than in a given district. As a bonus it would also get rid of gerrymandering.
Yeah -- keeping population-based apportionment of representatives per state, while making representatives elected state-wide would be a huge shift of power, for the better, especially in the South (speaking as a southerner).
It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.
There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate, according to most political scientists who study this, is an important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism along with independent courts etc are good.
It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform the system, don't just turn to blind populism.
> No, we need the House of Lords, otherwise the plebeians might do something crazy like tax us!
Do those political scientists say that it has to be so extremely unequal in its representation?
Right now, the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism. "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.
> the least representative parts of our government are the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism
Source? The President and--until like 24 hours ago--the House have been leading the charge on illiberalism and populism.
The Supreme Court is leading the charge. The presidency is a close second. Congress is pretty much just watching.
I'm not sure it's possible to reform the system. Its way too stacked towards corporate interests.
There are plenty of little-r republican institutions that can put a check on populism without blatant disproportionate representation.
> It's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for having it are long gone
Undemocratic is insufficient for removing a governing body per se. (Courts are technically undemocratic. That doesn't make them bad.)
Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.
We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.
> We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks because the Senate is broken
You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative body and you'd still have the same problem.
You could abolish the Senate and have a unicameral House. But then we'd never have survived 250 years as a democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)
> I don't really care if it's doing what some people 250 years ago thought
The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an agency where there wasn't money, the employees were behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2013/09/30/227292952/a-short-history-of-...
The fact that the Senate can't pass things without a 60% majority, despite that not being a thing in the constitution, is just another facet of its undemocratic nature. The body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says.
And this is definitely not a necessary aspect of the system. Even if you want to argue that the Senate itself is essential, the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades.
I'd be fine with a bicameral legislature as long as both houses were actually representative. Maybe you'd have one with short terms and one with long terms. But having a body where California and Wyoming both get two representatives is just ridiculous.
I'm curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate. It looks to me like they're doing pretty much whatever they want aside from passing the recent spending bill, and to the extent that they aren't, it's because of a handful of Republican holdouts in the House, not because the Senate stands in their way. And if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either.
> body has decided for itself, no matter what the people want or what the constitution says
All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
(Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
> the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in recent decades
Sure. Agreed. I'd honestly argue the concept of shutting down the government is dumber and setting a debt ceiling for already-appropriated and spent funds is unconstitutional.
> curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have done over the last 6 months without the Senate
All the crap Trump is doing by fiat would have been passed into law. That, in turn, would strongly reduce the ability for the courts to call foul.
> if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way either
The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
A fundamental aspects that makes the Senate different is each Senator is elected by more people, and thus must cater to more-diverse interests, than a Congressman, and they have longer terms. That means more people in the Senate must think about how what they're doing today will look after 2028.
[1] https://navigatorresearch.org/three-in-four-americans-feel-g...
> All representative bodies have rules. They have to in order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules. And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
You're missing the point. Of course they have rules. But to effectively make it so that you need 60% to pass anything is very different from ordinary parliamentary rules.
> (Until recently, the public didn't have a particular opinion on the filibuster [1].)
Until recently, the Senate filibuster was completely different from what we have now. It used to be something that sometimes allowed Senators to make a show of delaying legislation. This thing where nearly nothing can be passed without 60 votes is new.
> The filibuster has only been invoked this session around this budget dispute.
This means nothing. The rule isn't a secret. Things that couldn't achieve 60 votes will generally not be brought up in the first place, since it would be a waste of time.
If having a body where each representative represents more people and has longer terms is important, we can have that while still having it be reasonably proportional. The fundamental thing that sets the Senate apart is that it's meant to represent the states themselves, not the people. Thus each state is equally represented, and until the early 20th century they were not elected by the people. That no longer serves a purpose and that's what I'd like to see changed.
> Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to time.
Do you earnestly think this is a function of the rural-urban skew? In my view it is almost certainly due to the differences in number of people being represented by a senator and possibly term limit differences.
I think you're referring to "abolish the Senate filibuster rule"? recent lobbying.
Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.
(Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)
The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population of the US would end up and how the system would act to give the minority far too much power rather than protect them from having too little.
Ah ok, I hadn't noticed there was also recent discussion on the Senate itself, wrt not being numerically representative.
People often say stuff like "the founders would have changed their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population would end up [wrt representation]", but they don't propose anything specific or constructive (short of federal-state litigation, secession or another civil war). How about a (neutral) commission to reapportion State boundaries every 10 years based on Census results (with some population formula between not-quite-linear and wildly disproportionate)? Or else, to periodically reapportion state counts of Senators to total 100. (Obviously these couldn't get ratified these days, but they just might have in the 1790s). If not, what's your specific suggestion?
Another thing people aren't currently discussing much is how badly break down if/when the Supreme Court gets captured by a dominant group that is both ideological and not independent. Look at how high the stakes will be for nominating the eventual replacement to Justice Clarence Thomas/Sotomayor/etc.
And of course the terrible Citizens Utd ruling muddies every consideration of representation.
And then there's also the parallel discussion of the Senate filbuster rule, remember though that if there was no filibuster, Citizens Utd would allow unlimited dark money to influence every vote, specifically all the action would focus on the Senators in the middle, think Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Manchin, Sinema. Seems near-impossible to reconstruct democracy under these constraints. (Look at the recent Senate stealth attack in the shutdown bill by lobbyists for newly-legalized CBD to try to ban Hemp).
Do you believe there's a distinction between giving the minority too much power versus protecting them from having too little? It seems like the same thing said two different ways.
Giving the minority (Christian extremists in flyover states) too much power has caused them to start revoking the rights of everyone not them. Forget about protecting minority groups from having too little power, the main concern now is wresting control of our government in line with the principle of "one person, one vote" instead of "hectares of corn and churches take precedence over people".
Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along with because it means more power for themselves and less restrictions on how they use it.
Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states into more smaller states, but big states don't like that because it means they have less power as individual smaller states. And we have already have congressman holding far more power than they were originally meant to because they froze congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives we are suppose to have.
The US political and legislative system has been corrupted beyond reason and this is just the next step to further consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
> people living in big cities think they should be able to better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their lives with contempt.
Or they want to live in a democracy where every single person is represented equally to every single other person. And not a system where some people are "more equal" to others.
That's not even getting into how this weirdly, strangely seems to align up with a history of slavery and racism in the US. Total coincidence that some people think it's fair those "urban people" get 3/5 of a vote compared to them, the enlightened farmers who need to save others from themselves.
And before you say "well the house and electoral college are proportional" - no, they absolutely are not since 1929. Try that talking point when the apportionment act is repealed.
Nor are districts even conceivably "local" anymore for those arguing about "personal governance".
This is a weird one. It absolutely should not be haphazardly added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except Delta-9.
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
There is pretty extensive testing throughout the industry. Small hemp farms don't want to murder their customers or themselves.
It's night and day. It's also about access. The labs in legal states usually just test for more things. For a while, it was one or two labs plus a Cole extraction companies that were pushing the testing boundaries. Then, relation caught up and pushed the broader testing on to everyone. Then there were managed batch sizes (though these got too small in Oregon). Hemp does not have the same regulations, and unregulated states have way less infrastructure (including access to good labs).
Nobody wants to harm their customers, but it 100% happened in the early days. A lot of harm is/was not immediately obvious. Of was repeated exposure to harmful chemicals. Good intentions are great, but resources and incentives still matter. Nobodyv wants to get hacked, but building a new feature over hardening is what stops you from getting yelled at
is this the ongoing legacy of big pharma influence in government? there must be some reason why tapping this sign is not good enough for their purposes, maybe it’s too hard to enforce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
Another comment pointed to the alcohol industry:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917173
is it conspiratorial to wonder that if enough of the owners are the same investment groups they can move alcohol industry pieces on behalf of other industries they also own, then they have token industries already tainted and ready to accept newly thrown tomatoes instead of the ivory ones
It's absolutely insane how unrelated provisions can be inserted into a CR instead of being debated and passed on their own merits (or bundled with related laws).
