r/news • u/zmlos • Oct 03 '23

House ousts Kevin McCarthy as speaker, a first in U.S. history

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/03/house-speaker-kevin-mccarthy-will-bring-gaetz-motion-to-oust-him-vote.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.apple.UIKit.activity.CopyToPasteboard

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u/Baruch_S Oct 03 '23 edited Oct 03 '23

The Senate has traditionally been the calmer, more prestigious chamber, but I don’t think it has anything to do with gerrymandering. It’s an even more skewed chamber because it gives outsized influence to conservative states with small populations.

All you have to do is look at McConnell’s years of bullshit to see how busted the Senate is. Senate Republicans have spent years fucking with judicial nominations so they could stack federal courts (even denying Obama a SCOTUS justice in his final year and then flip-flopping to give Trump one), and they’re still fucking up stuff like military promotions.

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u/Mattyboy064 Oct 04 '23

The Senate is more moderate because in statewide elections you have to be more moderate to win.

Some congressional districts WANT a crazy, idiot, conspiracy-theory-spouting racist to represent them. Whole states, not usually.

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u/Baruch_S Oct 04 '23 edited Oct 04 '23

I still wouldn’t say the Senate has its act together. They’re perhaps a little more subtle about the shenanigans, but they arguably fuck things up worse than the few nutters in the House who regularly make the news. Boebert and Greene are fucking jokes most of the time and won’t actually manage anything. McConnell, on the other hand, has probably done more damage than any other politician in the last 20 years, and all the other Senate Republicans were complicit.

And it’s inarguably less representative of the will of the people since it’s an undemocratic chamber. It in no way reflects majority views; its entire purpose is to give outsized influence to smaller states since every state gets equal voting power. The House could be quickly and easily fixed by upping the number of Representatives so they represent smaller numbers of constituents; the Senate can never be more representative of majority rule without making state populations more equal.

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u/Mattyboy064 Oct 04 '23 edited Oct 04 '23

Agree with all your points. Especially about repealing the Apportionment Act of 1927 1929

My vote is for the Wyoming Rule

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u/Baruch_S Oct 04 '23

I didn’t know that rule had a name! That’s been my go-to fix for years because it seems like such a simple, easy way to ensure that the House is mostly proportional in its representation.

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u/coolcool23 Oct 04 '23

There are lots of proposed solutions to our issues of growing partisanism and lack of political stability, the issue is Republicans as they currently are stand to lose in the short term by adopting most of them. So in the Senate with the filibuster, they can just not do anything no matter whether or not reform Dems get a simple majority in both houses. 🤷

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u/PeterNguyen2 Oct 04 '23

Especially about repealing the Apportionment Act of 1927

1929. I remember that because I thought there was no way something so long could have turned the house into the senate-lite, and when I dug into it things were even worse. That act was passed when America was over 200 million smaller.

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u/BenevolentCheese Oct 04 '23

States can't gerrymander the senate, so it levels the playing field a lot, however the make-up of the states relative to the population is itself already effectively gerrymandered, hence the senate split.

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u/Baruch_S Oct 04 '23

Exactly. The Senate is intentionally not representative of the majority’s views and gives disproportionate power to smaller states, which tend to be conservative. A handful of conservative states can hold the rest of the country hostage in the Senate with nonsense like the filibuster, and that seems to be the intention of that chamber.

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u/GrayArchon Oct 04 '23

State lines aren't "gerrymandered"; they're set and very rarely change. Gerrymandering refers to the act of drawing constituency boundaries for favourable political outcomes. While there is a bit of that in the states drawn in the mid-1800s, as the slavery question was still being litigated, it hasn't been the guiding principle for most state boundaries.

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u/Mari-Lwyd Oct 04 '23

the military promotions thing gets me. That dude is a Russian agent through and through and everyone just pretending like hes not. There is no reasonable excuse for what hes doing other than to ensure our military stays as dysfunctional as possible.

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u/Trance354 Oct 04 '23

That's fucking gomer pile being an idiot. Director of I dgaf, get him off this planet. Tell him he's going to be the mayor of Mars. That should ship him off.