[HN Gopher] Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill
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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill
https://web.archive.org/web/20251113164403/https://hightimes...
Author : bilsbie
Score : 280 points
Date : 2025-11-13 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hightimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hightimes.com)
| superkuh wrote:
| Or, updated: https://hightimes.com/news/politics/trump-signs-
| shutdown-dea...
| monooso wrote:
| Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows
| "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of
| dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from
| the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021,
| Capitol riot." [1].
|
| This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill
| makes no sense to me.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-
| shutdow...
| dawnerd wrote:
| Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged
| together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands
| of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because
| funding.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My
| understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US
| congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the
| bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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,
| the executive can only do things that are expressly
| enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >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?
| jeffbee wrote:
| That isn't how federal rules have historically been made,
| so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading
| statement.
|
| Federal rules are created collaboratively between
| executive agencies and the subject matter experts
| relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal
| Register for public review and comments, then after
| feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated
| the final rules are promulgated. This process was created
| by Congress.
| CalChris wrote:
| That was during the Biden Administration. The Roberts Court
| now says the Executive can do anything. Free Enterprise
| Fund v. PCAOB, Seila Law, the end of Chevron deference, and
| of course, immunity. Anything.
| runako wrote:
| > This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill
| makes no sense to me.
|
| "Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this
| problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the
| first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the
| fact that they are both included in the same document. This is
| definitional stuff.
|
| Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department
| in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that
| it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the
| defense appropriations bill.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350
| million people and we're going to continue to get absurd
| unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant
| body. There's no getting around this and it will structurally
| just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists
| 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US
| political structure right now.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The senate makes perfect sense in the context of the fact that
| the slavery states wanted equal power but without counting
| their slaves as people. It should have been abolished during
| the Civil War.
| alessandru wrote:
| many non-slavery parliamentary societies have bicameral
| legislature, why do you think that is considering they never
| considered counting their slaves...?
| runako wrote:
| 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
| lovecg wrote:
| Bicameralism appeared very, very early on. There's a well
| known case of a missing pig in 1642's Boston (with a
| population of less than 2000 at the time) that finally
| solidified splitting the assembly into two chambers, and
| that debate has been going on for a while at the time
| already https://www.americanantiquarian.org/sites/default
| /files/proc...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| I suggest you check out the debate over bicameralism when
| this was chosen. It was not just slaves stats that wanted a
| senate.
| bavent wrote:
| Having the house capped is also ridiculous. My rep is also the
| rep for 750k+ other people. One person cannot represent a
| district that size appropriately at a federal level. They also
| cannot really respond to constituents properly either when they
| have that many.
| CalChris wrote:
| For 2020 it was 761,169 and Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska have
| less population than that. They still get a Member and then
| they get two Senators. And they get three electoral votes.
|
| Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
| dehrmann wrote:
| But 5,000 representatives can't run a country, either.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > This idea that a large amount of representatives can't
| govern is plainly false.
|
| Design by committee is a well-known failure mode. I'd
| argue that once the size of the house (or maybe one
| party's seats) gets past Dunbar's number, the house
| becomes less effective.
| dangus wrote:
| I'd argue the opposite. Congress could use more members
| so that it can have more sub-committees to craft
| legislation with more detail and taking on a larger
| number of issues with more precision.
|
| There could be sub-committees dedicated to a larger
| quantity of issues and addressing more industries.
|
| Your argument would be like if you were expecting Apple
| to only hire 100 engineers to write software for the huge
| product line they maintain. Maybe 100 engineers is a good
| number to make one product, but Apple has a huge product
| line.
|
| Sometimes you legitimately need more people in an
| organization.
|
| And this reminds me of how flawed your argument is when
| we already have highly functional corporations that have
| hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of
| managers and we know they function. Dividing and sub-
| dividing work is how it all gets managed.
| harshreality wrote:
| Very few legislators have expertise in anything except
| demagoguery, pandering, and graft. Having more of them to
| form more subcommittees to mess up more areas of the
| law... no thanks.
|
| We need merit-selected technical committees of non-
| representatives to advise politicians and tell them
| clearly, in as much detail as necessary, when they're
| wrong on something. If the politicians don't listen, the
| technical committees should be independent and able to
| make their case on the internet and social media.
|
| Implementing that would be difficult. The metric for
| merit is a challenge, and is itself easily coopted by
| politics. For example, China's vaunted "political
| meritocracy" is ultimately controlled by party leaders in
| the CCP, so it's basically a meritocracy for the CCP-
| aligned, not a meritocracy for anyone else. If a
| government's goals contradict facts-on-the-ground, the
| government will find a way to skew an "independent"
| technical committee to suppress those facts.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| The main reason I think this is wrong is that the sheer
| amount of different things the government needs to pay
| attention to in the modern world is staggering. In my
| view, it is well beyond what a few hundred reps can pay
| attention to. I think if you scale it, what you end up
| with is that representatives can be more specialized in
| ways that align with their constituency instead of being
| bad generalists.
| bavent wrote:
| I never said we needed 5k, if you have to pretend I said
| something in order to make an argument, you don't really
| have an argument. You also provided no evidence that 5k
| reps can't run a country either.
|
| The U.K. has more than triple what we have. If we had 1500
| representatives, that's roughly 1 per 225k people. Not a
| great number, but much more reasonable at least, and also
| much closer to what representation was when the House was
| capped.
|
| Smaller districts mean not just more accountability, but
| more similarity within the district. Right now, my district
| is 95% rural and 5% a slice of a city. I live in the city
| part, therefore my rep doesn't care about what I have to
| say, as my wants and needs are different than the rural
| population that makes up the majority of who vote for him.
| Smaller districts are harder to gerrymander like this, and
| they also mean your rep probably lives a life relatively
| similar to yours - drives the same highways, experiences
| roughly the same tax burden, shops at the same places,
| participates in the same events. This will not be true for
| every case, but it's still a better situation than what we
| have now.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| The federal government isn't supposed to "run the country".
| interestica wrote:
| Having representation based on land/physical space will
| increasingly be seen as absurd.
|
| Maybe we will have "youth reps" in the future. Or reps based
| on other organizing group (hunters? Musicians?). The problem
| is...taxonomical? People won't have to belong to a single
| group but can belong to several "unions".
| treetalker wrote:
| My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is
| its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as
| population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change
| becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes
| are increasingly necessary as time passes.
|
| Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But
| political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken
| hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and
| coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
|
| Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
| redserk wrote:
| I can't imagine the framers of the Constitution envisioned
| having 50 states, either.
|
| 26 Senators is a substantially different shape of legislative
| body than the current 100.
| petcat wrote:
| 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.
| cthalupa wrote:
| They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but
| I don't see how you can argue that things that happened
| after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their
| decisions while writing it.
| petcat wrote:
| So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in
| fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same
| myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.
| cthalupa wrote:
| I think there is very little our founding fathers would
| recognize about today's american government, in a wide
| variety of ways.
|
| Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at
| least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle
| to have any concept of what the future holds.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal
| government was only really supposed to meddle in things that
| were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
|
| But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money
| via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to
| spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk
| of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the
| minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| The problem is too much centralization of power in the
| federal government, when the entire purpose of the
| constitution was supposed to be to LIMIT the power of the
| federal government so that states could mostly govern
| themselves.
|
| California should make it's own laws, Montana should make
| it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the
| rules on how they talk to each-other.
|
| States Rights are supposed to be the protection against
| political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
| teeray wrote:
| Liquid Democracy. If the people can delegate their vote, they
| should be able to claw it back if enough of them care on some
| issue.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The Senate was absolutely one of the best features of
| government. Unicameral legislatures are uniformly godawful. In
| as much as it is imperfect, it is only so because Congress has
| become more unicameral-like... senators are little more than
| representatives that stay in office six years instead of two.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The senate was explicitly designed to provide a brake on the
| democratic aspirations of the lower classes by the founders.
|
| American government is a system of baffles designed to
| frustrate democratic will and preserve the property and
| political control of elites.
|
| The senate should be abolished along with the undemocratic
| supreme court (as currently constituted with lifetime
| appointments and the ability to overrule congress at a whim)
| and the imperial presidency.
|
| To be honest, we need a new constitution that promotes
| democracy.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >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.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Lets hear it for Tyranny by the Masses!
| kulahan wrote:
| People that say this are only looking to ensure the
| repression of those at the bottom of the totem pole remain
| oppressed! It's a direct path to fascism, and it is
| designed entirely to massively accumulate wealth at the top
| of the pyramid while ensuring all others starve and suffer!
|
| If you're going to make inane comments about how
| ahckchtually everything in the world is a creation of _the
| man_ who just wants to keep us down, you 'll need to
| qualify the statements.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > ability to overrule congress at a whim
|
| That can be stopped easily enough. The Constitution makes
| it clear that Congress is the ultimate source of power; the
| SCOTUS power of judicial review was granted to itself by
| itself. Congress can (and has, a few times, though not
| often) make legislation not subject to judicial review.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The problem is that it is far, far more difficult for the
| legislature to "fix" a decision by SCOTUS than it is for
| SCOTUS to "fix" an unconstitutional law.
|
| Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is
| unlikely to ever happen again unless we face an
| existential threat or civil conflict.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Supermajorities in both houses + 3/4 of the states is
| unlikely to ever happen
|
| I agree, we seem to have perfected the art of splitting
| of the population into fairly stable tribes similar in
| size. Unless one side goes batshit insane (and even then,
| I think current evidence counters this idea) there is
| probably not going to be a supermajority in the
| foreseeable future.
| CalChris wrote:
| WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the best features of
| government? In Britain, its name more honestly reflected the
| class it represents, House of Lords.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| The Roman Senate was a unicameral form of government.
| Bicameralism principally comes from Britain, the country
| which we were formerly a colony of and which gave us our
| dominant language, legal code, ....
|
| That said, again, WHY is the Senate absolutely one of the
| best features of government?
| macintux wrote:
| My take on some of the Senate's advantages:
|
| - No gerrymandering
|
| - Longer terms mean that senators can spend more time
| governing, less time running for election, and they can
| take a longer view on the impact of their decisions
|
| - Filibuster means that a tiny minority cannot force
| legislation through
| CalChris wrote:
| The States _are_ a gerrymandering. Five states have
| populations less than a million and three wouldn 't even
| qualify for Member of Congress by census. Yet they get
| two Senators, a Member and three Electoral College votes.
|
| You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants rights
| to a Senate minority.
| macintux wrote:
| > You've got filibuster backwards. Filibuster grants
| rights to a Senate minority.
|
| Yeah, I meant that 50.1% can't force legislation through.
| I should have said tiny majority.
|
| States aren't gerrymandering because the people decide
| for themselves where to live.
| CalChris wrote:
| > States aren't gerrymandering because the people decide
| for themselves where to live.
|
| The people can also decide for themselves where they want
| to live with respect to gerrymandered Congressional and
| other districts. So by your logic, gerrymandering doesn't
| exist at that level either.
|
| You're not going to convince me that some procedural
| nonsense is more important than equal representation.
| cthalupa wrote:
| The filibuster is not a feature inherent to the Senate
| and could be removed at any time with a simple majority,
| just like it has been done for the filibuster for several
| types of nominations, and was threatened during this past
| shutdown.
|
| I also assume you meant tiny majority, as the minority
| cannot force legislation through regardless of whether
| the filibuster exists or not.
| macintux wrote:
| Yes, I meant tiny majority.
|
| I recognize that the filibuster isn't guaranteed, but it
| has served as a powerful tool for a very long time.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| "No gerrymandering". Wut? The Senate is the most
| egregious example of anti-democratic systems in any
| country you could reasonably call democratic. It's far
| worse than the worst examples of gerrymandering.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is
| a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being
| the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live
| in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at
| least every 10 years the congressional district you live
| in may change without you having any say. So it is
| definitely _worse_ though I think the lopsided
| representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
| CalChris wrote:
| > voters being chosen rather than being the ones to
| choose
|
| With the Missouri Compromise, when territories were
| admitted, their voters were being chosen for political
| reasons. Territories were admitted two by two, slave
| holding and free to maintain a status quo. This falls
| under your definition of gerrymandering.
|
| There is no justification for this gerrymandering.
| There's nothing great about Wyoming such that it should
| have such outsized influence on the body politic while
| possessing the GDP of a mid-sized county.
| tlogan wrote:
| Things would work if we weren't so damn tribal and if
| extremists on both sides weren't the ones defining the
| discussion.
|
| Here is a video for us: https://youtu.be/mRtGg9F5xyA
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is.
| You need something that essentially represents each whole state
| as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly
| elected.
|
| When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt
| in issues that were common to the states or very clearly
| interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for
| the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker
| about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not
| about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a
| fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of
| exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal
| subsidy.
| dehrmann wrote:
| So the senate is sort of a house of lords?
| danudey wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > You need something that essentially represents each whole
| state as a unit.
|
| You can have a group of people that represent each state as a
| unit. Political power should absolutely be proportional to
| population represented though.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design --
| although I will point out that the notion of an extremely
| constrained federal government was controversial then,
| hardly consensus among the founding fathers.
|
| But the design clearly is not fit for where our society
| is or the direction it is moving, people have much more
| affiliation with the national entity than with the state
| entity, and it simply does not make sense to have a
| pseudo-house of lords with actual political power in the
| 21st century.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would
| still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get
| steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands
| about trying to level out concerns between smaller and
| larger states, which is why it was created with years of
| debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm from an even smaller political entity than Wyoming,
| although we don't get any Senate representation at all.
| It would be beyond absurd to grant us equal voting power
| to California and obviously not a sustainable way of
| constructing a political system.
| giantg2 wrote:
| DC?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| yes
| blackguardx wrote:
| You say smaller political entity, but the city of
| Washington D.C has 100k more people than the entire state
| of Wyoming...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Good point - and also whoops on forgetting that, should
| have remembered from my DC history class where they drill
| in that we have a larger population than Wyoming and
| Vermont yet no rep
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Of course the voters who have much more political power
| than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a
| system where all voters have an equal amount of political
| power.
|
| This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad
| for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but
| TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural
| ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and
| inherently unfair.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Of course the voters who have much more political power
| than is fair,"
|
| Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each
| _state_ to have equal representation?
|
| "This point is always brought up as if it's inherently
| bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones,
| but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural
| ones."
|
| The urban ones have more power in the house as that
| chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural
| states have equal power in the Senate. It might just
| happen that there are more rural states (just as in the
| House some states happen to have more people).
| krapp wrote:
| What "urban concerns" and "rural concerns" are we talking
| about, specifically?
| mothballed wrote:
| One in my state is solar panel legislation.
|
| You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and
| building plans and roof plans.
|
| That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck
| nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof
| plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass
| this law without even considering people like me in
| bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for
| solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have
| this regulation?
|
| The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just
| did it. Now I can't install solar panels without
| producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers
| just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the
| city you're required to file those when you build the
| house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked
| consideration for rural counties that don't inspect
| literally anything else, they basically made it the
| hardest to put solar in the places where it is most
| practical and has the most impact.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is
| rife with crap like this.
|
| It would be one thing if people were actually asking for
| this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly
| not. The trade groups, the professional organizations,
| the big industry players, they push it and the
| legislature just writes it knowing full well that the
| "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their
| electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation,
| the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see
| the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy
| homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still
| cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the
| legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election
| time.
|
| I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper
| city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that
| are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything.
| It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is
| you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
| hattmall wrote:
| But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you
| talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to
| the power company? My experience in rural areas is that
| after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no
| one is coming back to inspect anything.
| mothballed wrote:
| Oh the power company doesn't care. But counties use
| satellites to find solar panels or other unpermitted
| installations.
|
| If it's not noticeable via satellite imagery then yeah,
| probably nothing will happen.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Why is your rural county spending resources to find these
| unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote
| for better local representatives who don't do stuff you
| dislike.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The answer is they didn't even think about us, they
| just did it.
|
| Asserted without evidence.
|
| Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no
| building codes. Now many of them do (some still go
| without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards
| saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we
| want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design
| and construction standards, and we justify this with both
| public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of
| anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
|
| You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But
| don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
|
| p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own
| solar panels, under license from the state.
| mothballed wrote:
| The state has no law about me connecting to the electric
| grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection.
| In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than
| solar panels are.
|
| Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
|
| FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed.
| So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up
| to modern code or something.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to
| this conversation without causing a flame war of some
| kind, but we can see the general difference based on
| county level urbanization as it correlates to party
| voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns
| can also vary from one state to another (a core part of
| why the Senate was created).
