Predictions:

1. Some day, people are going to court with the argument that our antiquated district-based system of choosing legislators violates the one-person, one-vote principle.

2. They will win.

3. I’ll be long dead when it happens. So will John Roberts.

Stop silly focus on processing and advance demands. No amount of process improvement will matter if voters are passive wrt their needs and demands.

Let’s not forget that the Senate is hugely undemocratic also. All those Senators from sparsely populated red states is another thorn in the side of getting anything progressive done.

Any system that depends on people is inherently flawed.

Any system that dedpends on the current people we have in government is irreparably broken.

We MUS have campaigh finance reform and term limits. Without them we are screwed. Thank you very much SCOTUS and CJ Roberts in particular.

Districts in my area make no sense whatsoever. Not geographically and not culturally. Basically all the heavily democrat areas are lumped together in to a permanent dem district. The other parts of the city are split up so there are 2 permanent repub districts. The outcome will be the same for years to come. Now I guess we should be thankful they allowed the Dem seat, but the issue I have the district is that it covers such a wide jagged area that those of us in it have little in common. It includes more affluent, educated whites, a large middle class hispanic area and then both every black area. So you have affluent black areas and then verging on third world impoverished areas. Each group has really has different needs etc that I dont think get reflected with one congressperson.

Now something you didnt touch on which to me a is a HUGE problem is that people never leave congress. I mean they are literally dying in office these days. Someone has to literally die to get an open seat. I dont want to be agist but I really dont see how we can keep sending 80-something year old people back election after election. Some are sharp, yes but my real thought is that they are probably really out of touch with much of todays culture/society. IMO they also have a lot of secret health problems and probably arent really doing the job. Now this is mostly a senate issue but the same two reps have been representing my area since at least the early 90s. There would still be a guy there since 80s had he not been gerrymandered out.

I am not for term limits but I just think people need to be encouraged to not run again when they are like 79. The parties IMO just dont want to spend money or deal with anymore elections than they have to so they are willing to put up people as long as they are breathing

Oh wow, just think what the Dems could do if they controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate.

heh… I can see it now: paradise on a stick! /s

As a practicing Attorney for 47 years,I predict that its only a matter of time that the Supreme Court,when it has a 5 vote liberal majority,which should be in the next 5 to 7 years,declares that political gerrymandering is unconstitutional in the same way they threw out districts of unequal population in Baker vs.Carr in 1962.

We must remember that it was a long struggle in various Courts to get rid of rural domination of state legislatures and Congress.But that struggle was finally won in Baker and the cases that followed it,Lucas vs.44th General Assembly et al.We now take one man one vote for granted and in the future,gerrymandering for politcal purpose will be a historical anamoly,the way unequal districts are today.

If you call 2009 and 2010 paradise.

No. Do you?

I’ll take a fifth.

Who among us is not thoroughly convinced that IF the democrats decisively controlled both houses and WH thay they could not:
1. Pass much useless and costly legislation
2. Pass legislation that is completely unworkable because of its complexity
3. Pass legislation that forced unfunded mandates on the states
4. Passed legislation that most of the country places in the WTF? category.

Hands?????????????

I didn’t think so.

Did you mean “the” fifth??????

we’ve heard this song before.

I have a possibly stupid question, but couldn’t the government be compelled to follow the results of National referendums and how can referendums be set in motion.
It seems to me that Just about all Americans would agree to removing money from politics and having reasonable, enforcable policies on district reshaping.
I also think that ALL of America would agree to ban predator surveillance in the US as well as traffic cameras. 98%, I’m thinking.
Maybe public malfeasance could be a death penalty crime.

Sorry, just dreaming, but what about referendums or the public suing the federal government for gross mismanagement?

Just askin?

It is my understanding that Larry Ellison and Donald Trump are going to buy Puerto Rico. No money down, of course. It will then be grandfathered in as our 51st state. Both Trump and Ellison will pay off the entire gov’t, for about $12 million in beads and trinkets, and the whole of Puerto Rico will become a national Republican lock as a counter balance to Cuba. With Diebold voting machines; courtesy of a Democratic controlled Congress, Republicans will claim it’s the will of the governed and proof the ” Southern strategy ” is still alive and well. Democrats will claim, ” who could of seen this coming ” and ask Condi Rice to look into it and report back to Sen. Rahm Emanuel, who’ll be running for President, on the platform, Teachers Like Spankings, Too!!!

Under those systems, since Democrats got the most votes for the House they would have won control.

Except, the dumbocrats don’t want control. That would show them up. They’d rather lie low and accept corporate contributions, and enjoy The Village high life.

Miller time.

Exactly correct. The Dems had an opportunity 2009/2010 and didn’t do squat. So I agree with eCAHN #2 that it’s not the process, but still I can never blame voters when the pols are so much worse.

