Shadow1980 said:
Single-member districts combined with first-past-the-post voting rules is the worst kind of electoral system you can have for a legislature. There's always going to be issues with fair representation when geography figures heavily into the process, even when there's no gerrymandering (Massachusetts hasn't had a Republican in their House delegation in decades simply because Republicans are spread too thinly across the state). It's just that gerrymandering is deliberately making a bad problem worse. The only way to solve this problem is through proportional representation. For example, the organization Fair Vote advocates for the single-transferable vote system where there are multi-member districts where representatives are selected via ranked-choice voting, and you can see suggested maps here. Under a PR system, a state's House delegation would more closely resemble that of the state's actual partisan split, and such systems are functionally impossible to gerrymander. And that's ignoring the fact that upper houses in state legislatures are entirely redundant. The U.S. Senate at least had the excuse of nominally representing the state governments, as the U.S. was functionally 13 separate nation-states under the Articles of Confederation, each of which got one vote on all matters regardless of population size in the Continental Congress. There was no way something similar wasn't going to be added to the new Constitution that became our supreme law. But with states, the upper houses aren't there to represent county or municipal governments. They're just chambers with larger districts that can be altered just like those in the lower house. They probably only exist because our federal government under the Constitution normalized the idea of bicameral legislatures in America. I've always felt state legislatures should be unicameral and likewise have their members chosen via a system of proportional representation. |
Nebraska has a unicameral legislature composed of 49 Senators, and as a "senate," they have the filibuster.
One big issue is the difficulty of removing a defective president from office. Instead of the elaborate impeachment process that the Senate apparently can choose to ignore if their leader chooses, the president should be subject to the confidence only of the House. If that means an annual churn of presidents (as happened in Japan for a six-year period bookended on both ends by Shinzo Abe's terms as PMs), so be it. Part of the problem with the presidency is that we're locked into an administration for four years. Maybe Americans wouldn't be at each other's throats about the presidency if the president was a more replaceable position. I also think about how South Korea only escaped dictatorship because of mass protests after the Korean legislature nearly refused to do anything about Yoon... and in the US, a lot of Southern and Midwestern voters would die to protect Trump.
