I’ll add “SNL actor currently impersonating the president”.
That would be good because a lot of people wouldn’t notice the change.
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Wow has it really been THAT long since I’ve watched SNL? Last I remember was Fred Armisen impersonating Obama.
Term limits are dumb, and no I don’t hate Congress, just the dysfunction.
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Not only that, but is it even effective? I don’t have time to look it up right now, but I feel like I remember seeing something about how you will still wind up with something that looks like a gerrymander because clusters of population usually lean Democrat while sparse areas usually lean Republican.
Also, as I said before, Arizona is supposed to have a non-partisan method of drawing the map, and it produced a perfect Republican gerrymander.
Ok, maybe that won’t be the 28th Amendment then!
I mean why throw out the most experienced congressmen just because they have been there. Should actuarial jobs have term limits?
Maybe chief actuary. It might not be a bad idea to have term limits for CEO and Board members.
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That might not favor either party, but it hurts every single sitting politician. That’s got about zero chance of passing if there’s any way for the political establishment to block it.
We already have the ability to exercise term limits. We’ve had it for … well, ever since we started voting for politicians to serve in government. It’s called “an election.”
The problem is that regardless of how much people say they hate dysfunction in Congress and no matter how low approval ratings are for Congress, they immediately turn around and praise the job their representative / senator in Congress is doing. They’re convinced their guy is doing great and everyone else is the problem. They don’t realize (or most likely refuse to admit) their congresscritter is part of the problem.
As long as that exists, we can talk about how term limits are a great idea but it will never happen. We get the government we elect; if we keep electing the same shitty people back, we deserve what we get.
[Data appears to have been updated through 2020 for some things, 2021 for things like approval rating of Congress.]
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My representative is a major part of the problem. On of the most disgusting people around.
I don’t mind my senators much (although a lot of people are really annoyed with one of them)
Well I certainly can’t imagine that it would be initiated by Congress.
States can amend the Constitution without congress though. It’s never happened, but it is spelled out.
Here is my link again, in case you missed it:
Yes, I read an interesting article about how randomly-selected compact-ish districting tends to significantly favor Republicans, because they are usually more geographically disperse.
There’s also been some interesting math done in how to test for partisanship that lets you configure less biased districting. Or, hey, we could drop geographic districts altogether and and use ranked-choice voting to allow everyone to vote on all the state’s seats, giving the seats to the candidates who get the most support state-wide.
I think we’d be better off with something other than “geographic districts carefully selected by the party currently in power”, but it will be very hard to get there from here.
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Which leads to more stuff I didn’t know:
most of the original thirteen states used multi-member districts in the first congressional elections; none of course used proportional systems, which had yet to be developed.
the permanent [apportionment] act of 1929 … allowed states to abandon districts altogether and elect at least some representatives at large, which several states chose to do, including New York, Illinois, Washington, Hawaii and New Mexico. In the 88th Congress (in the early 1960s), for example, 22 of the 435 representatives were elected at-large.
1967 Law Requires Single-Member Districts
http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=526
The old “at large” gave 100% of the delegation to the winning party. A very bad idea.
Proportional representation by party within multi-member districts would be okay if I got to draw the districts. Proportional election by party across the whole state would be okay for “medium size” states. It seems cumbersome for big states.
Does this mean you’d vote for a party rather than a person? If so, why would that be cumbersome in a big state?
Certainly one could not reasonably expect Californians to form intelligent opinions about multiple candidates in 52 separate House elections every two years. But if they’re simply voting R or D (or G or L or P or S or whatever other parties are out there)… why would that be more difficult in California than Vermont?
I’m no authority on the various possibilities, but I was thinking about this:
Party list proportional representation is an electoral system in which seats are first allocated to parties based on vote share, and then assigned to party-affiliated candidates on the parties’ electoral lists.
I assume that means the Rs have a list of candidates. If they only get enough votes for one seat, their top name gets it. If they get enough for two, then their first and second. etc.
I assume in that system candidates still go out and campaign. I’m more likely to vote R if I like the people at the top of the R list. But, the longer the list, the more likely it is that the candidate “on the bubble” is well down the list.
If my state has 5 House seats, and I know from past elections they tend to go 3-2 or 2-3, I know the choice is between the third candidates on each list.
If my state has 53 seats, it’s not so clear who is on the bubble.
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I don’t think I like this one. What if I’m a pragmatic libertarian (oxymoron, I know) who realizes the libertarians aren’t going to get enough votes to send any candidates, so I look at the other parties & I prefer, say, Rand Paul over Mitch McConnell (who wouldn’t? Oh wait.) But the Republicans, if they win only one seat, would send Mitch over Rand?
Well the alternative would be to directly vote for Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer and Rand Paul isn’t even an option.
An alternative, yes. But you’re right- that is probably closer to the current dilemma.
If I were omnipotent, I would shift the US legislative system to having Representatives drawn from “superdistricts” with up to 5 Representatives each. On election day, individuals would cast a vote for one Representative, preferably with some form of instant runoff voting or a similar mechanic to identify the top n candidates.
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