Revising American Politics: The House of Representatives

There are two posts I've been thinking about making lately.  One is about how our perceptions affect how we view the physical reality around us in some profound ways (I thought no one would read it if I did make the post but my brother encouraged me to go ahead and write it down) and another post about some "simple" changes to improve the political system in the US.  I'll do the latter here.

Room for improvement.  It almost goes without saying that there are potential ways to improve the political system in the US.  I am no friend of the idea of political parties.  It is sometimes a puzzle to me how political parties took over politics in the US (if you don't understand this statement read the constitution carefully and look up Jefferson's statements about this).  However, the fact is, even with the number of independents rising, political parties are here to stay, and what I am proposing could be argued to actually be in favor of political parties.  The problem in the US is that there is not a diversity of political ideas at the higher levels of politics.  We live in a two party system.  There is really very little difference between the two parties.  What do republicans stand for?; they are against the democrats; and the democrats don't seem to know what they stand for except to oppose the republicans.  This statement is brutal but I am trying to break people out of the usual way they view "their" party; they only serve as alternative ritual moieties to give people a sense of membership (similar to a symbolic sports fan identity and the sense of community it brings) and to alternate the nominal ruling party between elections.  It has been argued elsewhere that the mechanics of the election system in the US has promoted and stabilized the two party system.  However, having a weak sense of an authentic ideological base makes you susceptible to being taken advantage of according to the perceived whims of popular culture promoted by the media and an influential minority with ulterior motives (the Iraq war for example). 

Many parliamentary systems in other countries work in a very different way.  When elections are held you vote for a party.  Then the total number of votes are analyzed and the seats in the parliament are divided up according to the percentage of votes.  So if the labor party has 30% of the votes, the christian democrats 20%, and the greens 10% of the votes they get the same number of seats in parliament.  This allows for a broader representation of ideologies because the majority in any single region may be only the labor party.  Minority parties (known as "third" parties in the US) will be unlikely to be a majority in any single geographic division, and thus excluded from the representative democracy completely.  However, with the concept of one person one vote, isn't it more democratic to include the input of these parties that people voted for---instead of artificially exaggerating  the tyranny of the majority?  How many people became members of the democrat or republican parties only because they felt like there was no alternative?  Does this promote the free dissemination of ideas or artificially prop up the strength of those that are already ruling?  The large negative to the parliamentary system is the argument that it makes for a very unstable government.  With no party in the majority ruling coalitions have to be negotiated and these have a habit of falling apart when interests get crossed.  (One things I am not advocating is having the system disbanded and calling for reelection midterm; this really does unnecessarily destabilize the system.  Once elected they are in it together for the full term and have to learn to work out their differences.) 

Originally, the house of representatives was to be the voice of the people.  Why it is based on geographic districts I have never really understood; the senate already does that by states.  The senate on the other hand was originally to represent state governments within the federal government.  However, the 17th amendment altered this so that senators were elected by popular vote within the states.  So now we seem to have two redundant systems---representation by popular election by geographic region; however, one has the disadvantage of gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering is the way geographic house districts are determined by the ruling party and it is no secret that this is done to give the ruling party more power and to strengthen its reelection---this is ridiculous and I cannot understand how it is legal.  A democracy should reflect the will of the people not redistricting tricks to divide up votes you don't agree with and consolidate power into the hands of the fewer.

A proposed solution:  Let's combine the stability of the traditional US representation system with the democracy of a parliamentary system.  The senate serves its purpose by popular vote representation of geographic regions---and accomplishes this without gerrymandering.  However, this removes many voices from the political process.  What if we reduced the house from 435 to 250 members.  Then 200 seats in the house were divided up by the proportion of votes for political parties, using the total number of votes across the entire United States.  Each of these seats gets the same full vote.  The remaining 50 seats each get 1/50th of a vote (they really only serve as a tie breaker in voting dynamics---we don't want a repeat of the conflict of interest of Al Gore being the tie breaker in his own election) but they represent by proportion, the remaining parties that were not represented in the first 200 seats.  You can think of them as an upper and lower house of parliament if you like.  Importantly however, any individual in any of the 250 seats can bring a bill up before the house.  This would allow for a more dynamic range of ideas and opinions to enter into our federal legislature and would be more democratically representative of the people of the United States, which is the whole point in the first place.

The first impression is that this kind of change cannot be done, but the 17th Amendment and the Apportionment Act of 1911, in fact even the 12th Amendment, which can be argued to be a result of the party system, suggests that these kinds of fundamental changes can be made.

Who that argues they are for democracy could be against this?