US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

We love to blame the common clay, don't we. You can win a majority of voters and lose an election. There are systemic problems, starting with money in politics, two senators per state, the electoral college and gerrymandering.

We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people being heard. Representatives are the face for too many people for them to truly represent their constituents.

You can win a majority of voters and lose an election, but that's not what happened. 77 million people voted for Trump, and it's not like he acted like a mild mannered constitutional conservative with a sensible reform package and turned into a vindictive, chaotic wannabe autocrat whose closest thing to a redeeming feature is is stupidity afterwards. The electoral college and gerrymandering may be ludicrous, but that's not why he won, and nor is lack of funds for opponents. The system of checks and balances isn't what they were cracked up to be, but the reason he's dismantling it is because when he telegraphed that he was going to do it the people of the land cheered him so loudly anyone else that wanted their votes stepped in line.

Yet the people of the state continue to allow this state of affairs to persist

It’s either free and people are actively choosing this or they are not free and choosing comfort of slavery than risking death for freedom

George Carlin said it best:

“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78321-now-there-s-one-thing...

Video version: https://youtu.be/rVXekzwkz10?si=90VqlzOLiUS_7yFx

Well, yes, the senate is useless. It was useful to check the South’s power in the Great Conpromise, but now the most deliberative body is not needed when the House can slow things down all by itself. Unicameral works for me.

Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.

It doesn't for me. That is an acceptance that we are a single federal government and the states are nothing more than administrative units of that federal government. For states to remain as sovereign entities that have collectively created the federal government the entity of the state must have representation at the federal level.

As for returning back to the original state appointment of senators, that is required for the senate to appropriately represent the state government at the federal level.

The original house apportionment had representatives that had about 35000 people. The size of the house was locked at 435 in 1913. Before then the number of representatives grew slower than population but still grew. After the last 2020 census there are 761,000 people per representative. The unevenness of how many constituents a representative from Wyoming has vs a representative from California has is a point of contention in higher population states. The complaint is that the representatives from smaller states have more proportional power. I think that is a bit ridiculous but that is what some Californian's told me. Increasing the size of the house to have a more proportional representation would alleviate that point of contention between states.

Gerrymandering is a side effect of not increasing the size of the house.