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Why is it not fair for each state to have equal
| representation?_
|
| Some people aren't used to thinking of states as relevant
| sovereign entities.
| cthalupa wrote:
| The problem with this argument is the Permanent
| Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of
| the people than the Senate, but capping the size means
| that as it stands lower population states still receive
| an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs.
| more populous states. As electoral votes are based on
| Congressional representatives across the two chambers,
| this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential
| elections as well.
|
| The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many
| places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am
| much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it
| stands is fine.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the
| 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is
| that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with
| repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent
| the States, and we can have representatives who more
| closely reflect their constituency.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside
| the PAA.
|
| I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely
| represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the
| current status quo for Congress is just insane.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| We could also split states.
|
| It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the
| red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never
| happen because the state governments would never give up
| any power.
| alistairSH wrote:
| This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district
| to the population of the least populates state, we'd end
| up with more House seats, many of which would be
| apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with
| average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state
| population).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too
| many places for it to be balanced.
|
| As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do
| with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I
| mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that
| argues farmers _deserve_ extra votes for dumb reasons.
|
| One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan
| area into a bunch of new states that would be the same
| population as Wyoming _and_ 100% urban, and they 'd still
| get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The Huntington-Hill method used since the 40s has
| supposedly reduced any discrepancies.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow
| individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and
| thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism
| that allows some individuals to have more of a role than
| others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you
| consider democracy to be good) unfair.
|
| If instead you consider our system of government to just
| be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy
| decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who
| believe that there are interests than just people, then
| sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
|
| For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves
| any sort of political representation above and beyond
| what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is
| obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy
| ...
| giantg2 wrote:
| "If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow
| individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and
| thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism
| that allows some individuals to have more of a role than
| others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you
| consider democracy to be good) unfair."
|
| Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You
| don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or
| be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct
| democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter).
| To be fair to the states that joined the country, they
| each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the
| senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not
| the direct people's.
|
| "For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming"
| deserves any sort of political representation above and
| beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve
| is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in
| democracy ..."
|
| That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton
| for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own
| laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to
| hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit
| nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We are a democratic republic of states.
|
| I made no comment about what "we" are ...
|
| The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose
| members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto
| rationalization by people who believe in the compromise
| that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
|
| Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a
| republic" is used to explain this, but this I find
| absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat
| orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics
| (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies
| (several African countries, for example), and systems
| that are both democracies and republics (the USA for
| example). "Republic" describes a system in which
| political power rests with the people who live in it;
| "Democracy" describes the process by which those people
| make political decisions.
|
| > The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive
| power over any state
|
| I think you missed significant changes to the US system
| in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great
| depression. Granted these were not encoded as
| constitutional amendments (which would have been better).
| However, you seem attached to the conception of the union
| as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
| mring33621 wrote:
| The problem is that the number of house members per state
| is capped, which results in more-populous states having
| less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So,
| in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both
| the house and senate.
| hattmall wrote:
| Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers
| are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are
| mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers
| are cut off from the output of rural areas their
| existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy /
| and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously
| there has to be a balance but you have to look at it
| logically and recognize that one is far more critical
| than the other.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Could be true (*)
|
| But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of
| people who live in truly rural American outsize power
| over everyone else.
|
| (*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own
| and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty
| absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not
| subsistence farmers.
| kccoder wrote:
| I'm from a smaller state and I don't think it makes
| sense. I'll take tyranny of the majority over tyranny of
| the minority any day of the week.
| joquarky wrote:
| It's starting to feel like direct democracy would make
| better choices than whatever this mess is that we have
| now.
| watwut wrote:
| Urban concerns are steamrolled by the rural concerns.
| Rural people literally hate and attack urban living
| people and urban people are supposed to smile and treat
| them nicely.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban
| concerns
|
| But effectively giving dirt a vote clearly isn't the
| solution. When voting maps are made weighted by strict
| land area they look one way, but weighted by population,
| they look entirely different, e.g., [0]
|
| Or, should Wyoming, with a population of 587,618 as of
| 2024 [1] really have as many senators as the 39,431,263
| people in California [2]? California has nearly five
| times the rural population of Wyoming [3], yet all rural
| and urban Californians get only 1.4% of the
| representative power of anyone living in Wyoming. Does a
| Wyoming resident really deserve 67X the representation of
| people in California?
|
| I absolutely think rural concerns must be heard and met,
| but this setup is not right, and is clearly not meeting
| those concerns.
|
| [0] https://worldmapper.org/us-presidential-
| election-2024/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
|
| [3] https://www.ppic.org/publication/rural-california/
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I've yet to understand why 'land' should have a stronger
| vote than 'people'
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why even have states? Or cities? What purpose do they
| serve?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Why this non-sequitur?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Cities have no representation at the federal level, so we
| can leave those out of the question.
|
| Why have states? Why indeed!
|
| One answer: to create a level of governmental
| organization smaller than the federal one that can act as
| a set of laboratories for legislative and legal
| experimentation.
|
| Another answer: to reflect the fact that not all laws and
| regulations make sense across a diverse range of climate
| and geography and demographics and economies.
|
| Neither of those answers, however, require states to be
| considered inviolable sovereign entities, and a lot of us
| born after 1880 don't think of them that way.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Because the rural folks think that "bad people" live in
| cities. (Don't ask them too many questions about what
| makes them bad; it's almost certainly bigotry.)
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I'm not going to do the math, but California has a larger
| rural area, a larger rural population, and a larger
| number of rural communities than, oh, I don't know, the
| ten least populous states combined? So at this point we
| have fewer rural communities overriding more rural
| communities just because of where state boundaries are
| draw.
| gspencley wrote:
| > But the design clearly is not fit for where our society
| is or the direction it is moving, people have much more
| affiliation with the national entity than with the state
| entity
|
| For better or worse.
|
| I would argue that government serves you much better the
| closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to
| be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city
| vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader
| constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going
| to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the
| Federal level.
|
| Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a
| culture. The more culturally people identify as
| "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian"
| etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the
| federal level expand, because that's what "the people"
| are asking for.
|
| The problem with democracy is that people don't always
| vote or act in accordance with their objective best
| interests.
|
| And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude
| towards democracy itself is indicative of my point.
| Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom"
| even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly
| appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the
| city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our
| roads?). But there are other matters that should never,
| under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups
| of people have rights).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I would argue that government serves you much better
| the closer it is to you.
|
| This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is
| much easier to capture city or county government than it
| is state, and much easier to capture state government
| than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a
| more powerful federal government than we did 200 years
| ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read:
| rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state
| government cannot control it adequately.
|
| There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be
| just as responsive as more local ones, other than _an
| entire political philosophy and party that is committed
| to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally
| wrong_.
| gspencley wrote:
| > This works very well for the local wealth crowd
|
| It works well for everyone. The problem with government
| that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are
| people too.
|
| You're effectively saying that because you're worried
| about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government,
| you would prefer to make change in government more
| difficult and representation farther removed for
| everyone.
|
| It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non
| local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it
| harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is
| the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're
| OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as
| long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be
| straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm
| not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the
| logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face
| value.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist
| economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that
| "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level
| (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps
| have interests outside of the country.
|
| In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less
| difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier
| for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just
| make government farther removed for everyone.
| Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're
| ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of
| capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are
| all sacrificial lambs on offer.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The problem with government that is for and by the
| people, is that wealthy people are people too.
|
| No, this is not a problem with government for and by the
| people. It is, however, a problem in a system in which
| economic power (read: wealth) translates (often almost
| literally) into political power for individuals. Rich
| people deserve a vote just like everyone else - but
| nothing more.
|
| > you would prefer to make change in government more
| difficult and representation farther removed for
| everyone.
|
| You say "farther removed" - I say "larger, less dependent
| on local influence, and with more power". As I said,
| there is an entire political philosophy and party that
| insists that responsive federal level government is not
| possible; as I implied, I simply don't agree with this.
| Of course, if that philosophy/party has significant
| political power, then federal government _will_ be less
| responsive, but that 's not inherent.
|
| Yes, mega-corp capture of the largest governmental
| structures is absolutely a major problem, and one we
| don't have a good solution to at present. But the
| existence of that problem doesn't justify a reversion to
| a system in which local capture becomes easier and more
| consequential.
|
| Do we need to be careful to not have the federal level
| squash deserved local variation? Yes, absolutely. But we
| also do not have to give in to the self-interested claim
| that federal government cannot serve the interests of the
| people well, either.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating
| is opinions.
|
| I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from
| Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator
| from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't
| doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree.
|
| I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal
| representation as the most populous state would still be
| a massive win for them and they would have almost
| certainly taken the deal at the time.
| giantg2 wrote:
| But would they continue to take the deal is the real
| question.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If you understand your just opining to other user's
| opining... why do you think your opinions can outweigh
| other's?
|
| Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >why do you think your opinions can outweigh other's?
|
| I don't see where this is implied. I took the implication
| of "your opinion did not sway my own"
|
| >Do you have a fleshed out logically sound argument?
|
| The "logic" is "larger states in a democracy should have
| more power because they represent more people". Which
| naively makes sense. I'm sure game theory would show some
| consequence of this formation though as a bunch of
| smaller states coalition around each other and make a two
| party system based on land, as opposed to ideology.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal
| representation as the most populous state would still be
| a massive win for them and they would have almost
| certainly taken the deal at the time.
|
| I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we
| _know for a fact_ that the smaller founding states would
| not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is
| structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it
| exists. So without that compromise, the country would not
| exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently
| to today). You can 't just renege on that deal 250 years
| later and figure people should be ok with it.
| teraflop wrote:
| I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were
| made with people who have been dead for centuries,
| actually, if there's a good reason to.
|
| Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all
| kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public
| policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made
| legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as
| slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th
| amendment. Maybe those people would have made different
| life choices if they knew that their slaves would be
| freed in the future. Tough luck.
|
| In other legal contexts, we recognize that allowing
| people to exert control over things long after their
| deaths is a bad idea:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| A bunch of states wouldn't have entered the union without
| the compromise on slavery.
|
| But we ended that "compromise" some time ago. No reason
| that equal Senate representation, or even general state
| "sovereignty" couldn't be revisited either.
| nxor wrote:
| I interacted with someone from Wyoming once. She made
| this point: Wyoming has a lot of Native Americans, and it
| struck her as contradictory when people would say "native
| Americans are underrepresented" alongside "Wyomingites
| are overrepresented." Of course there's nuance but it was
| interesting in any case.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Wyoming has 16k native americans. California has 762k
| native americans (if you agree with self-id, which I
| don't). Your friend clearly must be in favor of
| disenfranchising these native americans if she thinks her
| Wyoming vote should count for 67 native american votes in
| California.
|
| In general, I don't find the idpol defense of 67x
| relative voting power for Wyoming's particularly
| compelling.
| nxor wrote:
| If you could read you'd see (A) I didn't refer to her as
| a friend and (B) I didn't mention her political
| affiliation. In fact your assumption is wrong.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If we truly believed in a capitalistic system, wouldn't
| the US become a hyper aggressive competiton to make the
| most citizens settle in their given state? It would bring
| down home prices, offer amenities, fight cut throat for
| the best labor laws, and so much more.
|
| But it seems like we gave up and focused on a republic
| when it came to this matter instead.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The only reason we have the US is that we rejected this
| notion.
| hattmall wrote:
| I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that
| some people / land area are simply far more important than
| others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is
| more meaningful as a matter of state, but there
| positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw
| value than others.
|
| The US is huge and you have a major divide from the
| producers and the benefiters, the most critical components
| of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly
| your food production, natural resource extraction, and
| logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of
| the country to function.
|
| You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that
| outsizes their population representation to the people who
| support everyone else.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| But per-worker productivity is higher in larger states -
| so there goes that maker vs. taker justification of up-
| weighting rural areas. Regardless, plenty of other
| countries continue to produce adequate amounts of food
| despite a much more central approach.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > most critical components of the US don't require large
| populations centers
|
| Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if
| we're talking in economic terms. For food production
| especially. Most logistical operation also operates in
| large cities.
|
| >You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement
| that outsizes their population representation to the
| people who support everyone else.
|
| Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the
| constitution to begin with. They needed something like a
| Senate to get smaller states to sign on.
| hattmall wrote:
| But we aren't talking in economic terms. We are talking
| in political terms. The economy is an offshoot of the
| functioning political system. Contextually they are
| different things although logically intertwined, but
| resources and their management / allocation is what gives
| rise to the idea of governance and that governance
| implements the economic system etc. Without the resources
| there isn't really anything to govern. The infrastructure
| and logistics in a city are generally geared toward
| supporting that city, not the rural areas.
|
| And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this
| way because we have a very functioning system, most rural
| people don't even use the food and resources that are
| extracted around them anyway as we import and move things
| around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking
| about what is important to a functioning large scale
| country and economy at the basic level. You literally can
| not support the cities without the rural output, even if
| the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban
| area.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I use economics because I don't know how to politically
| measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants
| is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.
|
| >The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally
| geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.
|
| But thse large states also help fund small states. Which
| small states are considered "donor states".
|
| > But we are talking about what is important to a
| functioning large scale country and economy at the basic
| level.
|
| California is the 4th largest world economy. It can
| certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things
| got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army
| and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main
| bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.
|
| I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states
| can be. And overestimate the economic value of the
| smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the
| most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.
| dashundchen wrote:
| I disagree with your premise that agricultural and
| extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value
| compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that
| premise, it is immediately undermined by California.
|
| California is an both a service economy and agricultural
| powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value
| in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized
| populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota,
| Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.
