• miak@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I may be misremembering, but I believe the way things were originally designed was that the Senate was supposed to represent the states, not the people. The house represented the people. That’s why the Senate has equal representation (because the states were meant to have equal say), and the house proportionate to population.

    • MumboJumbo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That is correct. The state legislatures generally (if not always) picked the senators, but due to huge state corruption, it was almost always political qui pro quo, and some states even going full terms without selecting sla sentaor. This led to the 17th amendment (which you’ll here rednecks and/or white supremacists asposing, because states’ rights.)

      Edit to add: Wikipedia knows it better than I do.

    • invertedspear@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This is correct, and this part of the system works fine. What should have happened though is a population break point where a state has to break up if they exceed a certain population. CA should be at least 3 states. New York needs a split as well, probably a few others. There is no way a state can serve its population well when the population is measured in the tens of millions.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. Eliminate the Senate, and you have Panem: An urban Capitol district unilaterally controlling the rural satellite districts.

      • miak@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ll add, it’s incredibly dumb that the house is capped at 435 seats. There just is no way 435 people can represent the entirety of the nations population. Given advances in communication technology, there’s also no reason to keep it there. They really should be increasing the size of the house dramatically and no longer have a cap. The size of the house should grow, or shrink, with the size of the population.