1. Intentionality does not preclude a mistake. The makeup of the Senate gives outsized power to rural states with very few people in them, and in practice is a huge giveaway to the right wing.
2. The House's size is also capped, and not directly based on population, which is completely unnecessary in this age of digital communication. There is no reason why we couldn't return the number of representatives to being explicitly population-based—say, 1 representative per 50k constituents, or the like. That would increase the size of the House by about 15-fold, make every representative much more dependent on the votes of their particular district, make gerrymandering much harder (as districts will be smaller and there will be more of them), and make the electoral college much more representative and harder to game.
3. See #1.
4. The European Commission is widely criticized as being the least democratic, most unresponsive, most oligarch-friendly body in Europe.
5. "Representative government" does not have to mean "tyranny of the majority". There are plenty of checks and balances even in the current system that would prevent that sort of thing, provided the enforcement mechanisms weren't entirely operated by and for Trump.
Comments
1. Intentionality does not preclude a mistake. The makeup of the Senate gives outsized power to rural states with very few people in them, and in practice is a huge giveaway to the right wing.
2. The House's size is also capped, and not directly based on population, which is completely unnecessary in this age of digital communication. There is no reason why we couldn't return the number of representatives to being explicitly population-based—say, 1 representative per 50k constituents, or the like. That would increase the size of the House by about 15-fold, make every representative much more dependent on the votes of their particular district, make gerrymandering much harder (as districts will be smaller and there will be more of them), and make the electoral college much more representative and harder to game.
3. See #1.
4. The European Commission is widely criticized as being the least democratic, most unresponsive, most oligarch-friendly body in Europe.
5. "Representative government" does not have to mean "tyranny of the majority". There are plenty of checks and balances even in the current system that would prevent that sort of thing, provided the enforcement mechanisms weren't entirely operated by and for Trump.