|
| Are you saying that California deserves more
| representation for having a lot of farms then?
|
| Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction
| industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller
| percentage of the labor force than ever before.
|
| So why should the industrial base of a state have
| anything to do with how well citizens are represented?
| hattmall wrote:
| >I disagree with your premise that agricultural and
| extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value
| compared to urban dwellers
|
| Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a
| lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy
| outputs of the rural areas.
|
| I don't see how California is undermining anything.
| California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like
| many states, that doesn't change the premise and
| California is known for bending over backwards and taking
| a lot of detrimental actions to support their
| agricultural industry.
| Y-bar wrote:
| (Non-American here).
|
| 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?
|
| For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on
| top of that one seat per 500k citizens?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this is essentially how the electoral college functions
| Y-bar wrote:
| Not as far as my limited understanding is, USA still has
| a Congress and a House, and the comment thread I replied
| was specifically about abolishing the Congress for a
| different solution. And as far as I know USA has not
| abolished the Congress, right?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| _Senate_ and House - congress is both bodies. My point
| was merely the additive scheme you described is how
| electoral college votes are allocated.
| Y-bar wrote:
| What problem does the Congress solve in the democratic
| process which happens elsewhere where there is no such
| thing?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Congress as a whole? I don't know if there's anything
| unique it solves. It's merely the US's compromise to
| balance between a monarchy and a weak federal government
| with little control over the coalition of states.
|
| The big issue is that our House of Representatives
| stopped being proportional to the population some 90
| years ago. I believe analysts suggested that a House
| today would have over 1000 members, as to the 435 seats
| today. So that only increases representation of smaller
| states.
| dogleash wrote:
| >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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Point is, they would not have different roles, but
| instead work as a single house which votes on issues and
| laws and then delegates the result to the executive
| branch. No dual "clubs" or houses with separate votes or
| separate elections.
|
| This is how my country works.
| pwg wrote:
| Part of the point of the split when the US Congress was
| designed was to intentionally make it difficult for bills
| to pass, because they had to pass votes in two
| independent houses, that (presumably) were focused on
| differing agendas.
|
| This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try
| to assure that only bills which had strong support
| overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would
| make it through the double gauntlet.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Plus the separation of powers, which is nice and
| brilliant...
|
| House ----- Impeach Purse Break Electoral Tie for
| President
|
| Senate ----- Try the impeachment Break Electoral Tie for
| Vice President Ratify treaties Confirm executive
| appointments
| danudey wrote:
| 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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is exactly how I see how my country and EU works. I
| feel like this is something I am intimately familiar
| with.
|
| > Thus comes the senate, where a majority of states can
| decide that the law is inappropriate or against their
| interests and vote against it.
|
| What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient to
| those issues than a unified Congress?
| cameron_b wrote:
| Before 1913, State's legislatures would elect their US
| Senators. Since 1913, Senators are directly elected but
| to longer terms than their peers in the House, as a way
| to make them less beholden to the whims of the zeitgeist
| and more stable in their consideration of "what serves
| the state" in that they do not face elections immediately
| and the results of their work are meant to be evaluated
| over a longer period. -- this is the intent, reality may
| bear out differently
| pwg wrote:
| > What mechanism causes the senate to be more resilient
| to those issues than a unified Congress?
|
| The Senate is limited to two seats per state. With the
| current 50 states, that makes 100 members. So only 51
| seats need vote against a bill they feel would harm their
| states. As the Senate is divided up, a very populous
| state (California) receives two, just like a very small
| state (Delaware) receives two, so each is on "equal
| footing" with the other states. [note that "small" here
| refers to population, not land area]
|
| If everyone was all mixed together into one bowl, then a
| populous state like California (52 house seats, plus 2
| senators for 54) is 22% of the total votes needed for a
| simple majority, all by themselves.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Don't forget the filibuster - most votes actually require
| 60 Senators to pass.
|
| For most day-to-day legislation, we can have 59% in favor
| and still have a deadlocked Senate. The House has no
| means to bypass/override the Senate.
|
| But, that's probably a whole other topic and way in the
| weeds.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually
| selected by the states (or rather, their governments).
| Direct election of Senators only came about in the early
| 20th century with the 17th Amendment.
|
| And this whole discussion gets further complex when you
| consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to
| elect the President (who in our government is more akin
| to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than
| the ceremonial president in those same systems).
|
| In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect
| the President. The number is based on the number of
| Sentators plus the number of House members. So the
| smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how
| out of proportion that count may be.
|
| The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans
| have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the
| popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...
|
| 2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al
| Gore's 51%. 2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.
|
| Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with
| majorities of the popular vote.
|
| Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with
| LESS than a majority.
|
| For those of who are both residents of moderately sized
| states, and also lean left on political issues, this
| certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
| youainti wrote:
| Also, states have their own militaries. Some states even
| have multiple. All states have an Army National Guard and
| some have and Air National Guard. Those militaries can be
| federalized, but normally pertain to the state. Some
| states even have other military branches such as Texas,
| which has a State Guard which cannot be federalized.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Done!
| Y-bar wrote:
| You abolished the senate?
| Y_Y wrote:
| by the decree of Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set
| according to census data on population") and senate
| ("guaranteeing each state X seats") already do what you
| suggest.
|
| Amazingly some guys thought it up hundreds of years ago.
| Is your issue that it is bicameral? If so what advantage
| would one house have?
| cthalupa wrote:
| > Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set
| according to census data on population")
|
| This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no
| longer actually true.
|
| The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only
| partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed
| seats mean that low population states have more power per
| capita in the house to a significant degree.
| pwg wrote:
| You have essentially described the current US Senate/House
| as it was originally set out in the constitution.
|
| One group of limited seats, with equal seats per state (the
| Senate). This is the "guarantee of at least X seats" to
| each state part.
|
| A second group with the number of seats determined directly
| by population (the House). This is "the rest set ...
| according to census data on population".
|
| One big change along the way was an amendment that capped
| the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it growing
| ever larger as the population expanded. Now the 435 are
| allocated to the states based on population.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > One big change along the way was an amendment that
| capped the size of the House at 435 members to avoid it
| growing ever larger as the population expanded. Now the
| 435 are allocated to the states based on population.
|
| Thankfully, the Permanent Apportionment Act is not
| actually a constitutional amendment and could be
| corrected with the passing of legislation rather than
| needing to go through a full amendment process.
| wat10000 wrote:
| > You need something that essentially represents each whole
| state as a unit.
|
| Er, why?
|
| I understand why the country needed this at the beginning. It
| was a union of sovereign nations. The states were effectively
| the constituents of the federal government and it makes sense
| to have a body where each one is represented equally. And in
| practical terms, there was a real risk that the smaller
| states wouldn't have joined the union if they didn't have
| something that compensated for the increased power the larger
| states had due to their population.
|
| But today? The states are glorified administrative divisions.
| They still have some independent power but it's not a lot.
| And there's no option to leave the union.
|
| We still have the Senate in its current form due to inertia
| and the fact that the states that get disproportionate power
| from the current form of the Senate also have
| disproportionate power in deciding whether it changes. It's
| hard to convince the smaller states to give up that power.
| goatlover wrote:
| It was setup to represent states. The House represents
| districts of people.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, I understand the system and the original reasoning very
| well, it's explained in detail in the Federalist papers. I'm
| saying it is a bad one.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing
| 350 million people"
|
| They are intended to represent the states. The whole point was
| so that smaller states aren't overpowered by the larger states.
| We simply moved from the governors selecting them to the people
| selecting them.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I understand the motive, I think it is far outweighed by the
| harm it does, and it fundamentally undermines the modern
| American compact. We simply do not live in a federation of
| states in the way that the EU, this was much less clear and
| more contested in the late 18th century.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The point of democracy is to have some say (or the
| illusion of it) in how the government acts.
|
| People from small states will have a say. They will
| oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is
| not that some people get 10x voting power than others.
| The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to
| the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power.
|
| I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got
| representation in congress in the first place. I
| understand how it feels to be unrepresented. Suggesting
| that every US citizen ought to have an equal voice is
| completely different from disenfranchisement and I'm not
| sure why you are trying to muddy the waters here.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Suggesting that every US citizen ought to have an equal
| voice is completely different from disenfranchisement and
| I'm not sure why you are trying to muddy the waters
| here."
|
| I'm pointing out the historical concern that is still
| valid today. The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent
| people, but to represent the states. The House represents
| the people and that already has the proportional
| representation you are seeking.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > The House represents the people and that already has
| the proportional representation you are seeking.
|
| It explicitly does not due to Permanent Apportionment
| Act. It is more proportional than the senate, but the
| hard cap on the size of the House and it no longer
| growing with population still fundamentally skews more
| power per capita to lower population states.
| bombcar wrote:
| The big takeaway is that you are a location where you
| could increase your political power infinitely by moving
| to Wyoming, and let you remain.
|
| Very few people move based on where they would have
| voting influence.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Whether people do or do not move based on voting
| influence is irrelevant to my argument. In fact, if
| people did move based on where they have voting influence
| it would be much less of a problem.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Very few people move based on where they would have
| voting influence.
|
| Yeah, just the millionaires. Now billionaires. But with
| internet and private jets they don't even need to move
| anymore to exert power.
| downrightmike wrote:
| 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.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower
| the larger ones. Hooray for the Senate!
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| When larger states have half the seats they should have,
| it's very easy to overpower a larger state.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The insane thing about the US is that 350M people are being
| represented. The government needs to represent a minority of
| people in order to become functional again.
|
| That said I bet the Senate exists in 500 years.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The US will not see its quadricentennial without a new
| constitution.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Ideally yes, but I think we could just continue to ignore
| it like we've done in earnest since FDR
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Senators represent their State government, not the people.
| Americans didn't even vote for Senators until sometime in the
| 20th century. Traditionally they were selected by the State
| legislatures. Similarly, the President is the President of the
| States, not the people.
|
| If you don't have this then you don't have a Federal Republic.
|
| The House of Representatives, on the other hand, is intended to
| represent the people.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Intended to, but due to the Permanent Apportionment Act, does
| not do so in actuality.
|
| Congress is currently structured so that both chambers
| provide outsized representation to lower population states.
| With how the electoral college works, this also provides them
| with outsized representation in presidential selection, as
| well.
|
| If it was reasonable to argue that the House should not
| invest so much power into higher population states, then it
| is reasonable to argue that the Senate should not invest so
| much power into lower population states as well.
| bityard wrote:
| The two-party political system is the most successful sham that
| the US's aristocratic class has managed to pull off in the last
| 100 years.
|
| (A close second is the intense tribalism fueled by hot-take-
| heavy social media.)
| hnburnsy wrote:
| > Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it
| is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure
| right now.
|
| "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of
| Government except all those other forms that have been tried
| from time to time"
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Exactly! We are in a 'time to time' 200-year period of trying
| something other than equal-vote democracy, but ultimately it
| is not going to be sustainable.
| saltcured wrote:
| Opinions on this whole topic seem to revolve around how you
| conceive of the states in the US. Do you seem them as
| legitimate and important power structures, or essentially
| arbitrary boundaries which are relics of the past?
|
| To me, it is both fascinating and horrifying to imagine a
| periodic "fractal redistricting" of boundaries. Imagine the
| tension and chaos to reorganize the voting public and
| administrative functions based on the census, with no
| municipal, county, or state boundaries being set in stone...
| par1970 wrote:
| Are you arguing this?
|
| (Premise 1) If a country has 350 million people, then the
| Senate will produce unrepresentative outcomes.
|
| (Premise 2) America has 350 million people.
|
| (Conclusion 1) So, the Senate will produce unrepresentative
| outcomes in America.
|
| (Conclusion 2) So, the Senate is bad for America.
| kulahan wrote:
| The Senate is not the group meant to represent the _people_ ,
| so why would you think OP is arguing this?
| par1970 wrote:
| I think OP is arguing that because they literally said "The
| Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing
| 350 million people and we're going to continue to get
| absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains
| a relevant body."
|
| What do you think they are arguing?
| kulahan wrote:
| Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government
| meant to represent people. So is he saying the Senate is
| fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing _100
| states_ , or is he saying _the House_ is fundamentally a
| ridiculous way of representing 350 million people?
| par1970 wrote:
| Maybe we are talking past one another.
|
| > Right, but that's explicitly not the body of government
| meant to represent people.
|
| I haven't claimed that the Senate was intended to
| represent the people. I also haven't claimed that OP
| claimed that the Senate was intended to represent the
| people.
|
| > So is he saying the Senate is fundamentally a
| ridiculous way of representing 100 states, or is he
| saying the House is fundamentally a ridiculous way of
| representing 350 million people?
|
| He didn't say either of those things. He said this "The
| Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing
| 350 million people."
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Senators are _supposed_ to be representatives of the State
| Legislatures, not The People - that 's what the House of
| Representatives is for.
|
| The 17th amendment was a huge mistake.
| cthalupa wrote:
| And so was the Permanent Apportionment Act.
|
| Revoke them both and we're much closer to what the founders
| intended when it comes to Congress.
| mmoustafa wrote:
| We do not live in a democracy, we live in a _representative_
| democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a
| person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to
| do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for
| reporting votes, but I digress).
|
| I always wonder what they would've created if everyone had a
| device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to
| the capitol at the speed of light.
| lazide wrote:
| As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative
| democracy is direct democracy.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| _Vehemently_ disagree. I would much rather take our most
| contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a
| national ballot and let the general public decide. I don 't
| agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I
| respect that at least the majority voted for it.
| kyrra wrote:
| The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of
| interests and working through the details of the policy.
| If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that
| mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on
| what is or is not permissible.
| oblio wrote:
| Haven't the Swiss solved this?
|
| Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of
| engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and
| learn from them :-p
| lazide wrote:
| The Swiss have a representative democracy with a slightly
| different way of 'representing'.
| gsf_emergency_4 wrote:
| The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are
| referendums that can seriously challenge federal action.
| And then there are the state versions of that. And they
| don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made
| null by arbitrary veto powers.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most
| contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a
| national ballot and let the general public decide
|
| The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people
| would handle high-level issues that are direct
| reflections on people's basic values and principles, like
| the two examples you mentioned.
|
| The problem with true direct democracy is that every
| single person becomes responsible for understanding the
| intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of
| administration, like the third-order effects of specific
| tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to
| executive agencies.
|
| Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes
| prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be
| able to make informed decisions about all the necessary
| parts.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of
| states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions
| would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on
| the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people
| whose job it is to work out the details.
| lazide wrote:
| The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions
| because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their
| name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to
| hell.
|
| See the CA propositions - they turn into insane
| population wide gaslighting competitions.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid'
| and the reason we have representative democracy is so we
| can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and
| have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for
| the rest of us.
|
| People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what
| the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals
| on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male
| landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a
| wee bit more limited than the generally accepted
| definition today.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'd rather have CA's props than an elected congressman
| who ignores the will of the people
| mothballed wrote:
| Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their
| populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just
| told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and
| overturned it in court.
|
| So you can see even if you literally amend the
| constitution in california by popular referendum, those
| in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves
| and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the
| constitution is the supreme law of the state.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their
| populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just
| told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and
| overturned it in court.
|
| > So you can see even if you literally amend the
| constitution in california by popular referendum, those
| in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves
| and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the
| constitution is the supreme law of the state.
|
| Your argument would make sense if the courts had
| overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was
| unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what
| happened.
|
| The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts.
| The _federal_ courts ruled against it, in a completely
| separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection
| Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state
| constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
|
| It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed
| by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Exactly. Stop playing political football with issues. Put
| them to the people at let the voting public decide, and
| be _done_ with it.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of
| any party) to actually represent their constituents
| accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct
| democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.
|
| It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white
| CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my
| family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially
| well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate
| trustworthy representation in government at any level. I
| am the person that everyone says _is over represented_
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There's a widespread misunderstanding about what
| congresspeople do.
|
| They are not elected to represent the views of their
| constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those
| representatives whose agendas they most closely support.
| There's a subtle difference.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >They are not elected to represent the views of their
| constituents.
|
| Yet another thing I vehemently disagree with.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| why do you write 'cis' in all caps? It's not any kind of
| acronym, initialism, or otherwise; it's a Latinate
| prefix.
| lazide wrote:
| You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct
| democracy turns out.
|
| Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even
| eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because
| it's impossible to live and actual do that.
|
| So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want
| _while having the votes_ because they are the only ones
| who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is
| happening.
|
| Apps just tiktok'itize the whole process.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| You seem to have a very particular idea of how direct
| democracy might be implemented; there's no reason it has
| to be "show up at 11am on a Tuesday".