Then I’m reminded of a famous line from West Side Story, when the gang member says “I’m not depraved, I’m deprived.” But of course the opposite is true. In politics it’s the depraved pols. It’s always been there, depravity, but the depth of depravity has gotten deeper. Once upon a time there were senators who — I know, it’s weird — disagreed with administration war policies! Wayne Morse and Bobby Kennedy! Senator Sam Ervin who blew the whistle on Nixon! It was the same process.

Get rid of the states.

As a minimum, you need to get federal pre-emption of state control over elections — districting, voter qualifications, conduct of voting — the whole shebang, before you can get the reforms you want.

But even if you got that, even if the Federalist Society junta that controls SCOTUS would let you get away with nationalizing control over elections, you would still have the framework of House districts that had to conform to state lines, hindering the formation of fair districts and giving low population states an unfairly enhanced voice. And, worst of all, you still have all states, however populous or the opposite, getting two Senators.

Get rid of the states, though (and I mean, get rid of them as permanent entities with separate existences and irreducable powers — of course we’ll need some sort of administrative division of roughly the size of our current states) and we can have 100 Senate districts distributed over the whole country as equal-population districts. Those districts, because there will be fewer of them, will be less prone to inner city concentration of D voters, they could be drawn to be more balanced than the 435 House districts, and so a bicameral legislature would serve this puropose, of having a Senate elected by more balanced, thus more D, districts.

Well, except that single-member districts are in the Constitution, so it doesn’t really matter what SCOTUS justices we have at the moment. We would have to change the Constitution to get proportional representation, and probably just to get some fair mechanism of redistricting imposed by the federal govt on the states.

My idea is, as long as we’re talking about reforms that require changing the Constitution, why not go whole hog and just get rid of the states?

The Oracle may be interested in other people having more than one arrow in their quivers.

If I had to put the desirability of Constitutional amendments in order of priority, overrule the Citizens case would not be at the top of my list.

At the top would be a ban on gerrymandering, a requirement that neither house take secret action, except in cases of true national security concerns; and a requirement that actions in the House and Senate be my majority action and only majority action–no super majorities and no single vote secret holds.

Citizens could unite and make candidates take a pledge on those things, ala Grover Norquist and his tax pledge. But, we probably won’t. Apparently, Americans far prefer complaining about the status quo to taking action for any actual change.

Isn’t that why we keep voting for either Republicans with an (R) after their names or Republicans with a (D) after their names?

It’s not either or.

We could walk and chew gum, demanding both fair processes and fair results. Otherwise, the deceivers whom we keep electing will simply throw up their hands and blame everything on Senate rules or whatever. And most Americans will either believe them or not care enough.

Depends on your definition of “progressive.”

Originally, political “Progressives” consisted of the left wing of the Republican Party.

They are doing just fine in Congress. Liberals, not so much.

Deep Throat, through Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post Editorial Board blew the whistle on Nixon.

Sam Ervin headed the Senate Committee that eventually “investigated” claims that had already been published. It did produce additional evidence, but did not begin hearings until May, 1973, about a year after the connection between the breakin and Republican Party money had hit the press in June of 1972.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal

Yes, a sharp stick in the eye of Democratic voters.

I think the SCOTUS declared unconstitutional the part of the ACA that gave the Feds leverage over the states as far as expanding Medicaid or losing all Medicaid funds.

I know that your post made a somewhat different point, but I just thought I would mention that.

The SCOTUS, thanks to Roberts, upheld the mandate, which is the worst part of the ACA, IMO. However, thanks to the Republicans plus Kagan and Breyer, in the same case, the court struck down the bit when the feds could deny states all Medicaid funds unless they went along with expanding Medicaid.

So, ACA may well have left the poorest people twisting in the wind, while bailing out the industries that profit handsomely from human illness.

Meh. What’s new.

In addition to the map, Wiki has some history of gerrymandering and the guy who thought it up here in MA. It has been around exactly 200 years, quite awhile, no?

I’d bet the prospects of stopping gerrymandering, or adopting NPV for that matter, are about as likely as eliminating the filibuster — zilch, unfortunately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymander

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbridge_Gerry

According to Elbridge Gerry’s wiki to which you linked, Gerry did not make up gerrymandering. he did not even approve of it. The Republican state legislature did and, for whatever reason, probably tribal politics, Gerry signed the bill.

Re: #29

Thanks for the comment. One article says Gerry opposed, but signed the bill. The other article says Gerry signed the bill to favor his Democratic-Republican party.

It’s hard to know exactly what was on his mind after all these years, but it would seem he was conflicted enough. Maybe the political exigencies got the better of his judgment in the end. The Boston Gazette laid blame on his desk.