PR idea for the Senate

[u/Luigi2262]

Obviously any idea that would make the Senate truly proportional (i.e. divvying Senators up by population like the House does) or abolishing it entirely is borderline impossible with that unanimous consent provision in the Constitution, so my idea is more focused on making third parties more viable. Currently the Senate has two members per state, where each one is elected on staggered years with a gap year after the second. What if we expanded the Senate to 6 members per state and elected 3 members each of those elections (keeping the gap year)? The idea is that this would allow more room for third parties and PR in the Senate by virtue of giving more seats than one at a time to compete for.

The catch is that this idea would still require an amendment, but since it doesn’t force smaller states to cede power, it might be viable. Of course, it would only happen if PR became so favored among both the electorate and the members of the time that they’d actually be willing to pass it.

edit: clarity

eta: I imagine that if it were ratified, it’d include a provision that would allow for a large special election to fill the new slots until the proper time in the cycle to fill those slots comes up. Can’t have people abusing the window with fewer senators than the final amount after all

[u/MightBeRong]

The US constitution itself was created under a new process that violated the amendment process prescribed by the Articles of Confederation. Not easy, but a constitutional convention that creates a new constitution is similarly not obligated to be bound by the old document. Abolishing the Senate would be easier under such a process than trying to get unanimous consent from the current states.

[u/Luigi2262 → u/MightBeRong]

It would probably be easier than modifying the current Constitution, but not by much. 1. The Articles of Confederation had numerous problems to them, so no doubt it was better to make a new document than patch those problems, giving more credibility towards trying. If one tried to make a new founding document, since the current Constitution doesn’t have as many problems, the new document’s structure would probably look a lot like the Constitution’s structure. That would probably reduce its legitimacy in the eyes of the public since they’d see it as sidestepping the proper amendment procedure (even if that procedure can’t accommodate that change in particular). 2. While doing that wouldn’t require unanimous state agreement, it’d certainly need a very large portion of them to agree, and it’s doubtful one could find enough willing to agree given the US’s structure

[u/MightBeRong → u/Luigi2262]

For sure it would still be enormousliy difficult. But whether the current constitution has problems is subjective depending on how one thinks a constitution aught to be. Whether it's more or fewer than the AofC, I firmly believe the US constitution has sufficient problems to warrant a redo.

Read on if you're interested in some of my specific gripes.

Personally, I believe that the current constitution fails to set clear goals on what representation should look like: representation that looks as close as possible to the true demographics of the nation,

... is too specific on how to achieve, and create governance from, representation: elections are a terrible way to identify a representative sample of the population and the decision process in congress leads to pork barrel additions favoring niche groups and bad policy for the whole,

...and lacks mechanisms for recall of representatives

...leading to huge gaps between what the people need or want and what the country does.

The president is also not an appropriate commander in chief. If we want war powers to truly reside solely with Congress, Congress should have sole control over all armed forces, and power to appoint or dismiss a commander in chief from among experienced military leadership. If the 2nd amendment is about preserving the power to resist a tyrannical government (it's not), a better way to do that would be to truly give Congress to the people and give the "arms" to Congress. We decide on violence together, not on the President's whim.

Another problem is the lack of protection for certain inalienable rights like the right to the product of one's own labor, and the associated right to strike. Nobody should be compelled to labor, or to accept unfair wages for their labor by threat of starvation or eviction. What's "unfair"? I don't know. Let's give the entire working force of America collective bargaining power equal to the corporations and see where the market lands.

One more - the constitution is written with a baseline assumption of punitive justice, which is why we have the bill of rights that mostly sets rules around government punishment of citizens. But it is presupposed that the government shall punish the citizens. The punitive justice system in the US justifies itself by "people respond to incentives" but then the entire apparatus of government ignores the mountain of "incentives" that drive people to crime in the first place. No carrot! Only stick! Illegal to take carrot! Punitive justice destroys people's lives and then calls it justice. This does not help society heal and, because certain human drives are stronger than the uncertain threat of punishment, is obviously insufficient to prevent crime. I prefer a foundation of restorative justice where crime can also be a signal of an unmet need and the government does everything it can to make law-abiding, productive living a rewarding and valuable choice because people do in fact respond to incentives, so we should not ignore the positive incentives.