You can't really have checks and balances that survive those supposed to safeguard them allowing the system to be dismantled. Not to mention apathy or active wish from the public towards the system being dismantled.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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7th grade for him saw the government well on its way to setting up the coming storm
I was having a good night I didn't need this reminder
... today ...
America was built on the ideas of freedom and equality by slave owners who didn't think women should be allowed to vote.
I mean, they did give an earnest try at preventing a king from happening, and it did work for a couple hundred years.
Don’t forget they were also terrified of democracy. The Senate is one of the most comically anti-democratic institutions ever concocted. Wyoming has as much power as California. I mean it beggars belief that anyone but a complete imbecile could agree to something like that.
For an united states sort of setup having one level of government representing the states particularly makes sense to me. EU has a similar setup (but much more complicated) and a suggestion that it'd just be based on popular vote would cause a civil war.
The EU has a representative setup, which is democratic. Nothing like the US Senate, which is designed to rob people of representation.
Again, governments justify their existence by serving people, full stop, not arbitrary land masses. What’s next, a tertiary chamber of Congress for corporations?
The EU has a representative setup, which is democratic. It is nothing like the US Senate, which was created specifically to undermine democracy.
I'm just saying Council of the European Union and European Council vs. European Parliament is same sort of separation between "popular vote" and member state governments and the reasoning is similar. There's been a lot of discussion about how singular states can stop the will of the rest of the EU and so on. Taking away that veto is a real hot button issue.
Again, governments justify their existence by representing people, full stop, not arbitrary land masses.
Ostensibly the states should represent people, that is specifically their state's people. Whereas congress and president should be more about the whole federation, as I've understood it. How well that works, well, that's another matter.
What’s next, a tertiary chamber in Congress for corporations?
Ireland has something a bit like that:
"Most members of the Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of Ireland, are elected as part of vocational panels nominated partly by current Oireachtas members and partly by vocational and special interest associations. The Seanad also includes two university constituencies. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_Commercial_Panel
If a federal government that levies taxes and enacts laws affecting individual citizens represents “states” in a manner disproportional to the population, the result is undemocratic.
This is a normative fact.
You can’t argue that giving some citizens hundreds of times the voting power over others is somehow democratic. Or is a person in California and Texas worth less than someone living in Alaska or Delaware? Why do they get less say in how they are taxed?
1 person, 1 vote.
You are thinking of democracy as a binary thing instead of as a sliding scale. Not to mention you can have democratic form of government that isn't very democratic or representative in actuality.
Federations often have that sort of two tiered setup where there's general population vote and a level where each state can represent themselves as the states. The idea makes sense when you think of it as a federation of separate and equal units, with the state tier you make sure every state is equally represented. Otherwise they might not want to be part of the whole federation. Of course it can be horribly uneven when you consider the populations. But that's not too different from EU, where amount of MEPs differs but council seats and number of commissioners stays the same. Both Germany with 83 million people and Malta with 0,5 million people have the same number of council seats, commissars and both have veto rights. Unsurprisingly it's a topic that sometimes gets heated, but like i said, without it there'd be outrage because everyone would be worried of core big countries deciding everything. Many countries would probably fuck right off from the Union.
I think there's been some misunderstanding here. None of this is some value take from me or me arguing for or against something. I haven't at least consciously given much of an opinion on this, I've just described the reasoning behind the system and how it makes sense to me from the member state perspective.
Democracy is not binary. That is why democratic scholars consider the United States to be what’s called “a flawed democracy.”
And the Senate is one of those flaws.
The idea makes sense when you think of it as a federation of separate and equal units
That’s the problem. California and Wyoming are separate, but they are not equal! (Arguably they’re not even separate.) Wyoming has 1/40th the population. One person in Wyoming has the same voting power as 40 Californians to determine their own laws and taxes. That’s reminiscent of taxation without representation. For all practical purposes, the people of California have been disenfranchised by the US government.
Lastly, how Ireland, or Star Wars, or anyone else organizes their federal system has no bearing on whether the US Senate is in fact anti-democratic. 92% of the countries in the world are not full democracies.
Democracy is not binary. That is why democratic scholars consider the United States to be what’s called “a flawed democracy.”
Yes. It just seemed like you considered it as democratic/not democratic, instead of a scale where you could have such a thing as flawed democracy. I might've just misinterpreted your words.
That’s the problem. California and Wyoming are separate, but they are not equal. Wyoming has 1/40th the population. One person in Wyoming has the same voting power as 40 people in California to determine their own laws and taxes. That’s reminiscent of taxation without representation. For all practical purposes, the people of California have been disenfranchised by the US government.
I guess they could've made the original system such that US Senate accounted for population, but it would've been hard to get smaller states to join. It's the reason why we in EU have the equal status.
Lastly, how Ireland, or Star Wars, or anyone else organizes their federal system has no bearing on whether the US Senate is in fact anti-democratic.
It was just an aside I was hoping you'd find interesting.
True, I know we don’t disagree on the fundamentals. And you make a good point about how some governing bodies like the UN aren’t proportional in their representation. Although to be fair, the UN doesn’t levy taxes or directly interfere in the lives of citizens.
I suppose we could reform the US Senate to be more proportional by adding some seats so people living in populous states aren’t locked out of Federal decision-making.
It's not democratic from a person level, but it is more democratic from a state level. At the time they hadn't quite figured out if they wanted to be a country or a collection of states that sometimes work together.
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Maybe it's time you guys rewrote your constitution into something more modern instead of treating the old one as a holy scripture handed down from Olympus.
But I doubt that'll ever happen.
Trump is about to rewrite our Constitution, just not the way it should be written.
If he does, at least it'll show that it can be rewritten.
Why do people pretend like a piece of paper matters. Trump has all the power and there are no checks and balances left. Imagine if he breaks the constitution, are zombie Washington, Jefferson and Franklin going to rise from the grave and enact vengeance?
Every rule that’s been broken was unbreakable until it was broken.
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Now is definitely not the time to rewrite the constitution. Could you imagine what the powers that be would do to it?
Subscription based rights.
Already in effect. Lost of basic services require a mailing address, which means either rent or property taxes. Medical care often requires a job to grant insurance, and any chronic or ongoing illness is the definition of a subscription.
I'd like the 1st amendment to be altered slightly. Sure, everyone should be free to speak without government sanction but that shouldn't mean freedom to lie. Fox and the rightwing have been abusing the shit out of it for years.
This is a terrible, horrible idea. It would give the government the power to censor anyone and anything, and all they have to do is claim that the thing they are censoring is a lie.
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My teacher in middle school did specifically call out that it would take a project over several decades to co-opt the system.
Well, they've been going after the judgeships for decades.
Yeah. That's exactly what happened.
When I was growing up, they told us the US was the greatest country in the world. Now that I'm older, I realize it's one of the worst in the Western world in nearly every statistic.
So...the us is the greatest at being the worse!
A lot of people are being shown that a lot of stuff that kept their country going was decorum, shame and tradition, not rule of law.
Interesting take on The Social Contract.
But basically when your entire socoety is disingenuous to some extent, shit falls apart eventually.
Turns out it only works if the population doesn't believe they want that.
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