Regardless of what the measure is, or what party it's coming from, it's a significant flaw in the process.
One man's flaw is another man's feature.
"one man" -> American People; "another man" -> corrupt politicians
The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.
When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
You can have a group of people that represent each state as a unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though.
The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.
The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.
I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the 21st century.
> But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity
For better or worse.
I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the Federal level.
Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a culture. The more culturally people identify as "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian" etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the federal level expand, because that's what "the people" are asking for.
The problem with democracy is that people don't always vote or act in accordance with their objective best interests.
And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude towards democracy itself is indicative of my point. Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom" even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our roads?). But there are other matters that should never, under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups of people have rights).
> I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you.
This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is much easier to capture city or county government than it is state, and much easier to capture state government than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a more powerful federal government than we did 200 years ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read: rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state government cannot control it adequately.
There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be just as responsive as more local ones, other than an entire political philosophy and party that is committed to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally wrong.
> This works very well for the local wealth crowd
It works well for everyone. The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
You're effectively saying that because you're worried about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government, you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face value.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps have interests outside of the country.
In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just make government farther removed for everyone. Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are all sacrificial lambs on offer.
> The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.
No, this is not a problem with government for and by the people. It is, however, a problem in a system in which economic power (read: wealth) translates (often almost literally) into political power for individuals. Rich people deserve a vote just like everyone else - but nothing more.
> you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.
You say "farther removed" - I say "larger, less dependent on local influence, and with more power". As I said, there is an entire political philosophy and party that insists that responsive federal level government is not possible; as I implied, I simply don't agree with this. Of course, if that philosophy/party has significant political power, then federal government will be less responsive, but that's not inherent.
Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
Do we need to be careful to not have the federal level squash deserved local variation? Yes, absolutely. But we also do not have to give in to the self-interested claim that federal government cannot serve the interests of the people well, either.
>Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we don't have a good solution to at present. But the existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to a system in which local capture becomes easier and more consequential.
It boggles the mind that you can say this with a straight face. What do you think vesting more power at the federal level will do if not cause moneyed interests to work harder to capture it?
I think people are far too cynical. A highly visible federal government is in many ways more defensible from monied interests than many many small scale decisionmakers.
What do we have if not a highly visible federal government? And yet here we are talking about a hemp ban snuck into a funding bill at the behest of other industries.
Isn’t the problem the same with both systems but one just scales a lot better and is more dangerous?
Im intrigued by why you believe federal level should override local variations. It seems so counter intuitive.
I haven't argued for the federal level to override local variations, in fact I specifically said that it's an important problem to figure out how to avoid this.
The first problem is that city/county/state governments in general have completely inadequate power to confront national or trans-national corporations. The second problem is that some things (e.g. health insurance) really do work better when handled at the largest possible scale.
There are clearly things, like running the municipal rec center, where local government is better positioned than any federal government agency probably ever could be (though I stress "probably"). But there are lots of things where the opposite is true.
If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well.
The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.
As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.
One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
True.
I just meant in practice that the low-population states tend to be rural.
This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA.
I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
We could also split states.
It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
The Huntington-Hill method used since the 40s has supposedly reduced any discrepancies.
Reduced doesn't mean remove.
Huntington-Hill is better than nothing but it is still significantly worse than getting rid of the PAA and letting the House grow based on population size. Pressing my hand down on a bullet wound will slow the bleeding more than if I didn't, but not getting shot to begin with would sure be preferable.
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...
This argues for just an increase to 700, and shows a ~5% swing in likelihood of Democrat control, and I would argue that just increasing it to 700 is still not where we want to be - a ratio similar to the UK would put us at closer to 3k representatives, and I believe this is still within reason (and is roughly the size of the equivalent chamber in China). Ideally we get rid of gerrymandering at the same time and redistricting is done apolitically by independent groups.
At 3k seats, every state is above their 1 rep minimum, representatives have 1/7th the number of constituents, population to representation at each state is much closer to 1:1, etc. Obviously not everything will end up on clean divisible lines so there's going to be some differences, but Wyoming would be more like .96:1 instead of .75:1 like they are currently.
Ideally the size should also be set to be revisited based on population on a periodic basis
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair.
If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair."
Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.
"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."
That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
> We are a democratic republic of states.
I made no comment about what "we" are ...
The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.
> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state
I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
"The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd."
Perhaps you can read the history then.
"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."
I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
> Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
Some people aren't used to thinking of states as relevant sovereign entities.
The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
Do you have a link to that being a widespread problem after the huntington-hill method was used? For example, Delaware?
Wyoming is an easy example
590,000 / 342,800,000 roughly 0.00172 0.00172 × 435 roughly 0.75
Wyoming would not even qualify for a full seat in the House if it wasn't for minimums at this size house.
What "urban concerns" and "rural concerns" are we talking about, specifically?
One in my state is solar panel legislation.
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time.
I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
Oh the power company doesn't care. But counties use satellites to find solar panels or other unpermitted installations.
If it's not noticeable via satellite imagery then yeah, probably nothing will happen.
Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
To charge fines, I'm sure.
But even if it wasn't your local government, insurance companies do this sort of thing to deny claims even in tangentially related unapproved installations.
> The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it.
Asserted without evidence.
Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no building codes. Now many of them do (some still go without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design and construction standards, and we justify this with both public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own solar panels, under license from the state.
The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed. So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up to modern code or something.
Solar panels are generators that backfeed the line. Power utilities are going to take every opportunity to discourage/prevent/penalize the connection of generators to their lines.
Connecting your house to the grid poses more or less no threat to the grid or the linemen who work on it.
What does that have to roof plans and [structural] building plans? You know, the things I called out.
I've never claimed there is a city/rural contrasting point of relevance on documenting the electrical generation capacity of the solar panels.
You said:
> The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
But since your house is (presumably) not a generator, no, that's still less connected to others than even a single solar panel would be.
What on earth do roof and [structural] building plans have to do with eletrical connectivity to the grid? You're losing the plot and trying to lead us down another sideshow, that is the things i called out as the specific things city dwellers forgot I dont have that they require for the solar permit. 'Society' already decided i don't need those for literally anything else residential but solar.
The most likely explanation is they simply forgot rural folks often don't have roof plans, and should have written an exception in such case that the solar permit could be issued without them.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.
Could be true (*)
But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else.
(*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.
I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming, although we don't get any Senate representation at all. It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power to California and obviously not a sustainable way of constructing a political system.
You say smaller political entity, but the city of Washington D.C has 100k more people than the entire state of Wyoming...
Good point - and also whoops on forgetting that, should have remembered from my DC history class where they drill in that we have a larger population than Wyoming and Vermont yet no rep
DC?
yes
Surely you see the irony in the guy from DC wanting more direct democracy at a point in the nation's history when "drop a nuke on DC, see if things improve" would probably be a winning ballot measure in most states.
Very few of those people have much animosity towards everyday people or even federal workers (as people) living in DC, it's about the politicians.
>>rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns
But effectively giving dirt a vote clearly isn't the solution. When voting maps are made weighted by strict land area they look one way, but weighted by population, they look entirely different, e.g., [0]
Or, should Wyoming, with a population of 587,618 as of 2024 [1] really have as many senators as the 39,431,263 people in California [2]? California has nearly five times the rural population of Wyoming [3], yet all rural and urban Californians get only 1.4% of the representative power of anyone living in Wyoming. Does a Wyoming resident really deserve 67X the representation of people in California?
I absolutely think rural concerns must be heard and met, but this setup is not right, and is clearly not meeting those concerns.
