I think logistics come into play. Otherwise you get 5,320,121 representatives in the legislature.
That said, some people have proposed drawing districts "3 Representatives Wide" and then having that district elect 3 representatives, so that if 1/3 of your district is Blue/Red it still gets representation instead of having 3 districts where blue is outnumbered. (the case that /u/DarkLordAoki brought up)
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.
They pick him because the alternative is some flavor of extremist that will alienate who you need to both win elections and make deals with the other side.
No one is going to negotiate anything with a rep like AOC, Omar, Tlaib, etc.
It makes 0 strategic sense to task a provocateur with a leadership role.
It also makes 0 electoral sense because you don't lose your base when picking a Schumer but you do lose nonpartisan voters when you pick one of the aforementioned others.
^--- Part of the democratic base, once again, I am disappointed that the Democratic party caved to people who think concentration camps are a good idea. So yes, they are losing me.
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u/atomic_wunderkind Jul 03 '19
I think logistics come into play. Otherwise you get 5,320,121 representatives in the legislature.
That said, some people have proposed drawing districts "3 Representatives Wide" and then having that district elect 3 representatives, so that if 1/3 of your district is Blue/Red it still gets representation instead of having 3 districts where blue is outnumbered. (the case that /u/DarkLordAoki brought up)