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on
| the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the
| real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as
| political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion
| legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare
| for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto.
|
| I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the
| will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs
| feel otherwise.
| petsfed wrote:
| Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that
| you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged
| voters or you require participation from all, and issues
| are decided based on who can present the most sexy case
| on otherwise _very_ unsexy issues.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for
| direct democracy to work, we have to change society
| sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed
| enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on
| them.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of
| government, but we should take all the highly partisan
| crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _would much rather take our most contentious issues
| (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and
| let the general public decide_
|
| Those are actually great examples of where federalism
| _plus_ direct democracy works better than aggregated
| democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on
| abortion that a plebescite can 't reconcile. The failure
| of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So
| to make it work, you need another layer where
| deliberation occurs.
|
| The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the
| representative body deliberates, and then the population
| gets and up-down vote.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Could it actually be worse?
| cheschire wrote:
| I absolutely think so. Can you imagine if voting was
| influenced directly by whatever memes were on Tiktok?
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Given how Mamdani won in NYC I think we are already at
| that stage.
| mothballed wrote:
| That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to
| limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in
| society (usually land owners).
|
| While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here
| is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were
| far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent
| immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those
| with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those
| with the highest stakes in NYC.
| Razengan wrote:
| You could have actual semi-immortal magic users claiming to
| be the Senate.
| astroflection wrote:
| Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the
| citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast
| their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
| swarnie wrote:
| Impossible, we must interpret the intentions of some blokes
| who died 220 years ago and try to assume what they would
| have wanted.
|
| Its the only way.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| It's a blockchain moment - finally a use case ;) /s
| sershe wrote:
| Federalist papers were very explicitly against direct
| democracy, so... Not much?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative
| democracy_
|
| We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and
| direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer
| and more powerful than pure democracies have historically
| been able to be.
|
| The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples
| representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and
| ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to
| the elites. Selection by lot, _i.e._ by random.)
|
| In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for
| legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have
| national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme
| Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of
| appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should
| have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in
| a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that
| jurisdiction for N years.
|
| The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second
| legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in
| state law.
| smileysteve wrote:
| It's worse than the founding though because Congress has
| artificially capped its growth. If the house of
| representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early
| 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if
| it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.
|
| Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has
| existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had
| flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
|
| Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords,
| which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue is that post WW2 (and perhaps Great Depression) gave
| the federal gov't too much power (and money), resulting in a
| lot of low level meddling.
|
| It's why we have federal law on everything from drugs to creeks
| to porn, when these issues typically are better handled at the
| state (or even lower) level.
| maximilianburke wrote:
| I don't think the senate is necessarily the _biggest_ flaw, but
| it's close.
|
| A bigger flaw I think is the apportionment of house reps, and
| that the number of house reps hasn't changed in nearly 100
| years.
|
| Splitting the Dakota Territory into North and South to get two
| extra senators is pretty egregious and should be counteracted
| with DC and Puerto Rico being admitted as states.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from
| becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone
| else. We _need_ it, or something like it. People in coastal
| cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively
| referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance
| that people in such states would have their needs met in the
| slightest under your system.
|
| The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by
| the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the
| first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government
| has far too much power, completely illegally under the
| Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US
| politics. You simply _cannot_ have one central body adequately
| meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are
| determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into
| the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the
| federal government and return it to the states, who should 've
| held it all along.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the
| primary target of where I would support redistributing
| resources from richer more productive states.
|
| Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of
| the centralized system, especially the income taxation
| system.
| noelherrick wrote:
| As someone in flyover country, I don't think anybody in the
| coastal cities hates me, and I have never encountered someone
| from a big urban area that has treated me badly based on
| geography-that sounds like propaganda meant to divide people.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Equal State representation in the Senate is on the shortlist of
| things that is practically impossible to amend [0], but I
| propose a workaround:
|
| Amend the state-formation rules [1] so that any state may
| _subdivide without Senate approval_ , provided that (A) it
| occurs entirely within its existing borders and (B) no
| subdivision is smaller (less-populous) than the smallest
| current state.
|
| This means small states don't _have_ to give up their
| disproportionate representation in the Senate... but they
| cannot use that power to _monopolize_ it either. Any state
| above a certain size ( >2x the smallest) may decide that its
| constituents are best-served by fission.
|
| For example, if California _really wanted to_ it could split
| into anywhere between 2-67 states with just approval from the
| House of Representatives. Due to diminishing returns, the
| higher numbers are rather unlikely.
|
| This satisfies Article V, Section 5, since no state is being
| deprived of "equal suffrage": Each state has 2 senators, just
| like before.
|
| [0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union
| adrr wrote:
| Wasn't the senate just following the ask of 39 state Attorney
| Generals to close the loop hole on concentrated THC products
| made from hemp?
| bickfordb wrote:
| Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a
| reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase
| the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13
| states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states
| (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x
| increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally
| to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states,
| almost one for every two counties.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Only takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to
| make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the
| Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at
| will.
| codyb wrote:
| Definitely time for structural change.
|
| Here's my ideas...
|
| The Senate - Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the
| reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators - Find some minimum
| number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states
| like the Dakotas together
|
| The House - Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for
| the territories, add reps for DC - All maps drawn in a non
| partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the
| parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot
| these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even
| _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left
| DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
|
| - Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring
| conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of
| various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle
| where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of
| millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
|
| - Ranked choice voting everywhere
|
| Maybe the territories get less representation.
|
| The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more
| extreme positions some of these House members espouse,
| presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need
| to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely
| gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
|
| There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House
| members... congressional approval is famously less popular then
| things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades.
| Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
|
| Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back
| to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to
| the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for
| anyone.
| xdennis wrote:
| > The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing
| 350 million people
|
| The Senate does not represent the people. The House of
| Representatives represents the people. The Senate represents
| the states. That's why there are two senators per state and the
| number of representatives depends on the population of the
| state.
|
| It's so bizarre when American's don't understand their own
| democracy and a foreigner has to explain it to them.
|
| The US founding fathers learned from history and designed the
| US democracy to be more like the Roman system. In Greece they
| had a more direct democracy. That led to mob mentality. The
| Romans split the powers between different bodies and people.
| There were two executives (consuls). There were two legislative
| powers: the senate and the plebeian council.
|
| The system was set up with conflicting groups. When they agreed
| reforms were enacted, when they disagreed the country stays the
| same. This was not a bug, it was an intentional feature.
|
| The US democratic system was inspired by this.
|
| Senators are supposed to represent states. That's why they were
| appointed, not elected. Senators have only been elected from
| 1913 when the 17th amendment passed.
|
| ---
|
| On a separate not, this is also why the US does not have direct
| elections. The elector system is designed to take into account
| states, not just people. If it didn't exist. Candidates would
| only campaign in the populous east and west coast.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > The House of Representatives represents the people.
|
| The House of Representatives represented the people until
| 1929 and the Permanent Apportionment Act.
|
| The reasoning campaigned on for this act? To protect low
| population states from high population ones.
|
| The House represents the people more than the Senate, but it
| still provides proportionally more power per capita to lower
| population states than higher population ones.
|
| Repeal the 17th, overwrite the PAA, and we're back to
| something more closely resembling what the founding fathers
| intended. In the mean time, with the House having departed
| from their intent, it's just as reasonable for people to
| suggest the Senate depart from their intent too.
| AngryData wrote:
| I could say the same thing about the House of Reps, which has
| been frozen since 1929 and represents 3x more people per
| politician than it did then, is not equally distributed, and
| holds far more power and rights today than it ever did in the
| past.
| ethin wrote:
| This nonsense of tacking bills onto other bills needs to end. As
| does this nonsensical fearmongering of Hemp and Marijuana.
| Absolutely none of it is actually evidence-driven from what I
| remember. I know the CDC has (had?) side effect stuff but I think
| it might be very heavily exaggerated.
| whalesalad wrote:
| The alcohol lobbyists did this.
|
| > And in a letter Monday obtained by MJBizDaily, representatives
| from major alcohol lobbies urged senators to thwart Paul's
| efforts.
|
| > His "shortsighted actions could threaten the delicately
| balanced deal to reopen the federal government," a Nov. 10 letter
| from the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Distilled Spirits
| Council, Wine Institute, Beer Institute and Wine America reads.
|
| https://mjbizdaily.com/trump-backs-hemp-thc-ban-included-in-...
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's my guess too. Here in Canada, certain alcohol sales have
| been in decline since legalization. Not surprising.
| mothballed wrote:
| The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as
| anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the
| amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal
| weed states.
|
| Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the
| regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private
| operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-
| market like environment.
|
| No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The
| likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion
| dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody,
| zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let
| some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with
| nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a
| Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to
| ban it.
|
| History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the
| free market and create regulations that don't actually help
| people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their
| wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| Both senators from NY, Washington, California, and Illinois
| voted for this.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| is this the ongoing legacy of big pharma influence in government?
| there must be some reason why tapping this sign is not good
| enough for their purposes, maybe it's too hard to enforce
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act
| antonvs wrote:
| Another comment pointed to the alcohol industry:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917173
| luxuryballs wrote:
| is it conspiratorial to wonder that if enough of the owners
| are the same investment groups they can move alcohol industry
| pieces on behalf of other industries they also own, then they
| have token industries already tainted and ready to accept
| newly thrown tomatoes instead of the ivory ones
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| our congress has been intentionally rendered non-functional by
| people who are open about the fact that they want the president
| to be a dictator.
|
| edit: as always, downvotes are invited to rebut. as always, they
| will not.
| ge96 wrote:
| it's not their problem until it is eg. snap
| intermerda wrote:
| The comment by one supporter during the first term's shutdown
| shows everything
|
| > "He's not hurting the people he needs to be": a Trump voter
| says the quiet part out loud
|
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
| politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
| hollywood_court wrote:
| And you're being downvoted by folks who know your statement is
| true yet they don't care. Well, they don't care right now.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| thank you for acknowledging. I know what it means when my
| comment has a negative score but all the replies are
| supportive.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Don't forget about the people who want to coverup the fact that
| our president is a pedophile, too.
|
| The house got a nice paid vacation during the shutdown & Mike
| Johnson left an Arizona district without representation for
| weeks to this end.
| goatlover wrote:
| At least they didn't flag this entire thread like they often do
| in the guise of keeping HN apolitical.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| "I don't think that everything the state of Israel is doing
| is 100% above reproach"
|
| there, that should get rid of this thread in a hurry
| mlmonkey wrote:
| Each and every character inserted in a Bill _must_ have an owner:
| who inserted that character.
|
| Google Docs can do this. Why can't the Congress??
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment in general, but in this case it
| seems extremely well known:
|
| https://www.lpm.org/news/2025-11-11/mcconnell-paul-clash-ove...
| mullingitover wrote:
| This whole affair was Congress at its swampiest.
|
| GOP: We are holding firm on a _clean_ extension bill. We will
| shut down the government for the longest stretch in the history
| of the nation because we are so dedicated to our pure and honest
| principles.
|
| Democrats: We will use the same leverage that GOP has used time
| and time again by forcing them to choose between nuking the
| filibuster or (in our case, this time) negotiating to preserve
| health care access for millions.
|
| GOP: We will absolutely not preserve access to health care for a
| single person (ok _fine_ : one person[1]), but we will reopen the
| government if you allow us to embezzle millions personally, and
| also extort the cannabis industry.
|
| Democrats: Sold!
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-
| news/2025/11/03/nx...
| khuey wrote:
| What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and
| Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when
| they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA
| subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading
| the bill they were going to pass.
|
| The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of
| allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to
| loot the treasury is even more egregious.
| adamors wrote:
| The fact that all 8 are either retiring or not facing
| reelection in 2026 means that this was probably orchestrated
| by the minority leadership.
|
| It's exactly 8 senators, safe seats, no comments from
| Schumer. There is no coup.
| khuey wrote:
| I didn't say those 8 were the only 8 members of said group.
| missingcolours wrote:
| This is what always happened with Republican shutdowns too.
|
| - You get nothing
|
| - Eventually everyone understands they're going to get
| nothing, so they ask some sacrificial lambs to vote to end
| it while they posture and pretend they would have "kept
| fighting"
|
| With Republicans this was called "RINOs" and "tea party"
| but it's the same thing now.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Was there every a real clean bill offramp available early in
| the shutdown?
|
| I think the Democrat's mistake was as much as they were backing
| a popular policy, they didn't have the "clean bill" high
| ground, the Republicans are less concerned with government
| services, and they were backed into an end date with
| Thanksgiving travel coming up, so it would always get earmarks
| attached.
|
| What the Democrats got right was they wanted a fight, and at
| first, the majority was on their side.
| dangus wrote:
| 8 individual Democrats. Don't lump in the rest who held the
| line.
|
| You are "both sides"ing this when the GOP is the only side that
| worked tirelessly to end healthcare subsidies and allow
| America's poorest to go hungry.
| goatlover wrote:
| While true, at least in the Senate there are questions as to
| whether those 8 were selected to fall on their swords by
| Democratic leadership because they either aren't running
| again or aren't up for re-election in 2026. These questions
| are coming from the progressive part of the party and
| progressive supporters.
| adamors wrote:
| 8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote
| to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from
| reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| You can blame Chuck Schumer, but I agree that it's wrong to
| blame the rest of them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I blame the rest of them because of their reaction. House
| is torching the ones who caved. Not much commentary from
| the actual colleagues who "opposed" this maneuver.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| robryan wrote:
| Was it actually a cut or was it not renewing something
| that was expiring? A bill to fund the government seems
| like the wrong place to be debating new spending.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their
| vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them
|
| Cool, so we're hoping for a Christmas Carol to come in
| and show them the error of their ways in a dream?