[0] https://worldmapper.org/us-presidential-election-2024/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
[3] https://www.ppic.org/publication/rural-california/
I've yet to understand why 'land' should have a stronger vote than 'people'
Because the rural folks think that "bad people" live in cities. (Don't ask them too many questions about what makes them bad; it's almost certainly bigotry.)
It has nothing to do with land. It's about the political subdivisions that are states, and how those states have differing concerns (can even be seen in the talks about different commerce and trade concerns when the country was formed).
Why even have states? Or cities? What purpose do they serve?
Cities have no representation at the federal level, so we can leave those out of the question.
Why have states? Why indeed!
One answer: to create a level of governmental organization smaller than the federal one that can act as a set of laboratories for legislative and legal experimentation.
Another answer: to reflect the fact that not all laws and regulations make sense across a diverse range of climate and geography and demographics and economies.
Neither of those answers, however, require states to be considered inviolable sovereign entities, and a lot of us born after 1880 don't think of them that way.
Why this non-sequitur?
I'm from a smaller state and I don't think it makes sense. I'll take tyranny of the majority over tyranny of the minority any day of the week.
It's starting to feel like direct democracy would make better choices than whatever this mess is that we have now.
I'm not going to do the math, but California has a larger rural area, a larger rural population, and a larger number of rural communities than, oh, I don't know, the ten least populous states combined? So at this point we have fewer rural communities overriding more rural communities just because of where state boundaries are draw.
Urban concerns are steamrolled by the rural concerns. Rural people literally hate and attack urban living people and urban people are supposed to smile and treat them nicely.
"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."
That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.
Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions.
I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.
I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.
Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.
In other legal contexts, we recognize that allowing people to exert control over things long after their deaths is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
A bunch of states wouldn't have entered the union without the compromise on slavery.
But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason that equal Senate representation, or even general state "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
Yep. In fact, those probably needed to be addressed at the same time.
But would they continue to take the deal is the real question.
If you understand your just opining to other user’s opining… why do you think your opinions can outweigh other’s?
Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
>why do you think your opinions can outweigh other’s?
I don't see where this is implied. I took the implication of "your opinion did not sway my own"
>Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
The "logic" is "larger states in a democracy should have more power because they represent more people". Which naively makes sense. I'm sure game theory would show some consequence of this formation though as a bunch of smaller states coalition around each other and make a two party system based on land, as opposed to ideology.
If you don’t think your opinion can outweigh other’s here… how does replying even once, without an attached or linked argument, make sense?
It wouldn't male sense, but an opinion in this case is the argument, no? You can disagree with an opinion and also think your own isn't necessarily superior.
In much of internet discourse, your goal isn't even to convince the person to reply to, it's to give more viewpoints to the silent majority who lurk and never comment. Whether they think an opinion is better or worse is up to them.
This really doesn’t make sense.
I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
By your logic if I replied with that to every comment chain in every HN post adjusting X to each topic… then I would become the most productive HN user of all time.
>I can also just say:”All the opinions presented so far are deficient, here is my new, better, opinion X”
Yes, I browse reddit every now and then. It's a shame the Alt-Right pipeline hijacked this. They realized that being loud is better than being correct.
I'm a bit confused on how we got onto a tangent about productivity, though. All I was talking about came down to "opinions are arguments, and restating an opinion (in good faith) often means you aren't convinced of another opinion". They're opinions, they aren't inherently right or wrong.
If opinions were worth, or equivalent to, any kind of argument whatsoever… then my example holds true.
I would become the most productive HN user ever… anyone could do so by following that… so clearly opinions cannot be worth anything.
All the opinions you’ve ever written, and will ever write, must literally all add up to less than one solid argument.
I interacted with someone from Wyoming once. She made this point: Wyoming has a lot of Native Americans, and it struck her as contradictory when people would say "native Americans are underrepresented" alongside "Wyomingites are overrepresented." Of course there's nuance but it was interesting in any case.
Wyoming has 16k native americans. California has 762k native americans (if you agree with self-id, which I don't). Your friend clearly must be in favor of disenfranchising these native americans if she thinks her Wyoming vote should count for 67 native american votes in California.
In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly compelling.
If you could read you'd see (A) I didn't refer to her as a friend and (B) I didn't mention her political affiliation. In fact your assumption is wrong.
sure, just using friend colloquially. but on b, i think pretty clearly she is articulating an argument for disproportionate representation?
It wasn't a very political conversation but yes it could be used that way. I'll say this though. Isn't that what Native Americans need? They are in fact a tiny percent.
no, i don’t think we should move towards some sort of race-based confessional system. minority rights, sure - but the color of your skin should not impact your vote share.
If we truly believed in a capitalistic system, wouldn't the US become a hyper aggressive competiton to make the most citizens settle in their given state? It would bring down home prices, offer amenities, fight cut throat for the best labor laws, and so much more.
But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic when it came to this matter instead.
> it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving
This may have been true for the original 13 colonies. Doubtful for the subsequent joiners.
The only reason we have the US is that we rejected this notion.
I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that some people / land area are simply far more important than others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is more meaningful as a matter of state, but there positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw value than others.
The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly your food production, natural resource extraction, and logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of the country to function.
You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that premise, it is immediately undermined by California.
California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.
Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?
Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.
So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?
>I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers
Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.
I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.
> most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers
Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.
>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.
Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
But we aren't talking in economic terms. We are talking in political terms. The economy is an offshoot of the functioning political system. Contextually they are different things although logically intertwined, but resources and their management / allocation is what gives rise to the idea of governance and that governance implements the economic system etc. Without the resources there isn't really anything to govern. The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this way because we have a very functioning system, most rural people don't even use the food and resources that are extracted around them anyway as we import and move things around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level. You literally can not support the cities without the rural output, even if the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban area.
I use economics because I don't know how to politically measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.
>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".
> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.
California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.
I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
But per-worker productivity is higher in larger states - so there goes that maker vs. taker justification of up-weighting rural areas. Regardless, plenty of other countries continue to produce adequate amounts of food despite a much more central approach.
> You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit.
Er, why?
I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have something that compensated for the increased power the larger states had due to their population.
But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions. They still have some independent power but it's not a lot. And there's no option to leave the union.
We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power from the current form of the Senate also have disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.
(Non-American here).
Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on top of that one seat per 500k citizens?
The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:
1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population
2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.
As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.
As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.
Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.
The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.
Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually selected by the states (or rather, their governments). Direct election of Senators only came about in the early 20th century with the 17th Amendment.
And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).
In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.
The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...
2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%. 2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.
Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.
Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.
For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
> The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country.
This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I feel like this is something I am intimately familiar with.
> Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.
What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
Before 1913, State's legislatures would elect their US Senators. Since 1913, Senators are directly elected but to longer terms than their peers in the House, as a way to make them less beholden to the whims of the zeitgeist and more stable in their consideration of "what serves the state" in that they do not face elections immediately and the results of their work are meant to be evaluated over a longer period. -- this is the intent, reality may bear out differently
> What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to those issues than a unified Congress?
The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51 seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous state (California) receives two, just like a very small state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here refers to population, not land area]
If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2 senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a simple majority, all by themselves.
Don't forget the filibuster - most votes actually require 60 Senators to pass.
For most day-to-day legislation, we can have 59% in favor and still have a deadlocked Senate. The House has no means to bypass/override the Senate.
But, that's probably a whole other topic and way in the weeds.
Also, states have their own militaries. Some states even have multiple. All states have an Army National Guard and some have and Air National Guard. Those militaries can be federalized, but normally pertain to the state. Some states even have other military branches such as Texas, which has a State Guard which cannot be federalized.
>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?
Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.
edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.
Point is, they would not have different roles, but instead work as a single house which votes on issues and laws and then delegates the result to the executive branch. No dual ”clubs” or houses with separate votes or separate elections.
