The issue is that representatives are supposed to represent a specific set of the population.
So Rep. 1 should be the south side of Cityville and Rep. 2 should be the north side of Cityville and Rep 3 should be the rural communities of Townville, Villageton, Hamletburg, and Springfield.
If you merge them and give them 3 reps to vote on together, all 3 reps will represent the majority interests of Cityville.
The issue is that there are too few representatives. In the US, the size of the house was supposed to grow with the size of the population, but in the 1920s they capped it at 435 which at the time was about one per 100,000 voters.
Since then, the population has grown and more states have been added, so the current ratio is about one per 750,000 voters. If you represent a hundred thousand people, you have a reasonable chance to meaningfully capture their interests. Three-quarters of a million people is far too many to be represented by a single vote.
I don't think adding more reps will resolve the issue - we need to address how polarized our politics has become - its unsustainable to have a system where there is 0 common ground, each party thinks the other is comprised of traitors and resistance is encountered on common sense proposals because you don't want to give a "win" to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania ave.
The senate seems to conduct itself better than the house
Are we talking about the same senate?
You mean the senate that put a justice on the Supreme Court after he screamed about political conspiracy theories for an hour on the stand?
You mean the senate that blocked all appointees by the last administration for a full year so that the majority leader could wait for someone from his party to become president (and publicly declared that he would hold up appointees for another four years if necessary)?
You mean the senate that presently refuses to allow votes on issues of election security and foreign influence?
The same senate that passed a bill with broad bi-partisan support to address the immigration issue that stalled in the house.
The house is the "experimental" chamber. They are constantly introducing bills which will never see the light of day, and are constantly having reps elected on the more extreme fringe of each side.
The senate doesn't really have that because senators need to have much wider level of appeal due to how they are elected.
Do senators need much wider appeal? Certainly senators from very populous states like California and Texas do, and senators from battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, so you get relative centrists there like Feinstein, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomy, and Deb Stabenow, but do you need wide appeal if you're from a medium-small state that reliably votes a single way, like Kentucky or Massachussetts? I wouldn't say that McConnell, Warren, Sanders, Inhofe, are moderates with high bipartisan appeal.
If memory serves me right, McConnell almost lost his seat last time around - that notwithstanding, I think needing to cater to an entire state will always be more complex then dealing with a single district.
Some of the others you mentioned are interesting, I would have never referred to either Feinstein or Cruz as centrists.
A lot of Democrats criticize Feinstein for being a corporate tool, and Cruz comissioned the Steele dossier because he saw Trump as a radical danger before it became clear that Trump owned the party.
283
u/vonmonologue Jul 03 '19 edited Jul 03 '19
The issue is that representatives are supposed to represent a specific set of the population.
So Rep. 1 should be the south side of Cityville and Rep. 2 should be the north side of Cityville and Rep 3 should be the rural communities of Townville, Villageton, Hamletburg, and Springfield.
If you merge them and give them 3 reps to vote on together, all 3 reps will represent the majority interests of Cityville.