|
| Its the rest of the senator's responsibility to convince
| them. As it is their constituents. We're all a bit at
| fault here.
|
| >When will anything be the GOP's fault?
|
| The evil within will always be worse than the evil you
| know. No one expects the devil to turn another leaf, but
| will chastise Judas for betraying Jesus.
|
| Meanwhile the GOP has embraced the evil. They made things
| very easy for themselves.
| mothballed wrote:
| I wonder what those 8 got in return? They are going to take
| a lot of flack, they must have demanded something. You
| don't get anywhere in politics by being the type of person
| who would just offer something for nothing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| They either aren't rerunning or aren't on the 2026
| ballot. Some are taking an exit package. Others hope this
| blows over when 2028 or even 2030 come for reelection.
|
| If you believe the commentary of one of the defectors, he
| said (Paraphrasing) "I got my first good sleep since the
| shutdown began... I didn't have to worry about people
| eyeing me as I walked into work". So if you take that at
| face value it was everyday interactions that had him
| fold. Easier to crush the hopes of the invisible
| population you represent than look uncouth to your
| visible peers.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any
| of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of
| them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the
| blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
|
| In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-
| state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some
| issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the
| representative look good to his own state by throwing herself
| under the bus.
|
| I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but _this_ is what
| politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming
| to advance leadership 's agenda. Not individual politicians
| voting for what they think is best.
| hamdingers wrote:
| 8 democrats who don't care about reelection right now, who
| were up for a turn as the rotating villain.
| brightball wrote:
| "Preserve Access to Healthcare"
|
| =
|
| "We will not extend taxpayer subsidies that Democrats set to
| expire at this point while they were in office, to continue
| masking the inflated cost of healthcare due to the atrocious
| ACA bill that Democrats forced on the country on party lines,
| to make the failures less obvious in the run up to midterms
| while Democrats hold hostage federal workers, military
| families, airlines, etc."
|
| FIFY
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Leftists hate our current healthcare so much that they openly
| celebrate the murder of a healthcare CEO, but then also
| screech when the GOP tries to end that system.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This idea that there's just left and right is very quaint.
| The bigger divide today is pro- and anti-establishment,
| plenty of the 'right-wing' Trump voters were also
| celebrating what happened to Brian Thompson.
|
| Meanwhile, the ACA was quite frankly a love letter to
| conservatives.
|
| It kept the US profit-driven system on life support, and
| it's a form of the same system proposed by Nixon, and again
| by republicans during the Clinton administration's push for
| healthcare reform, and the system enacted by Mitt Romney in
| Massachusetts.
|
| The only reason republicans opposed it on party lines
| during the Obama administration was politics: they were
| forced to denounce the system they loved due to their
| status as the opposition party. In another universe they
| would've celebrated their president signing it into law.
|
| Actual leftists are probably fine with ending the current
| system because it will bring so much pain to the voting
| public that it might actually get them off their asses to
| bring in single payer. As the saying goes: "You can always
| count on Americans to do the right thing, after they have
| tried everything else."
| cthalupa wrote:
| More than a decade later, the GOP has still yet to present
| an alternative healthcare plan to the ACA. Actual leftists
| have continued to push and argue for a true single payer
| system.
|
| The ACA Is far from perfect but it was a significant step
| up from what we had before, and the party that spends all
| of their time trashing it has never made any sort of
| serious attempt at creating any sort of alternative.
| brightball wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920924
| cthalupa wrote:
| Ben Carson has not put forth anything even remotely
| resembling a practical replacement for the ACA. He hasn't
| even been able to put forth any sort of consistent plan.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A principled "small government" alternative would be ...
| nothing. Their view is that the federal government should
| have no role in providing health insurance.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Sure, but that's not actually the position of the GOP or
| their constituents, or even the pre-ACA situation.
|
| The amount of people that actually want the government to
| have no role in providing health insurance or health care
| in this country is vanishingly small.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| This wasn't about ending that system, it was about
| preserving that system and further entrenching it at a more
| substantial cost to the end users of healthcare, who tend
| to be some of those least able to afford it.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| The ACA was literally dreamed up by The Heritage Foundation,
| a right-wing think tank. This idea that it was some partisan
| thing Democrats forced on the country is hilarious. It was
| always a bending-over-backwards compromise solution to
| maintain the for-profit system.
|
| There's a reason that, after 15 years freaking out about it,
| Republicans still have no plan for replacing it. Virtually
| any change, outside of more socialization, will make health
| outcomes worse.
| brightball wrote:
| Party lines...
|
| Senate:
| https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s396
|
| House: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2010/h165
|
| There's always been a plan to replace it with the only
| economically viable plan that can reduce the cost of
| healthcare. The same plan Dr. Ben Carson has been talking
| about for years.
|
| It's the only solution proposed by anyone from either party
| that would work.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Ben Carson has been talking about a variety of half baked
| plans for years. He has gone back and forth over and over
| on who is funding the health savings accounts, what he
| plans to do with medicare and medicaid, etc. None of
| these ever-shifting plans have ever been able to answer
| all of the questions, which is why they are ever
| shifting.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| This whole process has shown again that a democracy can only
| function if everybody or at least most politicians act in good
| faith and respect the rules . If you constantly ignore
| boundaries, the whole things falls apart. I honestly have no
| idea how the US can return to some level of sanity. It just
| gets worse and worse. Lots of energy is being wasted on
| posturing and coherent long term policy is basically
| impossible. I really worry where this is going.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This whole process was the epitome of anti-democratic
| principles by design: the Senate is expressly an anti-
| democratic institution (wildly different levels of
| representation/power for different voters in different
| states), and the whole standoff centered on protecting the
| filibuster, which makes the anti-democratic senate even less
| democratic by allowing a tiny group within that tiny group to
| shut down the entire lawmaking process.
|
| It's exactly what the founders, who all read Plato's
| _Republic_ and its warnings about republics devolving into
| democracy, wanted.
| Spivak wrote:
| Hard disagree, I think time has proven that the filibuster
| (or some process like it) is necessary as a stabilizing
| effect on democracy. Making legislation easier to block
| than pass makes it so that small swings in representation,
| say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy.
| The minority party being able to, with effort, stop certain
| pieces of legislation they find abhorrent by raising the
| bar to it passing is a good thing.
|
| The Veto is also profoundly undemocratic in exactly the
| same direction and it's also a good thing.
| runako wrote:
| The Senate is already an antidemocratic brake/stabilizer.
| Adding a brake to it is stultifying.
|
| > so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to
| 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy
|
| Exactly, and this is bad. Voters should all know that
| every vote matters. The current setup creates the false
| impression that both parties would fundamentally steer
| the ship the same way ("uniparty"). The path to a
| government that is more responsive to the needs of
| citizens involves allowing winning parties to actually
| govern.
|
| I would argue that we want a more responsive, dynamic
| government that attempts to represent us. The filibuster
| is in direct direct opposition to all of that.
|
| The GOP won the last national elections. They should be
| allowed to end SNAP, ACA, EPA, Labor Dept, NSF, Dept. of
| Education, FDA, all science grants, Medicaid, put armed
| military checkpoints on every city block, end legal
| immigration, and zero out federal funding to any school
| that is closed on the federal MLK Jr holiday[1]. (And to
| the extent that those things are not legal now, they have
| the votes to make them legal.)
|
| And then in '26 and '28, voters should decide whether
| they agree with that vision for how the country should be
| run.
|
| The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system
| where Congress cares more about what we voters think.
|
| 1 - taken loosely from the 2024 GOP party platform and
| administration statements from this year
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic
| system where Congress cares more about what we voters
| think.
|
| Or an overwhelming switch the other direction, just as
| chaotic and unpopular, continuing to swing back and forth
| every four years.
|
| Who knows, maybe the overreach of the current party in
| power (even though "won the last national elections"
| meaning less than 50% of the cast vote, but that's
| another discussion) will cause a swing the other
| direction so hard that the opposition party gains a
| supermajority in congress. Things will be more stable in
| that case, if not universally popular, because well-
| crafted legislation is a good bit harder to reverse than
| executive orders.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It hasn't done a good job stabilizing for decades in this
| case. The power of the people was stripped unilaterally
| and none of these mechanisms stopped it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why is the hemp ban shady at all?
|
| Using farm bill hemp to produce CBD and THC is not the intended
| point of that bill. Plenty of states have set up actual, real
| legalized cannabis industries that benefit from regulation
| (like required mold testing).
|
| The products created from this oversight are a dumb loophole.
| If you want cannabis, just vote for people to legalize it, it's
| really not hard. The only reason it continues to be illegal
| federally is the GOP, and most of their voters say they want it
| at minimum decriminalized. Even my brother who thinks we
| shouldn't give addicts narcan (let them die) thinks it's dumb
| that we punish people for smoking weed.
|
| But they vote for people who want to keep it illegal so....
| mothballed wrote:
| > Plenty of states have set up actual, real legalized
| cannabis industries that benefit from regulation (like
| required mold testing).
|
| None of that cannabis is federally legal either, and relies
| on the same precarious position that 'hemp' industry will
| still be in of operating a massive ongoing criminal
| enterprise. It's just that rather than legalize the 'real'
| cannabis the big cannabis lobby and their politicians settled
| for swiping at their hemp competitor and make them go on the
| black market too so they could better capture the profits, as
| evidenced by the fact even 'legal' weed state senators voted
| to put 'hemp' in the same illegal category their illegal
| 'legal' weed sits in.
|
| In fact, under the old hemp rules, there was pending federal
| regulatory framework for testing hemps products (they were
| still operating under deferred DEA testing regime, so
| currently testing is largely being done privately with COAs
| being furnished by most CBD farms, if you have even the
| slightest concern you can order from a vendor with full
| contamination reports and chemical breakdown). For marijuana,
| absolutely no federal requirement as it's just illegal with
| no provision. So the situation is the exact opposite as you
| had concerned, with regard to the part of government we are
| speaking of.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What I learned is Democrats don't have the guts for a shutdown,
| and Republicans do.
|
| Republicans are completely willing to make people suffer in
| order to take away their health care.
|
| Democrats are unwilling to make people suffer temporarily in
| order to protect health care.
|
| So I don't see how a shutdown should ever happen again.
| Democrats are going to roll over, even when it's politically
| beneficial to them and to the country to keep pressure on.
| tlogan wrote:
| Alcohol lobbyists did this. Amazing swamp :(
|
| I was really stupid to think Republicans wanted a clean CR and
| Democrats wanted to help people with insurance.
|
| Both sides wanted to slip in something their lobbyists wanted,
| and they did it. Win.
| jLaForest wrote:
| Only one side wrote in million dollar payouts direct into their
| pocket from the Treasury...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| One thing I think most Americans can agree on is that Congress is
| utterly useless.
| goatlover wrote:
| We need to be careful with that sentiment. It plays into the
| hands of those who want to give the President and the current
| Supreme Court all the power. Congress was set up in the
| Constitution to be the branch that represents the people. It's
| supposed to be fully independent and wield the most power.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| You mean like the current president that has been skipping
| over congress for a number of things, and the supreme court
| that has been doing little to stop him? Our institutions
| aren't _failing_ they 've _already failed_.
| goatlover wrote:
| And that can change over the next couple of elections. What
| the current regime would like is for the electorate to
| think Congress is useless and not bother voting the
| majority out of power. There's already enough apathetic and
| disaffected voters who think voting doesn't matter.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Congress is directly responsible for _causing_ this
| problem. Elections aren 't going to change it because
| they redistrict to prevent it. They're a bunch of elites
| only interested in enriching themselves and holding
| office until they die.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is from 3 days ago. Did this part of the bill actually make
| it in? Like, asking for a friend, maaaaaan.
| ethin wrote:
| Yep, it did. If I have the right bill (H. R. 5371), it's SEC.
| 781 if you want to see the actual text. (The table of contents
| is horribly bad though, and only covers divisions and titles
| and nothing beneath it though.)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Thank you. I try to avoid reading bills for that reason.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Citizens United
|
| The more money you allow in politics, the more politics becomes
| about money.
| bakies wrote:
| Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right
| thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as
| reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated,
| but not class 1.
| dmix wrote:
| That seems to be an alcohol industry complaint. That it isn't
| taxed and regulated like booze
|
| Most US problems come down to inability of congress to just
| figure out basic stuff like regulating weed. Same with the
| getting rid of the penny, immigration, tariffs/executive power,
| doing a proper and legal DOGE etc. They mostly just sit on the
| sidelines of the big ticket items and focus instead on spending
| money in their own states.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but
| how much does that really matter when wildly popular things,
| like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by _anyone_
| in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, _and
| have been for over a decade_.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| > wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not
| even considered by anyone in congress?
|
| Because it's not "not considered by anyone".
|
| Democrats have been _demonstrably_ decriminalizing and
| legalizing weed all over the country, and the Democrats in
| the federal government have been pushing and submitting and
| trying to make it happen.
|
| It's republicans. They are the ones that continually
| stonewall a measure the vast majority of their constituents
| support, and they are the ones that somehow still get elected
| despite that.
|
| Show me the democrats preventing legalization of weed
| federally.
|
| Show me the democrats who invite cop associations to talk at
| their meetings about how dangerous weed is. Show me the
| democrats who are taking money from cop associations or
| prison lobbying organizations who very explicitly want to
| keep weed illegal.
|
| Stop overgeneralizing! It's literally how things are this
| bad! Blame who is actually at fault!