This is how my country works.
Part of the point of the split when the US Congress was designed was to intentionally make it difficult for bills to pass, because they had to pass votes in two independent houses, that (presumably) were focused on differing agendas.
This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try to assure that only bills which had strong support overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would make it through the double gauntlet.
Plus the separation of powers, which is nice and brilliant...
House ----- Impeach Purse Break Electoral Tie for President
Senate ----- Try the impeachment Break Electoral Tie for Vice President Ratify treaties Confirm executive appointments
You have essentially described the current US Senate/House as it was originally set out in the constitution.
One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to each state part.
A second group with the number of seats determined directly by population (the House). This is "the rest set ... according to census data on population".
One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
> One big change along the way was an amendment that capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
Thankfully, the Permanent Apportionment Act is not actually a constitutional amendment and could be corrected with the passing of legislation rather than needing to go through a full amendment process.
this is essentially how the electoral college functions
Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a different solution. And as far as I know USA has not abolished the Congress, right?
Senate and House - congress is both bodies. My point was merely the additive scheme you described is how electoral college votes are allocated.
What problem does the Congress solve in the democratic process which happens elsewhere where there is no such thing?
Congress as a whole? I don't know if there's anything unique it solves. It's merely the US's compromise to balance between a monarchy and a weak federal government with little control over the coalition of states.
The big issue is that our House of Representatives stopped being proportional to the population some 90 years ago. I believe analysts suggested that a House today would have over 1000 members, as to the 435 seats today. So that only increases representation of smaller states.
Done!
You abolished the senate?
by the decree of Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine
Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population") and senate ("guaranteeing each state X seats") already do what you suggest.
Amazingly some guys thought it up hundreds of years ago. Is your issue that it is bicameral? If so what advantage would one house have?
> Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population")
This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no longer actually true.
The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed seats mean that low population states have more power per capita in the house to a significant degree.
So the senate is sort of a house of lords?
There are similarities, but not quite.
The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.
Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).
The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.
Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they have that many.
For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have less population than that. They still get a Member and then they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
Having representation based on land/physical space will increasingly be seen as absurd.
Maybe we will have “youth reps” in the future. Or reps based on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem is…taxonomical? People won’t have to belong to a single group but can belong to several “unions”.
But 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.
China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population.
The US also has state representatives in every state.
This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.
> This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.
Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house becomes less effective.
I’d argue the opposite. Congress could use more members so that it can have more sub-committees to craft legislation with more detail and taking on a larger number of issues with more precision.
There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product line.
Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an organization.
And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when we already have highly functional corporations that have hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-dividing work is how it all gets managed.
Very few legislators have expertise in anything except demagoguery, pandering, and graft. Having more of them to form more subcommittees to mess up more areas of the law... no thanks.
We need merit-selected technical committees of non-representatives to advise politicians and tell them clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the technical committees should be independent and able to make their case on the internet and social media.
Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by politics. For example, China's vaunted "political meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the government will find a way to skew an "independent" technical committee to suppress those facts.
The main reason I think this is wrong is that the sheer amount of different things the government needs to pay attention to in the modern world is staggering. In my view, it is well beyond what a few hundred reps can pay attention to. I think if you scale it, what you end up with is that representatives can be more specialized in ways that align with their constituency instead of being bad generalists.
The federal government isn't supposed to "run the country".
I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said something in order to make an argument, you don’t really have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k reps can’t run a country either.
The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500 representatives, that’s roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also much closer to what representation was when the House was capped.
Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but more similarity within the district. Right now, my district is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city part, therefore my rep doesn’t care about what I have to say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural population that makes up the majority of who vote for him. Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places, participates in the same events. This will not be true for every case, but it’s still a better situation than what we have now.
"The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people"
They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states. We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people selecting them.
I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and more contested in the late 18th century.
"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"
But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?
> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts.
People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got representation in congress in the first place. I understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
"Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here."
I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent people, but to represent the states. The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
> The House represents the people and that already has the proportional representation you are seeking.
It explicitly does not due to Permanent Apportionment Act. It is more proportional than the senate, but the hard cap on the size of the House and it no longer growing with population still fundamentally skews more power per capita to lower population states.
The big takeaway is that you are a location where you could increase your political power infinitely by moving to Wyoming, and let you remain.
Very few people move based on where they would have voting influence.
Whether people do or do not move based on voting influence is irrelevant to my argument. In fact, if people did move based on where they have voting influence it would be much less of a problem.
>Very few people move based on where they would have voting influence.
Yeah, just the millionaires. Now billionaires. But with internet and private jets they don't even need to move anymore to exert power.
Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.
Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones. Hooray for the Senate!
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
When larger states have half the seats they should have, it's very easy to overpower a larger state.
We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
Impossible, we must interpret the intentions of some blokes who died 220 years ago and try to assume what they would have wanted.
Its the only way.
It’s a blockchain moment - finally a use case ;) /s
It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.
Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.
I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
There's a widespread misunderstanding about what congresspeople do.
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
>They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents.
Yet another thing I vehemently disagree with.
I guess it’s a question of semantics.
If a rep basically says ‘I don’t care what y’all say, I’m doing z’, and they get elected.
Does that mean they got elected because everyone wants z? Or they got elected, and plan to do z?
why do you write 'cis' in all caps? It's not any kind of acronym, initialism, or otherwise; it's a Latinate prefix.
> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.
Exactly. Stop playing political football with issues. Put them to the people at let the voting public decide, and be done with it.
The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to hell.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
I'd rather have CA's props than an elected congressman who ignores the will of the people
Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
So you’re saying popular votes are not sufficient to avoid flip flops on contentious issues, and popular voting also can step on minority groups recognized rights on a whim?
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
There is no free lunch.
Notably, imagine direct democracy and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic]!
Without guardrails on the levers of power, a lot of people would have died. As it is, a lot of lives still got ruined.
So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
It doesn’t require most people to be stupid. It just requires people to have other things they need to do, and pay attention to, and limited ability to give a shit.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
> would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
Sufficiently framed, the highly partisan crap is the day to day.
The gov’t shutdown was precisely using the day to day crap to get leverage!
You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out.
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
Apps just tiktok’itize the whole process.
You seem to have a very particular idea of how direct democracy might be implemented; there's no reason it has to be "show up at 11am on a Tuesday".
There is on average over 1 new bill a day that gets voted on in Congress. Those are the bills that get past committees.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
I don't know what I expect the voting process to look like, but you seem to be assuming the worst without even thinking it through very much. I'm not an expert, I just don't think we should throw out ideas based on poor strawman implementations.
It’s well trod history, hah. The founding fathers directly wrote about and considered it too.
There are reasons why literally nobody does it, and it isn’t because it works too well.
I don't know what I expect the voting process to look like, but you seem to be assuming the worst without even thinking it through very much.
I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
Who gets to decide what is insignificant or not?
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
Why would they vote to be stomped on?
The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
Haven't the Swiss solved this?
Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p
The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.
The Swiss have a representative democracy with a slightly different way of ‘representing’.
We can move the goalposts as much as we like, but the Swiss have the closest approximation of a direct democracy in the world, right now.
So before dreaming about 100% democracy, maybe the US could slide away from "flawed democracy", first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...
Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).
Federalist papers were very explicitly against direct democracy, so... Not much?
Could it actually be worse?
I absolutely think so. Can you imagine if voting was influenced directly by whatever memes were on Tiktok?
Given how Mamdani won in NYC I think we are already at that stage.
That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
You could have actual semi-immortal magic users claiming to be the Senate.
> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
The problem is too much centralization of power in the federal government, when the entire purpose of the constitution was supposed to be to LIMIT the power of the federal government so that states could mostly govern themselves.
California should make it's own laws, Montana should make it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the rules on how they talk to each-other.
