I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.

>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,

And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?

Not a historian, but some possibilities:

- some governments were explicitly modeled on the US system

- others were influenced by the US system as they moved from e.g. monarchies

- most countries have some sort of caste system that established interests want to preserve

There is a particular sort of partisan who loathes any process, procedure, or rule that acts as an impediment to his agenda. Never mind that, quite often, these same processes, procedures, and rules often act as impediments to his opponents when they are (temporarily) in the majority, he sees his faction as ascendant forever because the universe is designed to promote his peculiar idea of progress and thus there is no longer any need for those hurdles and obstacles. In hushed whispers he might even confess he thinks there never was a need, that those were put in place by his enemies to thwart his righteous cause.

Non-proportionately? For example the Netherlands has a senate but the weight of senators per province is set by population. They don't let Saba have equal powers with Utrecht, which is exactly what the American system does. Other Anglosphere countries — all of which have exceptionally bad forms of government due to the legacy of England and the early influence of the United States Constitution — have upper houses that do not have America's weird geographic correspondece.

China has almost 3,000 house members. The UK has almost 1,500 parliament members with a far smaller population.

The US also has state representatives in every state.

This idea that a large amount of representatives can’t govern is plainly false.

Even a modest increase in representative count would go a long way to make America more democratic and lessen the impacts of gerrymandering.

There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.

>American government is a system of baffles designed to frustrate democratic will

The "democratic will", like the people who manifest it, is so bizarrely stupid that there are no insults strong enough to properly insult it. If it can be tolerated at all, then it is so only when there are brakes strong enough to slow it down and force it to think carefully.

>To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes democracy.

Why would I (or anyone like me) ever agree to a new constitution that someone like yourself approves of? The whole point of the constitution as written was that people like yourself couldn't easily come in and change all the rules when our vigilance relaxed a bit, but here you are not even trying to hide it: you want to change all the rules in one fell swoop. No thanks. Do it the hard way to prove to yourself (and the rest of us) that a vast majority want those changes.

I think senators should be appointed by the states again, repeal the 17th.

Lets hear it for Tyranny by the Masses!

In Britain there is no Congress. The name of the House of Lords has nothing to do with the United States' Senate. If we are to believe that its form and function were inspired by some other nation's government, then let's talk about its true namesake: the Roman Senate.

I reject your Peel all apples because orange rinds are bitter! nonsense.

There are similarities, but not quite.

The UK House of Lords can't block legislation, only delay it and suggest changes to bills. It's also appointed for life, meaning the lords are immune to political pressures - they don't have to worry about doing something unpopular and getting voted out by the people they represent.

Canada's government, based off of the UK parliamentary system has a 'Senate' rather than a 'House of Lords'; it's still appointed for life and devoid of political repercussions, but unlike in the UK it is capable of blocking legislation entirely and sending it back to the House of Commons to be reworked (or given up on).

The US senate is another step difference from Canada's system, where the senate can (IIRC) prevent legislation like in Canada but the members are elected and are therefore subject to political pressures.

The federal government wasn't supposed to represent the people though for the vast majority of its function, it was supposed to essentially mediate interstate affairs and provide protection from foreign incursion.

The vast majority of what it does now, which acts on people rather than states, is a result of exceeding the powers constrained in the 10th amendment. The federal government is breaking because it is operating way outside of its design envelope.

"Political power should absolutely be proportional to population represented though."

That's your opinion. The opinion of people in Wyoming is likely different. What the facts would show if you look into the history of why the Senate was necessary, it would show that smaller states wouldn't have joined, and would be justified in leaving. The real problem is that the scope of decisions at the federal level has gotten ridiculous due to "interstate commerce" and "taxes", so we now operate more at the federal level than the system originally intended.

The only reason we have the US is that we rejected this notion.

this is essentially how the electoral college functions

>Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population?

Yes. If you call the "X" club the Senate and the "Y" club the House of Representatives, this is exactly how our bicameral legislature works.

edit: Their votes count for passage in their chamber, not equally weighted against eachother. If you mean Y seats equal seats by population but with a minimum X, then that's how the House works. Any proposal to make the senate proportional starts to ask why we're not unicameral because then you basically have 2x house of reps but with different voting district sizes.

The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires:

1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population

2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent the will or needs of the states themselves.

As an example of why that distinction is relevant, consider Rhode Island. With a population of 1.1 million people, 100 reserved seats plus one seat per 500k would give Rhode Island 4 votes. Meanwhile, California's population of 38.9 million would give it 70 votes. That prohibits effectively representing Rhode Island as a state in any meaningful way.

As it is now, vote-by-population could allow a small number of states with the majority of population to out-vote the entire rest of the country, passing a law that states that all healthcare should be made free and the states have to pay for it themselves. Large states with strong economies and large tax bases might be in favor of that, but smaller and less populous states with weaker economies would go bankrupt.

Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can decide that the law is inappropriate or against their interests and vote against it.

The distinction I think that most people from outside of the US probably don't fully understand is that, unlike in a lot of countries, each state is its own economy, government, politics, etc. rather than one sort of unified government that covers the whole country. Many of them see the federal government as not much more than a necessary evil to help the independent-but-united states coordinate themselves and prosper together. I remember someone once saying that it used to be "The United States are..." and not "The United States is..." and that kind of gives you an idea of the separation.

The best comparison might be the EU, where you could imagine the large, rich countries with large populations wanting to pass a vote that the smaller, poorer countries might chafe against. Imagine an EU resolution that said that all countries must spend at least 70 billion euro on defense; fine for large countries like Germany which already do, but absurd for a smaller country like Malta. The senate exists to prohibit that sort of unfairness in the US federal government.

Done!

"I think it is far outweighed by the harm it does"

But do you think the people in the less populous states feel the same? If we do remove the senate or make it population based, do you think people in those areas will feel represented if they're steamrolled by the urban areas? The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. If you're never sided with but have a large number of like minded people, how do you think they will respond based on what history shows us?

Compact is gone. They declared themselves domestic terrorists at their conventions, then once in power they declare anyone else are the domestic terrorists and start disappearing citizens without due process to other countries/cecot.

"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."

Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.

I didn't say those 8 were the only 8 members of said group.

You can blame Chuck Schumer, but I agree that it's wrong to blame the rest of them.

Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them.

And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters.

Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved.

The majority party isn’t blamed for failing to promote a consensus because they have R’s next to their names.

If the shutdown never happened and senate democrats just voted yes on the spending bill cutting healthcare they’d be blamed for rolling over to Republican policy and failing to use their filibuster to pressure Republicans to compromise.

When will anything be the GOP’s fault?

Are we forgetting that Donald Trump blocked SNAP disbursements that a court ordered him to restore? The GOP is going above and beyond to shut down the government more than it is legally supposed to be shut down.

The Democrats actually did some political good by putting a spotlight on the GOP’s quiet attempts to demolish social programs, and they pulled back as soon as they found out that our president was willing to starve poor people over the issue, something that a normal human with basic morals would never do.

Next time Democrats are in control and Republicans pull the same government shutdown strategy to block a Democrat policy initiative, it’ll magically be the Democrats’ fault because “they are in charge.”

By the way, zero government shutdowns under Joe Biden.

Blame everybody who is responsible, please.

It says that weed supporting stats voted for this. They did.