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| I'm confused, only 22 democratic senators tried to stop
| this, plus Paul and Cruz. They just did outlaw it only
| because it is not called "marijuana".
|
| Is it necessary to recount how this entire split is
| partially due to racism, anyway?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This law is about banning hemp companies from selling
| psychoactive products. It is about protecting weed
| companies from unregulated competition. The libertarians
| voted against it because they want to get rid of the
| regulation the weed companies face, not because they care
| more about legalizing weed,
| throwup238 wrote:
| The DEA started hearings on rescheduling marijuana last year.
| It's currently on hold pending an appeals court case.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I had read a while ago, and I struggle to really argue with
| it, that legalizing marijuana is simply the carrot on the
| stick.
|
| Many Republicans are just against it out right, and many
| Democrats are either indifferent or know that promising to
| legalize it will mobilize a subset of voters who prioritize
| it above else (or may just not vote at all otherwise, over
| 30% of Americans don't vote after all).
|
| It'd explain why there's been so many opportunities to
| reschedule the drug, and why in some states even when they
| had the numbers to pass legalization, they still don't. Or do
| so with extra incentives (often the actual sale of it) to
| come later (vote next cycle!).
| mebizzle wrote:
| AKA, the system at work and our issues just become
| bargaining chips for influence by the parties.
| AngryData wrote:
| Why should cannabis be regulated at all? 99.99% of problems
| with marijuana that ive ever seen or heard of stem from its
| either its illegality or its overzealous regulation.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| If you're _anywhere near Cherokee, North Carolina_ ... it 's
| _definitely worth the drive / prices_.
|
| These natives certainly _know what they 're doing_ with their
| dependant-domestic sovereign nation.
| lunias wrote:
| Surely we must be ignoring the rules...
| runako wrote:
| During every GOP administration at any state or local level, you
| can be sure that two things will happen:
|
| - individuals will lose some freedoms
|
| - the most powerful companies will get more freedoms
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| 76/100 senators voted to keep this provision. 39/50 states sent
| requests to Congress to have this banned. It is a bipartisan
| effort.
| runako wrote:
| Yes, none of this is in conflict with my message.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| Blame everybody who is responsible, please.
| runako wrote:
| You're making a different point than I am. Please go back
| and re-read my comment and see how it is different than
| the point you are making.
|
| If you still don't think we are making different points,
| please go back and re-read my comment again, but slower.
| If that doesn't help, you may consider asking one of the
| popular LLMs.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| So would that be almost all republicans and half of
| democrats?
| bilsbie wrote:
| That's not limited to GOP.
| mothballed wrote:
| Even the legal weed state senators were voting for this.
|
| It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low
| regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own
| dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that gatekeep
| out most the competition. This ensures profits are captured by
| the wealthy rather than small family type setups.
|
| Wealthy former hemp companies will shift to the "legal" weed
| market, while the mom and pops will get completely wiped out.
| goatlover wrote:
| Corporations are eroding democracy with their powerful lobbies.
| They have too much money and influence. And yet too much of the
| electorate has been convinced it's good for the economy to just
| let them and the super rich have free reign.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| 76/100 senators voted to keep this provision.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I'm not sure how this relates to the above comment.
|
| EDIT: I'm assuming this is to point out it's a bipartisan
| effort. Well, yes, there isn't exactly a pro-people party.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| It says that weed supporting stats voted for this. They
| did.
| CalChris wrote:
| Both Senators in California, my state, voted for the ban.
| Neither has explained why.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I didn't want to believe you so I went to the source: https
| ://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
|
| wtf.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Newsom recently banned hemp-based THC at the state level
| anyway, so there's no real change in California.
|
| https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/us-
| states/california/n...
|
| They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for
| textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low
| quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers
| licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for
| pesticides and such. When we do have all that
| infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people
| to sidestep all that?
| mothballed wrote:
| I don't understand how this has anything to do with
| federal hemp law, under federal law marijuana doesn't
| have any testing requirements either as it's just plain
| illegal. So what does California have to gain in testing
| by dumping hemp into the marijuana bucket at a federal
| level, neither of which improves the testing requirements
| in California? California could simply require hemp to be
| tested, but making hemp federally illegal does nothing on
| that point.
|
| The only answer I can think of is that hemp grown outside
| of California was competing with california 'legal' weed,
| the testing angle is non-sensical since this change in
| law moves hemp from 'kind of required to be tested (but
| none of the DEA testing implemented, so it's done
| privately and sometimes not at all), but poorly' to
| 'illegal' and marijuana still at 'illegal'.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| In general this kind of excuse is used by incumbents to
| pass laws to thwart competition.
|
| You have some regulatory framework which has already been
| created by captured regulators, so it has a couple of
| rules that it ought to have (always the ones pointed to
| in order to justify it) and then others that exist merely
| to exclude competitors or make sure fixed costs are high
| enough that only large incumbents can meet them.
|
| The latter set of rules are unreasonable so the market
| finds a way around them. The incumbents then call this a
| "loophole" and insist that the competitors be forced into
| the entire framework rather than just the subset of
| reasonable rules they'd be able to satisfy without being
| destroyed. Which destroys them, as intended.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be
| for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into
| low quality vapes.
|
| This is not at all what was happening. These aren't some
| special strains or cultivars where there is a remnant of
| THC that is getting squeezed out from a large quantity of
| plants to make a small quantity of product - they are
| same strains and cultivars being used by the legal
| dispensaries. It is a matter of timing and process -
| harvest and undercure the flower and it will not have
| converted enough THCa to Delta9 THC to hit the legal
| limit. In fact, many legal operations follow similar
| timing on harvesting and similar processing - the flower
| in your local dispensary is still mostly THCa, and a good
| chunk of it is likely under the limit for D9 THC as well.
|
| Much if it is effectively the exact same thing under a
| different label.
|
| > When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC
| regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
|
| I do agree here. There's no need for the unregulated
| market when a proper legal market exists.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| oh, I didn't know that. That's even more nefarious than I
| thought. Thanks for the info!
| cthalupa wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how this is particularly
| nefarious. It complies with the law as written, and
| results in a significantly better product for those
| choosing to consume it.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| If it was a textile-style-hemp farmer getting the last
| few bucks out of their crop via a loophole, that I can
| understand. Not great, but I can rationalize it.
|
| Someone growing the same plant that is regulated by
| California but decides they don't need testing or
| licenses is just plain anti-social. You can't not know
| you're doing something wrong in that case.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Most of the sales are in states where marijuana has not
| been legalized, from my understanding.
|
| I'm more concerned with ending an absurd prohibition,
| personally.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Legal weed senators were voting for it because their
| constituents include people growing legal weed. The hemp
| product market competes with these constituents.
|
| The anti-weed senators were voting for it because they are
| anti-weed.
| port11 wrote:
| Honest question but how is hemp competing with weed? Are
| these different plants?
| cthalupa wrote:
| The product being sold at your local dispensary is
| produced, marketed, distributed, and sold by an entirely
| different chain of businesses and people than the product
| being sold at your local head shop.
|
| THCa/Delta8/similar products are produced under an
| oversight in the hemp legislation and different
| businesses are taking advantage of that than those
| involved in the legal marijuana trade.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| It's the same plant, but hemp refers to the leaves and
| plant matter that isn't the THC-rich flower buds.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| They are the same species, but it's a Brussel-sprouts vs
| Broccoli type situation where they started as the same
| plant but have been selectively bred for different
| purposes
| cthalupa wrote:
| The THCa/Delta8 stuff is not brussel-sprouts vs.
| broccoli. They difference is in timing around harvest and
| process. They're growing many of the exact same cultivars
| as what is sold in a proper dispensary (and indeed, much
| of what is sold in dispensaries would actually qualify
| because they actually have very low levels of Delta9 in
| them)
|
| You can effectively just under-cure the exact same plant
| and get something that comes in under the limit.
| un1xl0ser wrote:
| Hemp is classified as below .3% THC (compared to old-
| school weed strains at 15% and modern levels at mid
| 30%s). Hemp is male and female, and trash in potency, but
| THC and other products derived from it are fair game in
| some jurisdictions, or a grey area.
|
| It is certainly a different market than legal, high
| potency THC, as well as medical.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > compared to old-school weed strains at 15% and modern
| levels at mid 30%s)
|
| These levels are still primarily based on THCa content,
| not Delta9 THC. Even your regulated legal flower is very
| low in D9 THC.
|
| > It is certainly a different market than legal, high
| potency THC, as well as medical.
|
| Much of it is literally the exact same. They are growing
| the exact same strains and cultivars as the regulated
| legal marijuana industry, just making sure to harvest and
| process them in a way that prevents the decarboxylation
| of THCa into D9 THC from going over .3%
| mebizzle wrote:
| It is quite literally the same and the distinction
| between hemp and marijuana is entirely arbitrary as
| defined by a shitty and ignorant law.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how is hemp competing with weed? Are these different
| plants?_
|
| I live in Wyoming, where weed remains technically
| illegal. The 'legal' weed is trucked in from Montanta and
| sold at farmers' markets. The hemp is sold at the liquor
| store check-out counter.
| almosthere wrote:
| I'm surprised a lot of people missed this, but hemp
| growth actually causes thc plants to lower their cbd
| because of unexpected pollination. you can't grow them in
| the open near each other
| cthalupa wrote:
| There's a lot of confusion here.
|
| The hemp products in question are not, like, hemp rope.
| They're just pot that is classified as hemp because they
| are harvested and processed in such a way that keeps the
| D9 THC below .3% at the time of testing.
|
| If you were to go look at a growing operation for someone
| making THCa flower and then go look at a growing
| operation for someone making regulated legal marijuana,
| they would be virtually indistinguishable.
| mothballed wrote:
| The humorous part though, is that the 'legal' growers
| screaming about the 'unregulated' competition and for
| this law, are actually the outlaws breaking federal law
| and totally non-scrutinized by federal regulation (other
| than the fact it's outright illegal).
|
| It is the absolute worst case of gas lighting. The
| literal, federally unregulated criminals were screeching
| that the people obeying the law and following the
| regulations (even if in a way legislators didn't expect)
| were unregulated cowboys who were 'skirting the law.'
|
| It's absolutely comical if you think about it. And
| somehow, this argument actually won.
| cthalupa wrote:
| I see both sides of it.
|
| Many of the state legalized programs do have
| significantly higher standards because they are
| explicitly regulating for things intended to be consumed
| by humans, while the federal regulations for hemp are
| focused in an entirely different area.
|
| As a consumer, I would prefer to be purchasing the more
| stringently regulated state-legalized product. But that
| would require I live in a state that has legalized it.
|
| Instead, my options are (at least for another year),
| purchase the less stringently regulated "hemp" products
| or the entirely unregulated stuff grown god knows where
| by god knows who with no recourse if it turns out they've
| been spraying their crop with leftover lead arsenate.
| asveikau wrote:
| Most senators who vote on this bill are not voting on the
| basis of the hemp thing in either direction. That's why all
| the headlines are about the tactic of sneaking it into a
| "too big to fail" budget bill.
| cthalupa wrote:
| There was an opportunity for this bit to be removed from
| the bill.
|
| 76 of 100 voted to keep it. This, is like, literally the
| entire point of discussion in this part of the thread? I
| don't understand where your confusion lies.
| asveikau wrote:
| Are you saying it was an amendment? That it not what I
| get from this or any articles I've seen about it.
|
| TFA:
|
| > On Sunday, Senate leadership inserted a hemp-
| recriminalization clause into the must-pass funding bill
|
| > ...
|
| > Not a standalone bill. Not a debate on cannabis reform.
|
| Seems like it wasn't a full Senate vote on a specific
| amendment, but the bill as a whole. I've elsewhere seen
| it stated as McConnell acting alone.
|
| Edit: as I googled around, I found that Rand Paul
| attempted to use an amendment to remove the language, and
| it failed. But people vote on amendments for all sorts of
| strategic reasons. For example maybe they felt the
| amendment would kill the bill, because house and senate
| bills need to match, and the terms had already been
| negotiated.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Rand Paul's vote was, like, specifically for this, and
| the house is clamoring for the hemp stuff even less.
|
| This is Mitch McConnell's crusade.
| harles wrote:
| > It is mostly about shifting profits from mom and pop, low
| regulation hemp industry to wealthy corporations that own
| dispensaries that have gargantuan regulatory costs that
| gatekeep out most the competition.
|
| That's a big assertion that needs evidence. I'm strongly in
| favor of legalization but not deregulation. It was a pretty big
| loophole that allowed what's essentially weed to sidestep the
| regulation their competitors faced - and there wasn't great
| consumer awareness about the differences even though there were
| safety implications: https://drexel.edu/cannabis-
| research/research/research-highl...
|
| This law seems pretty well targeted in its scope, bringing the
| 2018 law back to what was intended (easy legal CBD/hemp, as
| long as there aren't other things in there).
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| Yet Kratom is legal, yt is recommending to me some product
| called "meth" (not joking) and there are a million new
| research drugs coming out every decade?
|
| It's just old-school think of the kids and not in my
| territory. We don't know how to regulate and handle this
| because our politicians and more and more our citizens don't
| understand what is being voted on or has been happening in
| their own states for 7 years.
|
| Have you used these products? It's a shame, the quality that
| I was getting just within the past 3 months was incredible
| and it is market not afraid to try new stuff.
|
| I'm sad, flower from OR, NC, OK, IN, and others will never
| legally hit my lungs. Back to the cartels? Or perhaps I
| should overpay by $200 with the comfort of having 0 clue
| where it comes from, again?
| mothballed wrote:
| We are speaking of federal law here.
|
| There was absolutely no federal regulatory framework for
| marijuana. none. It's just plain illegal. Unless you can get
| one of a handful of research licenses, which is almost
| totally irrelevant.
|
| Hemp had some, fairly weak regulation. And theoretically,
| testing requirements, although they were deferred and
| deferred to the point they were basically done only privately
| with the idea the DEA would eventually get involved.
|
| Instead they're just dumped now into the marijuana bucket
| which has no federal regulation at all, or alternatively, at
| the state level the states could always define their
| regulatory framework to be agnostic to THC content of
| cannabis.
|
| So this does the exact opposite of what you had hoped.
| mebizzle wrote:
| >(easy legal CBD/hemp, as long as there aren't other things
| in there)
|
| Your ignorance shows in spades. The arbitrary ban on THC and
| its analogues prevent chronic pain patients like me (a
| criminally underserved market) from becoming addicted to the
| big pharma system. The "other things in there" argument is
| the same as razorblades in candy, sanctimony to portray
| dissent as degeneracy.
| dboreham wrote:
| These are all just symptoms. The underlying vulnerability is the
| median US culture, which permits venality, scamming, skuldugery,
| shenanigans and crime in its ruling class.
| Herring wrote:
| I was reading about Austria recently. It's a nice place, but it
| turns out they have their far-right Nazis in rural areas too.
| It's pretty common around the world.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...
|
| I think the world is still figuring out how to deal with this.
| The German firewall looks quite interesting.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_against_the_far-right...
|
| Of course things like the electoral college, filibuster,
| gerrymandering, fptp, lifetime appointments etc don't help.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| The party of small government strikes again.
| goatlover wrote:
| That has never really been true whenever they get power. Just
| like states rights, the deficit spending and federal overreach
| stops mattering. It's just a matter of which part of the
| government Republicans want to grow and have the funding (ICE
| for example).
|
| Republicans pretend to act principled when they're not the
| party in power. Amazing how that works.
| fundad wrote:
| Jobs stop mattering when they get power too. It all makes a
| lot more sense when you realize that party doesn't want
| economic growth.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| 76/100 senators voted to keep this provision in the bill.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _The party of small government strikes again_
|
| The GOP hasn't been a party of small government since W. Bush.
| And it hasn't really claimed to be as much since Trump 1.
| mind-blight wrote:
| This is a weird one. It absolutely _should not_ be haphazardly
| added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this
| really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most
| plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were
| ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except
| Delta-9.
|
| Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every
| environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals,
| etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the
| concentration of any present toxins.
|
| The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing
| every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get
| concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
|
| States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so
| the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require
| these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other
| conversation...)