States Rights are supposed to be the protection against political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
I can’t imagine the framers of the Constitution envisioned having 50 states, either.
26 Senators is a substantially different shape of legislative body than the current 100.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.
So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.
I think there is very little our founding fathers would recognize about today's american government, in a wide variety of ways.
Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.
Senators represent their State government, not the people. Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the States, not the people.
If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to represent the people.
Intended to, but due to the Permanent Apportionment Act, does not do so in actuality.
Congress is currently structured so that both chambers provide outsized representation to lower population states. With how the electoral college works, this also provides them with outsized representation in presidential selection, as well.
If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not invest so much power into higher population states, then it is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so much power into lower population states as well.
Definitely time for structural change.
Here's my ideas...
The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together
The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
- Ranked choice voting everywhere
Maybe the territories get less representation.
The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
> The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people
The Senate does not represent the people. The House of Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the number of representatives depends on the population of the state.
It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.
The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The Romans split the powers between different bodies and people. There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative powers: the senate and the plebeian council.
The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.
The US democratic system was inspired by this.
Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.
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On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct elections. The elector system is designed to take into account states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
> The House of Representatives represents the people.
The House of Representatives represented the people until 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.
The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low population states from high population ones.
The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower population states than higher population ones.
Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to something more closely resembling what the founding fathers intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
Equal State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I propose a workaround:
Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may subdivide without Senate approval, provided that (A) it occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest current state.
This means small states don't have to give up their disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they cannot use that power to monopolize it either. Any state above a certain size (>2x the smallest) may decide that its constituents are best-served by fission.
For example, if California really wanted to it could split into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the higher numbers are rather unlikely.
This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just like before.
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union
i think we should just swear in every US citizen as a supreme court justice and then have 157,382,103-50,373,281 rulings on whatever issues we want to put to a plebiscite
I don't think the senate is necessarily the _biggest_ flaw, but it's close.
A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100 years.
Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
The issue is that post WW2 (and perhaps Great Depression) gave the federal gov’t too much power (and money), resulting in a lot of low level meddling.
It’s why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the state (or even lower) level.
I could say the same thing about the House of Reps, which has been frozen since 1929 and represents 3x more people per politician than it did then, is not equally distributed, and holds far more power and rights today than it ever did in the past.
> Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.
"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it is not going to be sustainable.
Opinions on this whole topic seem to revolve around how you conceive of the states in the US. Do you seem them as legitimate and important power structures, or essentially arbitrary boundaries which are relics of the past?
To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and administrative functions based on the census, with no municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
Only takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at will.
Liquid Democracy. If the people can delegate their vote, they should be able to claw it back if enough of them care on some issue.
The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the class it represents, House of Lords.
In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.
I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.
The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government. Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our dominant language, legal code, ….
That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of government?
My take on some of the Senate's advantages:
- 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
The filibuster is not a feature inherent to the Senate and could be removed at any time with a simple majority, just like it has been done for the filibuster for several types of nominations, and was threatened during this past shutdown.
I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority cannot force legislation through regardless of whether the filibuster exists or not.
Yes, I meant tiny majority.
I recognize that the filibuster isn't guaranteed, but it has served as a powerful tool for a very long time.
The States are a gerrymandering. Five states have populations less than a million and three wouldn't even qualify for Member of Congress by census. Yet they get two Senators, a Member and three Electoral College votes.
You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights to a Senate minority.
> 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.
> 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.
“No gerrymandering”. Wut? The Senate is the most egregious example of anti-democratic systems in any country you could reasonably call democratic. It’s far worse than the worst examples of gerrymandering.
I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at least every 10 years the congressional district you live in may change without you having any say. So it is definitely worse though I think the lopsided representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
> voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose
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.
The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
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.
Lets hear it for Tyranny by the Masses!
> ability to overrule congress at a whim
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.
The problem is that it is far, far more difficult for the legislature to "fix" a decision by SCOTUS than it is for SCOTUS to "fix" an unconstitutional law.
Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an existential threat or civil conflict.
The funny thing is that the discussion we're having, about congressional representation, already has an amendment out there floating around, waiting to be ratified. Already has 11 or 12 states who have ratified it (I forget). It can't be canceled or expired or cockblocked. If you live in a state outside of New England, you could petition your state legislators to ratify it tomorrow. And if even one state were to ratify it, others would notice and follow.
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.
> Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is unlikely to ever happen
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.
People that say this are only looking to ensure the repression of those at the bottom of the totem pole remain oppressed! It's a direct path to fascism, and it is designed entirely to massively accumulate wealth at the top of the pyramid while ensuring all others starve and suffer!
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.
>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will
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.
Please don't fulminate or make personal attacks on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here, and we've had to ask you several times to try harder to observe them. We eventually have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you arguing this?
(Premise 1) If a country has 350 million people, then the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes.
(Premise 2) America has 350 million people.
(Conclusion 1) So, the Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes in America.
(Conclusion 2) So, the Senate is bad for America.
The Senate is not the group meant to represent the people, so why would you think OP is arguing this?
I think OP is arguing that because they literally said "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body."
What do you think they are arguing?
Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people. So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
Maybe we are talking past one another.
> Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government meant to represent people.
I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the people.
> So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people."
I know that's what he typed, I'm asking what he meant. The Senate does not represent 350 million people. It has never represented people. It was never meant to represent people. Of course it's a ridiculous way of representing people, in the same way that a hammer is a ridiculous tool for heating something up. It's a completely nonsensical statement.
The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being represented. The government needs to represent a minority of people in order to become functional again.
That said I bet the Senate exists in 500 years.
The US will not see its quadricentennial without a new constitution.
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Senators are supposed to be representatives of the State Legislatures, not The People - that's what the House of Representatives is for.
The 17th amendment was a huge mistake.
And so was the Permanent Apportionment Act.
Revoke them both and we're much closer to what the founders intended when it comes to Congress.
Wasn't the senate just following the ask of 39 state Attorney Generals to close the loop hole on concentrated THC products made from hemp?
Things would work if we weren’t so damn tribal and if extremists on both sides weren’t the ones defining the discussion.
Here is a video for us: https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA
It was setup to represent states. The House represents districts of people.
Yes, I understand the system and the original reasoning very well, it's explained in detail in the Federalist papers. I'm saying it is a bad one.
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I suggest you check out the debate over bicameralism when this was chosen. It was not just slaves stats that wanted a senate.
many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral legislature, why do you think that is considering they never considered counting their slaves...?
Not a historian, but some possibilities:
- some governments were explicitly modeled on the US system
- others were influenced by the US system as they moved from e.g. monarchies
- most countries have some sort of caste system that established interests want to preserve
Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There’s a well known case of a missing pig in 1642’s Boston (with a population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and that debate has been going on for a while at the time already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default/files/proc...
Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.
There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.
The two-party political system is the most successful sham that the US's aristocratic class has managed to pull off in the last 100 years.
(A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-heavy social media.)
The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system.
The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.
As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.
I don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the primary target of where I would support redistributing resources from richer more productive states.
Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.
This is going to be controversial because it steps into the shutdown blame game.
I think I am more interested in the mechanics of how this happens. Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation? What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
Single subject bill amendment. Several states require single subject bills in State legislature. The same must be required at the federal level. The pushback has always been "then nothing will get done". From where I am standing that would be a good thing. No more sneaking shit in at the last minute. Vote on every single issue. People will still try to sneak stuff in. I remember seeing a video of a Minnesota legislator admonishing his colleges for trying to do omnibus bills after they passed a single subject amendment.
To get such an amendment passed it would have to come from the States. Nobody that is already in congress is going to vote for this. It is a huge restriction on their power to spend our money.
Here is Alaska's single bill requirement: The Alaska Constitution Art II, Section 13. Form of Bills reads: Every bill shall be confined to one subject unless it is an appropriation bill or one codifying, revising, or rearranging existing laws. Bills for appropriations shall be confined to appropriations. The subject of each bill shall be expressed in the title. The enacting clause shall be: “Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Alaska.”
