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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.

I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.

I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.

house of representatives having 1,000 members

Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.

(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)

Small City

Ackchually, according to the United Nations you don't hit "city" status until 50,000 people, so this would just be a mid-sized town.

Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.

I don't see why roll call votes are necessary. Just use an electronic tabulator like they used to poll the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.

Recursive sub-parliaments?

Imagine the committee appointment drama.

I've done the math, and if we kept up with the original intent, we'd be close to 1776 congressmen right now.

I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.

So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).

Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.

I'd say most of the law making gets done in the bureaucracy. And technically that bureaucracy is under the presidents authority, but reality is a much different picture. The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds. But they rarely make much of an impact. The only ruling I can think of recently that impacted me was their handling of homelessness.

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