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| There is pretty extensive testing throughout the industry.
| Small hemp farms don't want to murder their customers or
| themselves.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| I've been a regular consumer of the results of this since about
| 2020 when I discovered it. It's been quite the journey watching
| the industry boom and evolve and get better and better.
|
| I've seen an incredible incredible amount of ignorance on this
| topic. Prior to this, I found 1 comment on HN mentioning this
| last night. On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics,
| r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant. I can find it on r/news
| but like every other thread not a single person is mentioning
| something very factual.
|
| Rand tried to stop this provision in the Senate. 76/100 senators
| voted for this ban to remain. 76 senators from across the
| political spectrum, from every state have decided to secretly try
| to destroy a $30b industry, 300,000 jobs, and a lot of lives.
| oblio wrote:
| > On reddit, it's not on the frontpage of r/politics,
| r/moderatepolitics or anything relevant.
|
| There were at least 3 posts on /r/all yesterday.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| I mean, were you posting to draw attention to it? How would
| people know if the people who do know aren't spreading it? Most
| people don't read bills themselves and it's no news that US
| media is captured by billionaires and special interests...
| nerdjon wrote:
| I feel like I am missing something here, and it is around it
| being called "hemp".
|
| Does this actually have any impact on legal dispensaries, their
| products, farms, etc?
|
| Does this make it harder to eventually de-schedule pot.
| mothballed wrote:
| Yes, in the sense that now it will be illegal to ship cannabis
| seeds interstate. Under current law, which doesn't expire for a
| year, cannabis seeds can be shipped legally interstate across
| the US as they don't exceed the THC content. Doesn't matter if
| it's a hemp seed or marijuana seed as both are hemp under the
| old definition in seed form as long as they're under 0.3% THC.
|
| The passed legislation outlaws any seeds that _can produce_ a
| plant that doesn 't satisfy the new definition of hemp. It
| completely destroys the white market seed industry, on which
| the legal weed industry partially operates.
|
| Also, prices will go up and quality will go down in the 'legal'
| weed market, as previously the hemp industry was a check on
| prices because you could get better product for cheaper than
| going to a dispensary and with nice lab tested COAs to see what
| you were getting.
| missingcolours wrote:
| Only indirectly (see other comment).
|
| In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize
| "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to
| believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like
| that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually
| legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that
| outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated
| with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal
| cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or
| anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being
| reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of
| the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of
| the farm bill).
|
| Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed
| gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor
| issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't
| even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products
| legalized by the 2018 loophole.
| linkregister wrote:
| This is a perfect example of the opportunity for federalism.
| Any state could --and many did-- close the loophole. You
| mentioned emergency regulation from the Texas governor. New
| recreational substances are discovered and introduced to
| market continuously. States can use their legislative
| authority to address them. Delta-9, Spice, and other delta-8
| THC analogues have been successfully addressed by states.
|
| The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the
| ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable
| for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written
| amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended
| consequences.
| ls612 wrote:
| But I'm not aware of many (any?) states that chose to close
| the loophole with a ban. Most, even ruby red Texas, just
| passed a state regulatory regime that included testing and
| taxation, as well as a 21 year old cutoff for buyers.
| pogue wrote:
| Contact your representatives and let them know this is BS. [1]
| When Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott was trying to ban that same
| "loophole" the business community had time to organize & lobby
| against it, but in addition, regular citizens sent in over 120k
| letters, there's footage of people moving boxes and boxes of
| letters into his office. [2] In the end, he folded and kept the
| law as it was despite a pretty big push from his party. Was that
| the reason he didn't end up acting on it? It's hard to know, but
| it definitely showed him public sentiment was against it.
|
| Don't be apathetic! Letters & phone calls work best, but emails
| through their official contact page at least get glanced at by an
| intern.
|
| [1] _Find and contact elected officials_
| https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
|
| [2] _120,000 Texans send letters and petitions against THC ban to
| Gov. Abbott_ https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-06-03/austin-tx-
| thc-ban-la...
| somehnguy wrote:
| It's infuriating to take the time to draft & send a thought out
| email to my representatives only to receive a canned email 8
| months later.
|
| Most of the time the response is even something like "ok cool
| opinion but I believe the opposite so bummer" (obviously
| exaggerated but the meaning is identical).
|
| I will try a letter at some point, email feels completely
| useless.
| pogue wrote:
| Time is of the essence, so I might just have a chatbot draft
| me something quickly and edit it or rewrite it to more what I
| want to say. Just emphasize the main points that even the
| linked article mentions - hugely bad for business, loss of
| taxes, bad for veterans, people will just go back to the
| black market for their needs, etc. I'm kind of surprised I'm
| not finding sites like NORML have any of those "take action"
| forms on their site you just fill in and it sends it out to
| all your representatives automatically.
|
| Regardless, it doesn't need to be something you spend hours
| pouring your heart into.
|
| Some representatives respond differently than others. I've
| gotten boilerplate letters back, and I've even had phone
| calls back with someone from their office. It really just
| depends.
|
| EDIT: It's already been signed into law, so now they have 1
| year to try and remedy the situation... :(
|
| _Trump Signs Bill To Recriminalize Hemp THC Products, Years
| After Approving Their Legalization_
| https://www.marijuanamoment.net/congress-passes-bill-to-
| recr...
| candiddevmike wrote:
| The party of small government killing a new, billion dollar
| industry because Mitch McConnell's state beverage is seeing
| declining sales.
| iammjm wrote:
| A similar thing can be observed in Germany: the most anti-
| cannabis state is the state that produces the most alcohol
| (Bavaria)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's less because Bavaria makes beer, otherwise the wine
| states would also impede cannabis.
|
| The problem is that Soder and his CSU are obviously following
| the old Nixon attitude of targetting cannabis to hit left-
| wings [1]:
|
| > You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it
| illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting
| the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
| with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could
| disrupt those communities.
|
| And then you got the absolute deranged ones, like Marlene
| "Cannabis ist verboten, weil es eine illegale Droge ist"
| (cannabis is banned because it's an illegal drug") Mortler or
| Daniela "Cannabis ist kein Brokkoli" (cannabis ain't
| broccoli) Ludwig [2]. Imagine, these two utter failures were
| the official drug policy heads.
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-
| ehrlichman-...
|
| [2] https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/legalisierung-
| von-c...
| InTheArena wrote:
| You realize that this statement was completely fabricated
| by a legalization proponent, correct? No historian takes
| that "quote" seriously.
| hellisothers wrote:
| In my experience (of friends who drink and/or smoke weed)
| weed isn't replacing drinking wine, it's replacing drinking
| beer and booze.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Bavarian attitude towards cannabis always bordered on
| authoritarianism, ever before weed legalisation became a
| political mainstream topic.
|
| Police was infamous for kicking in your door if a random
| copper walked home and smelled weed. "You smell like you
| got some weed on you" was a popular excuse the cops used
| at Munich Central Station to fleece everyone they deemed
| to look like a punk or, worse, Black person.
|
| And the latter, well, it's certainly not a coincidence
| that the cops asked for, and got, the weapon ban zones in
| train stations giving them back the authority to fleece
| people at will, right after the cannabis legalisation
| came in force last year.
|
| It's not about cannabis, it's not about the guns, it's
| all about the ability of the fucking cops to abuse their
| power whenever they goddamn want to, and Bavarian police
| are notable in Germany for being particularly aggressive
| and ignorant.
| dude250711 wrote:
| Best of luck to them! I am not forced to inhale beer while
| walking down the street, yet there is seemingly always a
| pothead around.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Then you don't live, like me, in the Ballard neighborhood
| of seattle where there must be 50 microbreweries. Every few
| mornings the whole neighborhood smells like rotting bread.
| I'd be happy to run into someone smoking weed on the street
| during those times, I find that smell much more pleasent.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Or never encountered the drunks on Alki during the
| summer.
| AngryData wrote:
| And? There is also always people smelling like shit, with
| perfume, driving combustion vehicles, using grills, or
| working in any of the numerous industries that create
| smells. Why is marijuana so special that it needs to be
| dealt with, but I can be assaulted by some petrochemical
| and whale barf cocktail fumes with no restriction?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I thought that was because of the tit-for-tat with Canada.
|
| I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-hand.
|
| Personally, I don't drink or smoke, but I think the "war on
| drugs" has been a miserable failure that has been, for the most
| part, a footgun.
| nickff wrote:
| It is my understanding that neither Canada nor the USA allows
| for the importation of products containing THC, so I don't
| see this as having anything to do with Canada. Perhaps I do
| not understand what you mean to say?
| ModernMech wrote:
| Since tariffs were placed on Canada, Canada has been
| boycotting American industries like whisky, specifically
| because they are significant industries in Republican-
| controlled states. I don't know whether this move against
| THC is a response to that pressure, but that's the
| reference.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You're missing the parent comment's point. Bourbon sales
| are way down significantly because the largest liquor
| importer on the continent (Liquor Control Board of Ontario)
| has banned the import of all American products. Many other
| provinces followed suit.
|
| They can blame Trump, not go after Hemp farmers.
| guyzero wrote:
| Canada has pulled American liquor from sales as a tariff
| retaliation, so Kentucky bourbon sales have dropped
| considerably. Thus we have the senator from Kentucky trying
| to kill off domestic competitors for Kentucky liquor.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'd think a joint and a glass of bourbon would go hand-in-
| hand.
|
| They don't. Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot. I might
| have a beer when I'm stoned, but only a very tasty one, and
| only one.
|
| I think that extremely light pot smoking is killing alcohol
| sales. The tiniest bit of pot is just as pleasing as a mild
| alcohol buzz, and an alcohol buzz kills the effect of pot. I
| know I got in the habit for a while of smoking a tiny, tiny
| bit when I got home, with the effect long gone before I went
| to sleep. Back in the day (and sometimes still), I would have
| had one beer, or one glass of wine.
| bloppe wrote:
| In my experience, there is no such nullification.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I. am. not. strunk.
| kylebebak wrote:
| There are terms for the combined effects of drinking
| alcohol and smoking weed. Cross-faded in English, pachipedo
| in Spanish. I find these terms and the effects they refer
| to enjoyable.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Drunkenness just kind of nullifies pot.
|
| ???
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l11hARAnpcM
| billy99k wrote:
| I disagree. Legalizing drugs has only created larger black
| markets in states like California and allowed cartels to
| legally get into the business and gain more power in other
| countries.
| viraptor wrote:
| Can you explain how legalisation created larger black
| markets? Got some stats for that?
| hamdingers wrote:
| > the "war on drugs" has been a miserable failure that has
| been, for the most part, a footgun.
|
| It has accomplished everything its proponents hoped for and
| much more.
|
| "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it
| illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting
| the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
| with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could
| disrupt those communities"
|
| - John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president for domestic
| affairs under Richard Nixon
| garciasn wrote:
| Typical war on the 'others' as championed by the
| Conservative party members: terrorists, Communists,
| immigrants, 'drug' users, hippies, ANTIFA, liberals, etc,
| etc, etc.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >The party of small government killing a new, billion dollar
| industry because Mitch McConnell's state beverage is seeing
| declining sales.
|
| McConnel sponsored the original bill. Kentucky is historically
| one of the largest hemp producing states. The whole thing just
| shows how inept the entire administration is. DJT 45 signed the
| original law himself, after it was drafted and passed by his
| Republican house and senate.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Let's be clear McConnel isn't writing or doing anything. The
| man has been in a 'Weekend at Bernies' state for at least a
| couple of years. He's on camera being literally held up by
| his aides and seemingly having moments where he goes
| completely no communicative IN FRONT OF CAMERS several times,
| and not in a "I just don't have anything to say way" but just
| straight up 'freezing' in place. Either because of dementia
| or some kind of seizure.
| loeg wrote:
| There is no party of small government in the US. Libertarians
| have a long-standing alliance with mainstream Republicans, but
| they are unambiguously the smaller and weaker member.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| It won't take effect for a year. Plenty of time to stock up.
| Gunax wrote:
| This is going to be controversial because it steps into the
| shutdown blame game.
|
| I think I am more interested in the mechanics of how this
| happens. Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation?
| What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
| ronsor wrote:
| > Why do we need to attach riders / sneak in legislation?
|
| Because they can't agree on anything normally, so the only way
| to make changes is to shove them in with things they _must_
| agree on.
|
| > What changes could we make to the constitution to avoid this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_rule
|
| Multiple states already have this.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| This can have interesting consequences, because politicians
| are going to be politicians.
|
| > The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, arguing that the
| omnibus bill, whose original title is over 300 words before
| it keels over in repetition of the word "subdivision,"
| violated the single-subject rule.
|
| https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2025/09/the-
| minnes...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Scoping the single subject gets a bit tough, in practice.
| petcat wrote:
| It works just fine for the vast majority of US states,
| including all the largest ones (California, New York,
| Texas). I don't think the federal government is special
| here.
| pacoWebConsult wrote:
| The federal government has grown immensely since the early 20th
| century due to the interpretations of the commerce clause
| allowing more and more federal legislation and rules to broadly
| be applied to essentially override state legislation.
|
| The 10th amendment exists for a reason. The system wasn't
| intended for congress to even control something like this in
| the first place.
| Gunax wrote:
| We definitely are straining the rules. I _think_ we actually
| want a federal government like this. The reality on the
| ground is that most people want things like FDA and FCC at
| the federal level.
|
| Maybe we just need to change the constitution--which I know
| is technically possible but im practically it's frozen. It's
| like a legacy API no one wants to touch.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate, the positive of allowing legislation
| to include unrelated riders is that it promotes compromise. And
| compromise is how a healthy democracy should operate.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| The compromise should be on the content of the bill specific
| to the subject. It is not a compromise to allow a rider that
| funnels money to some pet project. That is buying votes.
| petcat wrote:
| Oftentimes there can be no compromise on the specific
| subject. So the bill is either DOA or just immediately
| passed without any debate.
|
| Allowing several issues to be passed as a singular unit
| provides opportunity for an agreement to be made about
| several issues at once. Think of it like a Collective
| Bargaining Agreement.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| That is fine. If our representatives can't come to a
| compromise then it probably shouldn't be done at the
| federal level.
| Gunax wrote:
| Yes, that's a really good point!
| xmprt wrote:
| You don't need to have a bunch of unrelated riders to
| compromise. If the bill is healthcare funding, the compromise
| could be something like who receives the assistance, whether
| there are any cutoffs, how to implement it, etc.
|
| Or if that's really impossible, you could compromise on
| separate bills. If people ever break promises, that's a
| reason not to trust them in the future and it's a lot more
| clear to the public about who voted which way rather than
| having a rider which no one really understands where it came
| from.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Compromise to what, to reopen the Government?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Single subject bill amendment. Several states require single
| subject bills in State legislature. The same must be required
| at the federal level. The pushback has always been "then
| nothing will get done". From where I am standing that would be
| a good thing. No more sneaking shit in at the last minute. Vote
| on every single issue. People will still try to sneak stuff in.
| I remember seeing a video of a Minnesota legislator admonishing
| his colleges for trying to do omnibus bills after they passed a
| single subject amendment.
|
| To get such an amendment passed it would have to come from the
| States. Nobody that is already in congress is going to vote for
| this. It is a huge restriction on their power to spend our
| money.
|
| Here is Alaska's single bill requirement: The Alaska
| Constitution Art II, Section 13. Form of Bills reads: Every
| bill shall be confined to one subject unless it is an
| appropriation bill or one codifying, revising, or rearranging
| existing laws. Bills for appropriations shall be confined to
| appropriations. The subject of each bill shall be expressed in
| the title. The enacting clause shall be: "Be it enacted by the
| Legislature of the State of Alaska."
| Gunax wrote:
| Hmm, I've never heard of this. My initial gut reaction is
| that this _sounds_ good but the definition of 'single
| subject' is dubious. With enough leeway and creativity,
| anything can be a single subject.
|
| But if it works, then maybe it's what we need.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Frankly, there are a ton of laws that seem dubious and
| underspecified to a person with an engineering mindset.
| This is by design, and it is the reason we have so many
| judges - because writing laws that clearly specify how they
| apply to every possible situation is often impossible. The
| law tries to make its intent clear, tries to lay out
| reasonably specific outlines, but necessarily must rely on
| the interpretation of those who judge the application of
| laws to cases.
| bloppe wrote:
| Alaska is effectively a one-party state. At the federal
| level, you almost always need compromise to clear a
| filibuster, and it's easier to find compromise if you can
| draw on more subjects. Maybe the Democrats get cheaper health
| care while the Republicans get a giant bust of Trump
| installed on the former site of the Lincoln memorial. Neither
| measure would pass in isolation, but together they might.
| eszed wrote:
| So they could agree to pass two bills. This would require
| the two "sides" to trust each other, but it could (ideally
| would) also function to _build_ trust, which would be a
| good thing.
| bloppe wrote:
| Assuming there was enough trust to "guarantee" that one
| bill would pass right after the other, then what's the
| point of having the single subject rule in the first
| place? Sounds like you still have riders but with extra
| steps (and an opportunity to betray trust).