Hmm, I've never heard of this. My initial gut reaction is that this sounds good but the definition of 'single subject' is dubious. With enough leeway and creativity, anything can be a single subject.
But if it works, then maybe it's what we need.
Frankly, there are a ton of laws that seem dubious and underspecified to a person with an engineering mindset. This is by design, and it is the reason we have so many judges - because writing laws that clearly specify how they apply to every possible situation is often impossible. The law tries to make its intent clear, tries to lay out reasonably specific outlines, but necessarily must rely on the interpretation of those who judge the application of laws to cases.
Alaska is effectively a one-party state. At the federal level, you almost always need compromise to clear a filibuster, and it's easier to find compromise if you can draw on more subjects. Maybe the Democrats get cheaper health care while the Republicans get a giant bust of Trump installed on the former site of the Lincoln memorial. Neither measure would pass in isolation, but together they might.
So they could agree to pass two bills. This would require the two "sides" to trust each other, but it could (ideally would) also function to build trust, which would be a good thing.
Assuming there was enough trust to "guarantee" that one bill would pass right after the other, then what's the point of having the single subject rule in the first place? Sounds like you still have riders but with extra steps (and an opportunity to betray trust).
Because it becomes harder to "hide" things - like, the provisions being bargained for, or politicians' actual convictions about particular measures. There are items which now get passed in omnibus bills, bargained for behind closed doors by leadership, which couldn't (whip votes as ye may) be passed in up-or-down votes on their own merits. Those are, in my opinion, corrupt bargains, and shouldn't happen. I like legislative horse-trading - it's an important part of the democratic process - but I'd like it to be open and above board.
You say that like everybody that is in one party agrees on everything. That is absolutely false.
It is also an inaccurate portrayal of Alaska state politics. While historically the State Legislature has been majority republican it has been more even since 2015ish. Which is coincidentally when weed was made legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_House_of_Representative...
How we vote in federal elections has more to do with Republicans in general being more aligned with the majority interests in Alaska.
Of course you don't have to agree on everything, but the whole point of joining a party is to coordinate action to maximize power. Whether you agree with the party policies doesn't matter if you vote for them anyway to gain political currency with your party that you can hopefully spend later on your own priorities.
That said, I guess the Alaska legislature is a lot more balanced than I assumed. If the single subject rule works there, bravo. Congress is a different beast, though.
The biggest benefit of single subject bills is that it is infinitely easier for citizens to understand what is being passed and hold legislators to account on the next election if necessary.
It makes things like the Patriot Act and Inflation Reduction Act impossible.
> Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation?
Because they can't agree on anything normally, so the only way to make changes is to shove them in with things they must agree on.
> What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_rule
Multiple states already have this.
This can have interesting consequences, because politicians are going to be politicians.
> The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, arguing that the omnibus bill, whose original title is over 300 words before it keels over in repetition of the word “subdivision,” violated the single-subject rule.
https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2025/09/the-minnes...
Scoping the single subject gets a bit tough, in practice.
It works just fine for the vast majority of US states, including all the largest ones (California, New York, Texas). I don't think the federal government is special here.
The federal government has grown immensely since the early 20th century due to the interpretations of the commerce clause allowing more and more federal legislation and rules to broadly be applied to essentially override state legislation.
The 10th amendment exists for a reason. The system wasn't intended for congress to even control something like this in the first place.
We definitely are straining the rules. I think we actually want a federal government like this. The reality on the ground is that most people want things like FDA and FCC at the federal level.
Maybe we just need to change the constitution--which I know is technically possible but im practically it's frozen. It's like a legacy API no one wants to touch.
Playing devil's advocate, the positive of allowing legislation to include unrelated riders is that it promotes compromise. And compromise is how a healthy democracy should operate.
The compromise should be on the content of the bill specific to the subject. It is not a compromise to allow a rider that funnels money to some pet project. That is buying votes.
Oftentimes there can be no compromise on the specific subject. So the bill is either DOA or just immediately passed without any debate.
Allowing several issues to be passed as a singular unit provides opportunity for an agreement to be made about several issues at once. Think of it like a Collective Bargaining Agreement.
That is fine. If our representatives can't come to a compromise then it probably shouldn't be done at the federal level.
You don't need to have a bunch of unrelated riders to compromise. If the bill is healthcare funding, the compromise could be something like who receives the assistance, whether there are any cutoffs, how to implement it, etc.
Or if that's really impossible, you could compromise on separate bills. If people ever break promises, that's a reason not to trust them in the future and it's a lot more clear to the public about who voted which way rather than having a rider which no one really understands where it came from.
Compromise to what, to reopen the Government?
Yes, that's a really good point!
It's not the constitution. It's the American people (on average) who tolerate corruption and crime within their leaders.
As others mentioned, unfortunately the last bill allowed for some large loopholes and emboldened underground growers (also due to more lax state laws) to grow and flood the market with sub-par or even poisonous product. It’d a billion dollar market that state actors and cartels alike are using to launder money (and ruin lives). Very informative video on this: https://youtu.be/3qC4c-zNxTg?si=oy4ab6kuo27fJqcx
Wouldn’t the correct solution be to close the loopholes or make more strict regulations? Not shut down everything.
By that logic, we should ban lettuce[1] next
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/e-coli-outbreak-trac...
This corrects a drafting error. There were never supposed to be be products containing THC selling in gas stations.
This kills the entire hemp flower market.
Our state similarly tried to get it outlawed by using these excuses but ignoring the many shops where they are just selling quality product, not allowing kids, etc.
These are all just symptoms. The underlying vulnerability is the median US culture, which permits venality, scamming, skuldugery, shenanigans and crime in its ruling class.
I was reading about Austria recently. It's a nice place, but it turns out they have their far-right Nazis in rural areas too. It's pretty common around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...
I think the world is still figuring out how to deal with this. The German firewall looks quite interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_against_the_far-right...
Of course things like the electoral college, filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, lifetime appointments etc don't help.
Alcohol lobbyists did this. Amazing swamp :(
I was really stupid to think Republicans wanted a clean CR and Democrats wanted to help people with insurance.
Both sides wanted to slip in something their lobbyists wanted, and they did it. Win.
Only one side wrote in million dollar payouts direct into their pocket from the Treasury...
US system of creating legislation seems…broken
Surely we must be ignoring the rules...
One thing I think most Americans can agree on is that Congress is utterly useless.
We need to be careful with that sentiment. It plays into the hands of those who want to give the President and the current Supreme Court all the power. Congress was set up in the Constitution to be the branch that represents the people. It's supposed to be fully independent and wield the most power.
You mean like the current president that has been skipping over congress for a number of things, and the supreme court that has been doing little to stop him? Our institutions aren't failing they've already failed.
And that can change over the next couple of elections. What the current regime would like is for the electorate to think Congress is useless and not bother voting the majority out of power. There's already enough apathetic and disaffected voters who think voting doesn't matter.
Congress is directly responsible for causing this problem. Elections aren't going to change it because they redistrict to prevent it. They're a bunch of elites only interested in enriching themselves and holding office until they die. True regardless of party.
This nonsense of tacking bills onto other bills needs to end. As does this nonsensical fearmongering of Hemp and Marijuana. Absolutely none of it is actually evidence-driven from what I remember. I know the CDC has (had?) side effect stuff but I think it might be very heavily exaggerated.
Think of the children! Anyways, would you like to try this new strawberry vodka I invested in?
This is from 3 days ago. Did this part of the bill actually make it in? Like, asking for a friend, maaaaaan.
Yep, it did. If I have the right bill (H. R. 5371), it's SEC. 781 if you want to see the actual text. (The table of contents is horribly bad though, and only covers divisions and titles and nothing beneath it though.)
