Have you noticed the rush of House Republicans calling it quits in the last few weeks?
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) announced his exit Nov. 1. He explained that to be a member of the Republican House majority means putting up with the “many Republican leaders [who] are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Buck is predicting that even more House Republicans will leave “in the near future.”
The day before Buck said good-bye, House Appropriations Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) also quit. Granger had been a leader among House Republicans who prevented the far-right, election-denying Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) from becoming Speaker of the House.
Also in October, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said she was quitting. “Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken,” she said. “It is hard to get anything done.”
The fact that there’s even a debate to be had about whether it’s a victory just shows how fucked up our system of government is—in this case, our electoral processes. Government policies in a democracy should be highly predictable based on what’s popular with the voting-age public, but instead, the policy effects of something as minor as some people retiring are so unpredictable we may as well be trying to read the future in chicken entrails.
I think part of that reason is due to the fact that half of Congress has an arbitrarily capped headcount and we’re no longer able to represent the popular opinions of the constituency. Last I checked, we should have something like 3x the representatives in the house that we have currently.
We also need to ditch the electoral college. There’s no reason to have it any longer. We won a civil war that forced the South to start evolving beyond chattel slavery to prop up their economy, there’s no need to continue with that farce.
The numbers I’ve seen are that if the House wasn’t capped it would have around 10,000 members.
I agree with your points but I don’t think they go far enough. Approval voting (or RCV) and proportional representation are needed.
Oh for sure, I’ve advocated for that for several years. Here in multinomah county, Oregon USA, we went with a version of RCV and our next election will be run that way. There’s a lot of detractors, and while I personally would have preferred STAR voting, I think almost anything is better than FPTP.
You’re right, I was off by a factor of 10 or so on the rep count.
Do you want to take a guess which party is making RCV illegal & already has done so in Florida?
We have computers and Internet and broadband. We could figure out 10,000 representatives.
the whole federal government leans toward rural conservatives. every state gets two senators regardless of population. there’s a ceiling and a floor on house reps, so big states are underrepresented and little states are overrepresented. the president is picked by the electoral college, which favors smaller population states. SCotUS is picked by the already biased president and the senate, which has the heaviest bias.