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| You say that like everybody that is in one party agrees on
| everything. That is absolutely false.
|
| It is also an inaccurate portrayal of Alaska state
| politics. While historically the State Legislature has been
| majority republican it has been more even since 2015ish.
| Which is coincidentally when weed was made legal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_House_of_Representativ
| e...
|
| How we vote in federal elections has more to do with
| Republicans in general being more aligned with the majority
| interests in Alaska.
| bloppe wrote:
| Of course you don't have to agree on everything, but the
| whole point of joining a party is to coordinate action to
| maximize power. Whether you agree with the party policies
| doesn't matter if you vote for them anyway to gain
| political currency with your party that you can hopefully
| spend later on your own priorities.
|
| That said, I guess the Alaska legislature is a lot more
| balanced than I assumed. If the single subject rule works
| there, bravo. Congress is a different beast, though.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's not the constitution. It's the American people (on
| average) who tolerate corruption and crime within their
| leaders.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I remember being lectured about how this needed to be a "clean
| funding bill".
| gwbas1c wrote:
| All of this stuff is already built around loopholes.
|
| > But the provision that was inserted into the government funding
| bill makes illegal any hemp product that contains more than 0.4
| milligrams of THC per container.
|
| Now the online "hemp" industry will shift to selling gummies in
| "containers" that really equate to individually wrapped. You'll
| get bulk discounts for buying groups of 30 "containers", but what
| you get will feel like Japanese-style individual wrapping.
|
| BTW: This was kinda-sorta what I encountered when I bought
| gummies in Ontario, Canada. The gummy was in a single "container"
| and had roughly ~0.4 mg THC.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| 0.4 mg is an extremely low amount. The as far as I understand
| (and have seen) the limit of THC in Ontario is 10 mg/container
| for gummies. Some companies will get around that limit by
| packaging multiple 10 mg THC bags together.
|
| While it's annoying and definitely creates more waste than is
| needed, 10 mg is a relatively reasonable limit. Most people
| aren't going to consume more than 10 mg THC worth of gummies in
| one sitting (at least if they're getting something government-
| sactioned).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's absolutely insane how unrelated provisions can be inserted
| into a CR instead of being debated and passed on their own merits
| (or bundled with related laws).
|
| Regardless of what the measure is, or what party it's coming
| from, it's a significant flaw in the process.
| tmnvix wrote:
| One man's flaw is another man's feature.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| "one man" -> American People; "another man" -> corrupt
| politicians
| philcrocket wrote:
| As others mentioned, unfortunately the last bill allowed for some
| large loopholes and emboldened underground growers (also due to
| more lax state laws) to grow and flood the market with sub-par or
| even poisonous product. It'd a billion dollar market that state
| actors and cartels alike are using to launder money (and ruin
| lives). Very informative video on this:
| https://youtu.be/3qC4c-zNxTg?si=oy4ab6kuo27fJqcx
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Wouldn't the correct solution be to close the loopholes or make
| more strict regulations? Not shut down everything.
| tediousgraffit1 wrote:
| By that logic, we should ban lettuce[1] next
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/e-coli-outbreak-
| trac...
| nxor wrote:
| I have friends who smoke and have seen over the years how they've
| abandoned hobbies in favor of smoking more. Where's the outrage
| about that? I take public transport and the people who smoke make
| the entire train smell. I just don't understand why people see
| this as a bad thing. Other than I agree the implementation will
| probably be awful.
| ng12 wrote:
| Outrage about what? I know people whose hobbies cab generally
| be summed up as "drinking alcohol". We already decided
| prohibition didn't work once.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > I have friends who smoke and have seen over the years how
| they've abandoned hobbies in favor of smoking more. Where's the
| outrage about that?
|
| Why in the world would I or anyone else have any right to be
| outraged over someone trading one hobby for another?
|
| > I take public transport and the people who smoke make the
| entire train smell.
|
| Make and enforce laws about smoking on public transport.
| pissmeself wrote:
| > Where's the outrage about that? I take public transport and
| the people who smoke make the entire train smell.
|
| So do fatties. I don't want fatties on the bus, but I don't get
| what I want :(
| Animats wrote:
| This corrects a drafting error. There were never supposed to be
| be products containing THC selling in gas stations.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| This kills the entire hemp flower market.
|
| Our state similarly tried to get it outlawed by using these
| excuses but ignoring the many shops where they are just selling
| quality product, not allowing kids, etc.
| zapataband2 wrote:
| I guess all those involved in burgeoning hemp trade are just in
| time for the mines to re-open. We're ruled by sociopaths and we
| don't live in a democracy.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from recently?
| I get people have been complaining about 'flyover' states for a
| while now, but the Republicans also have the majority in the
| House at the moment.
|
| At least wait until the House doesn't represent the current
| majority party in the Senate (like it almost certainly will again
| eventually) to make that argument.
|
| I'm mildly worried that it's just an attempt to speed up major
| change the next time a party has a super majority, by planting
| the seeds early...
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's nothing new. It's fundamentally undemocratic and the
| reasons for having it are long gone. I don't care who controls
| it, it should go or at the very least be dramatically reformed.
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| There is the concept of illiberal democracy. The Senate,
| according to most political scientists who study this, is an
| important part of cutting that off that because bicameralism
| along with independent courts etc are good.
|
| It's mostly populism rising and not realizing how dangerous
| it would be to have another check on power removed. Reform
| the system, don't just turn to blind populism.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's possible to reform the system. Its way
| too stacked towards corporate interests.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > No, we need the House of Lords, otherwise the plebeians
| might do something crazy like tax us!
| wat10000 wrote:
| Do those political scientists say that it has to be so
| extremely unequal in its representation?
|
| Right now, the least representative parts of our government
| are the ones pushing _towards_ illiberality and populism.
| "Better democracy can be dangerous" really falls flat when
| our existing worse democracy is actively being dangerous.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the least representative parts of our government are
| the ones pushing towards illiberality and populism_
|
| Source? The President and--until like 24 hours ago--the
| House have been leading the charge on illiberalism and
| populism.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's fundamentally undemocratic and the reasons for
| having it are long gone_
|
| Undemocratic is insufficient for removing a governing body
| _per se_. (Courts are technically undemocratic. That doesn 't
| make them bad.)
|
| Compared with the House, the Senate has behaved as designed--
| a far more mature body that actually deliberates from time to
| time.
| wat10000 wrote:
| We just had the federal government shut down for six weeks
| because the Senate is broken. Maybe that's behaving as
| designed, but I don't really care if it's doing what some
| people 250 years ago thought it should do or not.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We just had the federal government shut down for six
| weeks because the Senate is broken_
|
| You could turn the Senate into a purely-representative
| body and you'd still have the same problem.
|
| You _could_ abolish the Senate and have a unicameral
| House. But then we 'd never have survived 250 years as a
| democracy. (What do you think Mike Johnson and Trump with
| unilateral power would have done over the last 6 months?)
|
| > _I don 't really care if it's doing what some people
| 250 years ago thought_
|
| The government didn't shut down 250 years ago. Shutdowns
| are a modern phenomenon, mostly dating to a Carter-era
| legal opinion that said "if any work continued in an
| agency where there wasn't money, the employees were
| behaving like illegal volunteers" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2013/09/30/227292952/a-short-
| history-of-...
| wat10000 wrote:
| The fact that the Senate can't pass things without a 60%
| majority, despite that not being a thing in the
| constitution, is just another facet of its undemocratic
| nature. The body has decided for itself, no matter what
| the people want or what the constitution says.
|
| And this is definitely not a necessary aspect of the
| system. Even if you want to argue that the Senate itself
| is essential, the ridiculous modern filibuster
| demonstrably is not, since it only became this way in
| recent decades.
|
| I'd be fine with a bicameral legislature as long as both
| houses were actually representative. Maybe you'd have one
| with short terms and one with long terms. But having a
| body where California and Wyoming both get two
| representatives is just ridiculous.
|
| I'm curious what _you_ think Johnson and Trump would have
| done over the last 6 months without the Senate. It looks
| to me like they 're doing pretty much whatever they want
| aside from passing the recent spending bill, and to the
| extent that they aren't, it's because of a handful of
| Republican holdouts in the House, not because the Senate
| stands in their way. And if we had the Senate rules from
| thirty years ago the Senate wouldn't stand in their way
| either.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _body has decided for itself, no matter what the people
| want or what the constitution says_
|
| _All_ representative bodies have rules. They have to in
| order to function. The House, like the Senate, has rules.
| And both of them can amend them by simple majority.
|
| (Until recently, the public didn't have a particular
| opinion on the filibuster [1].)
|
| > _the ridiculous modern filibuster demonstrably is not,
| since it only became this way in recent decades_
|
| Sure. Agreed. I'd honestly argue the concept of shutting
| down the government is dumber and setting a debt ceiling
| for already-appropriated and spent funds is
| unconstitutional.
|
| > _curious what you think Johnson and Trump would have
| done over the last 6 months without the Senate_
|
| All the crap Trump is doing by fiat would have been
| passed into law. That, in turn, would strongly reduce the
| ability for the courts to call foul.
|
| > _if we had the Senate rules from thirty years ago the
| Senate wouldn 't stand in their way either_
|
| The filibuster has only been invoked this session around
| this budget dispute.
|
| A fundamental aspects that makes the Senate different is
| each Senator is elected by more people, and thus must
| cater to more-diverse interests, than a Congressman, and
| they have longer terms. That means more people in the
| Senate must think about how what they're doing today will
| look after 2028.
|
| [1] https://navigatorresearch.org/three-in-four-
| americans-feel-g...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I don't know what you're talking about, since abolishing the
| Senate (or at least making it the lesser of the two bodies) is
| anything but nonsense.
|
| edit: Since I cannot respond due to throttling, I agree with
| the below idea of statewide house races, but by doing
| Proportional representation and a ranked/approval voting
| system.
| harimau777 wrote:
| If anything I think we need to make the House more like the
| Senate by making them run state wide. That would do a lot to
| get rid of the hyper partisan nutjobs since there's usually
| more ideological diversity across a state than in a given
| district. As a bonus it would also get rid of gerrymandering.
| evil-olive wrote:
| > Where'd all this abolish the senate nonsense come from
| recently?
|
| if you think it's recent, you haven't been paying particularly
| close attention
|
| 2021: The Senate Cannot Be Reformed -- It Can Only Be Abolished
| [0]
|
| 2018: The Case for Abolishing the Senate [1]
|
| 2004: What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States
| Senate [2]
|
| and that's just from the first page of Kagi results for
| "abolish the senate". I have no doubt it goes back farther than
| that if I actually went digging for historical sources.
|
| the imbalance of power is only going to get worse as time goes
| on, as well [3]
|
| > By 2040, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by 30
| percent of the Senate
|
| > "David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and
| international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040,
| about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest
| states," Seib wrote. "They will have only 30 senators
| representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will
| have 70 senators representing them."
|
| 0: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abolish-us-
| senate...
|
| 1: https://www.gq.com/story/the-case-for-abolishing-the-senate
|
| 2: https://harpers.org/archive/2004/05/what-democracy-the-
| case-...
|
| 3:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...
| hemp_is_canvas wrote:
| I suggest scholars such as Bednar.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287234169_The_Robus.
| ..
|
| It's way, way more complicated than these articles suggest.
| smcin wrote:
| I think you're referring to "abolish the Senate _filibuster_
| rule "? recent lobbying.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Its more about abolishing the premise of the Senate where
| every state gets 2 senators regardless of their population.
|
| (Though the filibuster issue is also a valid debate lately)
|
| The founders had decent intentions for this design, but I'm
| fairly sure the vast majority of them would have changed
| their mind if they knew just how concentrated the population
| of the US would end up and how the system would act to give
| the minority far too much power rather than protect them from
| having too little.
| AngryData wrote:
| Because people want an excuse to blame our problems on, and
| people living in big cities think they should be able to better
| dictate law as they often view poor rural people and their
| lives with contempt. And many politicians are happy to go along
| with because it means more power for themselves and less
| restrictions on how they use it.
|
| Real solutions to the imbalance would be to split up big states
| into more smaller states, but big states don't like that
| because it means they have less power as individual smaller
| states. And we have already have congressman holding far more
| power than they were originally meant to because they froze
| congressional count in the 1929 reapportionment act which means
| we only have 1/3 of the amount of congressman representatives
| we are suppose to have.
|
| The US political and legislative system has been corrupted
| beyond reason and this is just the next step to further
| consolidate political power and law into the hands of a few.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| > people living in big cities think they should be able to
| better dictate law as they often view poor rural people and
| their lives with contempt.
|
| Or they want to live in a democracy where every single person
| is represented equally to every single other person. And not
| a system where some people are "more equal" to others.
|
| That's not even getting into how this weirdly, strangely
| seems to align up with a history of slavery and racism in the
| US. Total coincidence that some people think it's fair those
| "urban people" get 3/5 of a vote compared to them, the
| enlightened farmers who need to save others from themselves.
|
| And before you say "well the house and electoral college are
| proportional" - no, they absolutely are not since 1929. Try
| that talking point when the apportionment act is repealed.
|
| Nor are districts even conceivably "local" anymore for those
| arguing about "personal governance".
| jjk166 wrote:
| The Senate has been nothing but a non-population-proportional
| version of the House since the 17th amendment. The House was
| supposed to give voice to the people while the Senate saw to
| the needs of the nation. The need for the house and senate to
| work together would balance these often competing needs. Direct
| election of senators is a worst of both worlds situation -
| democracy where some people's votes count for more than others.
| Since the 17th amendment was ratified, the legislature has
| ceded tremendous power to the executive and judiciary as it has
| become steadily more ineffectual, and public perception of the
| institution has plummeted. This has only accelerated in recent
| decades. Abolishing the senate is only one potential form that
| reform could take, but I don't know how anyone could look at
| the current situation and not see the need for some type of
| reform to get the legislative branch back on track.
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