Thank you. I try to avoid reading bills for that reason.
Seems like they are doing this now just to distract from the Tucker/Epstein controversy.
I guess all those involved in burgeoning hemp trade are just in time for the mines to re-open. We're ruled by sociopaths and we don't live in a democracy.
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76/100 senators voted to keep this provision. 39/50 states sent requests to Congress to have this banned. It is a bipartisan effort.
Yes, none of this is in conflict with my message.
Blame everybody who is responsible, please.
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Please don't post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So would that be almost all republicans and half of democrats?
That’s not limited to GOP.
No, but only with the GOP can you be certain that those things will happen.
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What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading the bill they were going to pass.
The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to loot the treasury is even more egregious.
The fact that all 8 are either retiring or not facing reelection in 2026 means that this was probably orchestrated by the minority leadership.
It’s exactly 8 senators, safe seats, no comments from Schumer. There is no coup.
This is what always happened with Republican shutdowns too.
- You get nothing
- Eventually everyone understands they're going to get nothing, so they ask some sacrificial lambs to vote to end it while they posture and pretend they would have "kept fighting"
With Republicans this was called "RINOs" and "tea party" but it's the same thing now.
I didn't say those 8 were the only 8 members of said group.
This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on posturing and coherent long term policy is basically impossible. I really worry where this is going.
This whole process was the epitome of anti-democratic principles by design: the Senate is expressly an anti-democratic institution (wildly different levels of representation/power for different voters in different states), and the whole standoff centered on protecting the filibuster, which makes the anti-democratic senate even less democratic by allowing a tiny group within that tiny group to shut down the entire lawmaking process.
It's exactly what the founders, who all read Plato's Republic and its warnings about republics devolving into democracy, wanted.
Hard disagree, I think time has proven that the filibuster (or some process like it) is necessary as a stabilizing effect on democracy. Making legislation easier to block than pass makes it so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy. The minority party being able to, with effort, stop certain pieces of legislation they find abhorrent by raising the bar to it passing is a good thing.
The Veto is also profoundly undemocratic in exactly the same direction and it's also a good thing.
It hasn't done a good job stabilizing for decades in this case. The power of the people was stripped unilaterally and none of these mechanisms stopped it.
Not clear on what we’re disagreeing about: yes, anti democratic mechanisms have a stabilizing effect on democracy. They accomplish this by thwarting democracy.
I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad, it is what it is, but these anti-democratic mechanisms are intentional.
The Senate is already an antidemocratic brake/stabilizer. Adding a brake to it is stultifying.
> so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy
Exactly, and this is bad. Voters should all know that every vote matters. The current setup creates the false impression that both parties would fundamentally steer the ship the same way ("uniparty"). The path to a government that is more responsive to the needs of citizens involves allowing winning parties to actually govern.
I would argue that we want a more responsive, dynamic government that attempts to represent us. The filibuster is in direct direct opposition to all of that.
The GOP won the last national elections. They should be allowed to end SNAP, ACA, EPA, Labor Dept, NSF, Dept. of Education, FDA, all science grants, Medicaid, put armed military checkpoints on every city block, end legal immigration, and zero out federal funding to any school that is closed on the federal MLK Jr holiday[1]. (And to the extent that those things are not legal now, they have the votes to make them legal.)
And then in '26 and '28, voters should decide whether they agree with that vision for how the country should be run.
The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
1 - taken loosely from the 2024 GOP party platform and administration statements from this year
> The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
Or an overwhelming switch the other direction, just as chaotic and unpopular, continuing to swing back and forth every four years.
Who knows, maybe the overreach of the current party in power (even though "won the last national elections" meaning less than 50% of the cast vote, but that's another discussion) will cause a swing the other direction so hard that the opposition party gains a supermajority in congress. Things will be more stable in that case, if not universally popular, because well-crafted legislation is a good bit harder to reverse than executive orders.
IMHO - a step in right direction would be abolishing first-past-the-post voting system, together with electoral college. Finally USA could get a feel for multi-party system, instead of always voting for lesser evil. MAGA could be their own party, but they will need to deal with coalition instead of having total chokehold on all institutions of government.
Not sure how to break Senate and highly unequal representation it gives.
Though realistically I don't think this will ever be possible.
Was there every a real clean bill offramp available early in the shutdown?
I think the Democrat's mistake was as much as they were backing a popular policy, they didn't have the "clean bill" high ground, the Republicans are less concerned with government services, and they were backed into an end date with Thanksgiving travel coming up, so it would always get earmarks attached.
What the Democrats got right was they wanted a fight, and at first, the majority was on their side.
What I learned is Democrats don't have the guts for a shutdown, and Republicans do.
Republicans are completely willing to make people suffer in order to take away their health care.
Democrats are unwilling to make people suffer temporarily in order to protect health care.
So I don't see how a shutdown should ever happen again. Democrats are going to roll over, even when it's politically beneficial to them and to the country to keep pressure on.
Why is the hemp ban shady at all?
Using farm bill hemp to produce CBD and THC is not the intended point of that bill. Plenty of states have set up actual, real legalized cannabis industries that benefit from regulation (like required mold testing).
The products created from this oversight are a dumb loophole. If you want cannabis, just vote for people to legalize it, it's really not hard. The only reason it continues to be illegal federally is the GOP, and most of their voters say they want it at minimum decriminalized. Even my brother who thinks we shouldn't give addicts narcan (let them die) thinks it's dumb that we punish people for smoking weed.
But they vote for people who want to keep it illegal so....
> Plenty of states have set up actual, real legalized cannabis industries that benefit from regulation (like required mold testing).
None of that cannabis is federally legal either, and relies on the same precarious position that 'hemp' industry will still be in of operating a massive ongoing criminal enterprise. It's just that rather than legalize the 'real' cannabis the big cannabis lobby and their politicians settled for swiping at their hemp competitor and make them go on the black market too so they could better capture the profits, as evidenced by the fact even 'legal' weed state senators voted to put 'hemp' in the same illegal category their illegal 'legal' weed sits in.
In fact, under the old hemp rules, there was pending federal regulatory framework for testing hemps products (they were still operating under deferred DEA testing regime, so currently testing is largely being done privately with COAs being furnished by most CBD farms, if you have even the slightest concern you can order from a vendor with full contamination reports and chemical breakdown). For marijuana, absolutely no federal requirement as it's just illegal with no provision. So the situation is the exact opposite as you had concerned, with regard to the part of government we are speaking of.
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The ACA was literally dreamed up by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. This idea that it was some partisan thing Democrats forced on the country is hilarious. It was always a bending-over-backwards compromise solution to maintain the for-profit system.
There’s a reason that, after 15 years freaking out about it, Republicans still have no plan for replacing it. Virtually any change, outside of more socialization, will make health outcomes worse.
Party lines...
Senate: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s396
House: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2010/h165
There's always been a plan to replace it with the only economically viable plan that can reduce the cost of healthcare. The same plan Dr. Ben Carson has been talking about for years.
It's the only solution proposed by anyone from either party that would work.
Yes. Along party lines. Why do you think every Republican voted against the conservative think-tank produced healthcare bill? I certainly have my theory...
Yes. Carson introduced that "plan" in 2015, right? Why do you reckon Republicans have not pushed it forward once in over the past 10 years despite twice controlling all parts of the federal government? Because it's D.O.A. flawed.
It does what basically every other non-starter contemporary Republican health insurance idea does: willfully misunderstands how health insurance works to appeal to rich healthy folks whose costs will be reduced at the expense of the poor sick saps who inevitably will die as a result. It's a straightforwardly eugenicist plan that would make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.
Controlling is not the same as filibuster proof majority (as we just saw with the shutdown), which is what it would take to do this.
