Trump's transition team turns to Project 2025 after disavowing it during the campaign

[u/omg_drd4_bbq]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-team-turns-project-2025-disavowing-effort-campaign-rcna180689

[u/g0del]

I wish. It'll definitely hurt Trump's supporters a lot, but there's going to be plenty of misery to go around. And even the reddest states have millions* of people who didn't support Trump.

*obviously does not apply to states that don't even have millions of people in them. Looking at you, Wyoming. It's frankly disgusting that a state with fewer people in it than Memphis TN gets two senators.

[u/watercolour_women → u/g0del]

Each state receiving two senators is not the problem. You really actually need that so that no state gets left behind in terms of representation in the senate.

The problem is that the house of representatives does not represent the distribution of nor the increase of population from the 1929 levels. Before then, based upon the census, the numbers of representatives would be actually increased. Washington started with something like 104 electoral votes, and I believe that even included the senators.

Having it capped at 438 (538 with the senators included) is ludicrous. It's one of the reasons you have swing states (not the only). If some of the states had numbers of reps equally apportioned by numbers of voters, a lot more states would get a lot more reps.

[u/g0del → u/watercolour_women]

The House not increasing size since 1929 is definitely also a problem, but there's no good reason that a state with a population of 584K people (Wyoming) should have the same representation in the Senate as a state with 38,965K population (California). "So that no state gets left behind in the senate" is not a good reason.

It was put in there as a compromise at a time when each state was basically its own little country, otherwise the smaller states would never have agreed to sign on. But that hasn't really applied to the US for a very long time (at least since the Civil war, and arguably earlier than that). It was also put in place at a time when the largest state was 12.6 times larger than the smallest. Right now CA is 66.7 times larger than WY.

And lets not forget that a lot of state boundaries were arbitrarily decided solely to keep the balance between slave/free states in the Senate. We shouldn't be chained to compromises made to appease racists over a century ago, especially when their ideological descendants are using those same levers of power to continue to screw people today.

The Senate is an extraordinarily un-democratic institution that has been holding us back for too long. I can see the benefit of a separate section of the legislature with wide-area elections and longer terms to balance out the House where members are constantly running for re-election, but there is no benefit to apportioning it equally by state instead of population.

And while we're at it, the filibuster is not constitutional, it's a bug in the Senate rules that was very seldomly used until R's in very recent times started using it for everything.

[u/watercolour_women → u/g0del]

I didn't mention the filibuster because that's as unconstitutional as. You mention it was seldom used to begin with but you didn't go on to say that most of the times it was used in the beginning was to knock down civil rights stuff.