Why did every Republican vote against it? Because it was terrible legislation that nobody even got to read before voting on it. As Pelosi famously said, "You have to pass the bill to find out what's in it."
And the reason that you didn't get single payer is because you didn't have support for single payer among Democrats, who did hold a filibuster proof majority.
This idea that the ACA, Obama's signature legislation is some how a conservative push is not based in reality. It's a talking point to give it the appearance of bipartisan legislation, which it is not.
The Heritage Foundation influences were from a 1989 proposal that talked about the an individual mandate and health insurance exchanges. The Heritage Foundation itself has gone as far as to totally disavow any association to the ACA.
https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/commentary/dont-...
The ACA disaster is 100% on the party that forced it in along party lines, without even reading it first.
Ben Carson has been talking about a variety of half baked plans for years. He has gone back and forth over and over on who is funding the health savings accounts, what he plans to do with medicare and medicaid, etc. None of these ever-shifting plans have ever been able to answer all of the questions, which is why they are ever shifting.
The ACA was very much a compromise that Republicans wanted over a better healthcare bill supported by the Democrats. It's basically a big cash present to insurance companies, who were free to jack up premiums and get paid by the Governement for it. Now that's gone, and the jacked up prices are now falling into the regular folk.
The GOP has zero plans to improve healthcare in this country, their messaging focuses on self-medication through their four magical products: raw milk, methylene blue, horse dewormer and Hydroxychloroquine. They are very much anti-vaccines and anti-science, in that they defeunded most health research and prefer an holistic/esoteric understanding of medicine to it.
Ultimately, I think this is good. The GOP is completely uninterested/unable of running this country. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we can be rid of them.
The crazy thing is that the ACA actually is bad -- it's Romneycare, a giveaway to the private health insurance industry thought up by a conservative think tank -- but the Democrats get to take the blame for it being actually bad, and Republicans get to point at it being actually bad even though any changes they would make are actually worse. It was an act of long-term political suicide by the Democrats under the Obama administration, which they doubled down on by ratfucking Bernie twice.
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More than a decade later, the GOP has still yet to present an alternative healthcare plan to the ACA. Actual leftists have continued to push and argue for a true single payer system.
The ACA Is far from perfect but it was a significant step up from what we had before, and the party that spends all of their time trashing it has never made any sort of serious attempt at creating any sort of alternative.
A principled "small government" alternative would be ... nothing. Their view is that the federal government should have no role in providing health insurance.
Sure, but that's not actually the position of the GOP or their constituents, or even the pre-ACA situation.
The amount of people that actually want the government to have no role in providing health insurance or health care in this country is vanishingly small.
Which is a very nice view, until the federal government has to start getting involved anyway because someone has to scrape the rotting corpses off the streets.
Ultimately the health and life of the citizens is one of the most foundational concerns of any nation. You literally can't just ignore it. You have to face it, whether you want to or not.
Scraping rotting corpses off the streets is really a job better left to the states.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920924
Ben Carson has not put forth anything even remotely resembling a practical replacement for the ACA. He hasn't even been able to put forth any sort of consistent plan.
This wasn't about ending that system, it was about preserving that system and further entrenching it at a more substantial cost to the end users of healthcare, who tend to be some of those least able to afford it.
This idea that there's just left and right is very quaint. The bigger divide today is pro- and anti-establishment, plenty of the 'right-wing' Trump voters were also celebrating what happened to Brian Thompson.
Meanwhile, the ACA was quite frankly a love letter to conservatives.
It kept the US profit-driven system on life support, and it's a form of the same system proposed by Nixon, and again by republicans during the Clinton administration's push for healthcare reform, and the system enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
The only reason republicans opposed it on party lines during the Obama administration was politics: they were forced to denounce the system they loved due to their status as the opposition party. In another universe they would've celebrated their president signing it into law.
Actual leftists are probably fine with ending the current system because it will bring so much pain to the voting public that it might actually get them off their asses to bring in single payer. As the saying goes: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else."
8 individual Democrats. Don’t lump in the rest who held the line.
You are “both sides”ing this when the GOP is the only side that worked tirelessly to end healthcare subsidies and allow America’s poorest to go hungry.
8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
You can blame Chuck Schumer, but I agree that it's wrong to blame the rest of them.
I blame the rest of them because of their reaction. House is torching the ones who caved. Not much commentary from the actual colleagues who "opposed" this maneuver.
I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person who would just offer something for nothing.
They either aren't rerunning or aren't on the 2026 ballot. Some are taking an exit package. Others hope this blows over when 2028 or even 2030 come for reelection.
If you believe the commentary of one of the defectors, he said (Paraphrasing) "I got my first good sleep since the shutdown began... I didn't have to worry about people eyeing me as I walked into work". So if you take that at face value it was everyday interactions that had him fold. Easier to crush the hopes of the invisible population you represent than look uncouth to your visible peers.
Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.
And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.
Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.
The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.
If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.
When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.
The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.
Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”
By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.
>Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them
Cool, so we're hoping for a Christmas Carol to come in and show them the error of their ways in a dream?
Its the rest of the senator's responsibility to convince them. As it is their constituents. We're all a bit at fault here.
>When will anything be the GOP’s fault?
The evil within will always be worse than the evil you know. No one expects the devil to turn another leaf, but will chastise Judas for betraying Jesus.
Meanwhile the GOP has embraced the evil. They made things very easy for themselves.
Was it actually a cut or was it not renewing something that was expiring? A bill to fund the government seems like the wrong place to be debating new spending.
I don’t know what the news rhetoric on all of this is, I haven’t seen it mentioned on here or on news articles, and I’m not on the socials/don’t watch tv. IIRC the initial ACA bill always had this cliff in order to make the numbers work for the bill to pass.
Like most long-term financial bills, everyone just assumed the cliff won’t hit and new legislation will pass.
This is the actual crux, no? “We expected the funny numbers to pass again” as opposed to “we should have addressed this before Biden left office”
While true, at least in the Senate there are questions as to whether those 8 were selected to fall on their swords by Democratic leadership because they either aren't running again or aren't up for re-election in 2026. These questions are coming from the progressive part of the party and progressive supporters.
The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the representative look good to his own state by throwing herself under the bus.
I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but this is what politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming to advance leadership's agenda. Not individual politicians voting for what they think is best.
8 democrats who don't care about reelection right now, who were up for a turn as the rotating villain.
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Don't forget about the people who want to coverup the fact that our president is a pedophile, too.
The house got a nice paid vacation during the shutdown & Mike Johnson left an Arizona district without representation for weeks to this end.
At least they didn't flag this entire thread like they often do in the guise of keeping HN apolitical.
"I don't think that everything the state of Israel is doing is 100% above reproach"
there, that should get rid of this thread in a hurry
it's not their problem until it is eg. snap
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thank you for acknowledging. I know what it means when my comment has a negative score but all the replies are supportive.
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> I have friends who smoke and have seen over the years how they've abandoned hobbies in favor of smoking more. Where's the outrage about that?
Why in the world would I or anyone else have any right to be outraged over someone trading one hobby for another?
> I take public transport and the people who smoke make the entire train smell.
Make and enforce laws about smoking on public transport.
Outrage about what? I know people whose hobbies cab generally be summed up as "drinking alcohol". We already decided prohibition didn't work once.
Who gives a fuck? Mind your business?
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I’m sure they don’t want to be on the bus with an insufferable asshole, but there you are.
The alcohol lobbyists did this.
> And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul’s efforts.
> His “shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately balanced deal to reopen the federal government,” a Nov. 10 letter from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
https://mjbizdaily.com/trump-backs-hemp-thc-ban-included-in-...
The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal weed states.
Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.
No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.
History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
Both senators from NY, Washington, California, and Illinois voted for this.
That’s my guess too. Here in Canada, certain alcohol sales have been in decline since legalization. Not surprising.