Surprise surprise, an industry doesn’t work like people assume it does. This applies to literally everything, everyday in society. Yet society keeps on rolling along because they are done this way for a reason. Nothing is new anymore, things work the way they do because that’s how it works best. That is until the media intentionally makes a mountain out of a mole hill for ratings, and thus advertising revenue. And the current makeup of the government is a veritable golden goose for media companies. Constant scandal and bullshit being thrown around all the time with modern communication means a constant source of revenue.
Congressional partisanship has fucked this country up, and it’s not new it dates back to the late 1800s and turn of the century. They limited the House of Representatives artificially to 435 members back in 1911. It has not been truly representative of the populace since then with districts in different states varying by millions of people from one end of the spectrum to the other since some states are so sparsely populated. The purpose of the House is to represent the size of each State. The Senate represents each equally. The House has been hamstring to be a weird fucked up version of both with this limitation.
The Supreme Court should be increased to 13 seats, matching the 13 federal circuits, with each Justice overseeing a circuit, as designed. At its height, the court had 10 seats in 1863. A Republican controlled Congress in 1866 began fucking with the court due to partisanship to try to limit the power of Democrat Andrew Johnson, reducing the court to 7 members, and after he left they increased it again to the current limit of 9 in 1869 allowing Ulysses S. Grant to appoint two new justices.
FDR wanted to increase the court size in 1937, appointing new judges as incumbent ones reached the age of 70, up to a maximum bench of 15, but that was rejected by Congress. So we’re at the point now where the US has one of the smallest Supreme Courts in the world, with scholars saying it cannot possibly represent a country the size of the US adequately, and we haven’t updated it since 1869 due to political squabbling. The larger the court, the less power any individual justice has, reducing or removing the “swing justice” problem we’ve dealt with for over a century now.
And while we’re at it, get rid of the first past the post system, designed during a time where only white landowners could vote, and were expected to keep up with politics as a result of their abundance of daily time not slaving away with the menial jobs, and travel took weeks across the states to deliver news and ballots. It’s a system of its time, but it inherently creates a two party system, which puts people into an us vs them train of thought, which isn’t how the world works. We have the ability to do ranked choice voting, it works great in countries that have implemented it. Hell, it has even been implemented in some local and state elections in the US already. The parties themselves don’t have to go away, but there needs to be more than two viable options, and that means changing how the choices are made.
Surprise surprise, an industry doesn’t work like people assume it does. This applies to literally everything, everyday in society. Yet society keeps on rolling along because they are done this way for a reason. Nothing is new anymore, things work the way they do because that’s how it works best. That is until the media intentionally makes a mountain out of a mole hill for ratings, and thus advertising revenue. And the current makeup of the government is a veritable golden goose for media companies. Constant scandal and bullshit being thrown around all the time with modern communication means a constant source of revenue.
Congressional partisanship has fucked this country up, and it’s not new it dates back to the late 1800s and turn of the century. They limited the House of Representatives artificially to 435 members back in 1911. It has not been truly representative of the populace since then with districts in different states varying by millions of people from one end of the spectrum to the other since some states are so sparsely populated. The purpose of the House is to represent the size of each State. The Senate represents each equally. The House has been hamstring to be a weird fucked up version of both with this limitation.
The Supreme Court should be increased to 13 seats, matching the 13 federal circuits, with each Justice overseeing a circuit, as designed. At its height, the court had 10 seats in 1863. A Republican controlled Congress in 1866 began fucking with the court due to partisanship to try to limit the power of Democrat Andrew Johnson, reducing the court to 7 members, and after he left they increased it again to the current limit of 9 in 1869 allowing Ulysses S. Grant to appoint two new justices.
FDR wanted to increase the court size in 1937, appointing new judges as incumbent ones reached the age of 70, up to a maximum bench of 15, but that was rejected by Congress. So we’re at the point now where the US has one of the smallest Supreme Courts in the world, with scholars saying it cannot possibly represent a country the size of the US adequately, and we haven’t updated it since 1869 due to political squabbling. The larger the court, the less power any individual justice has, reducing or removing the “swing justice” problem we’ve dealt with for over a century now.
And while we’re at it, get rid of the first past the post system, designed during a time where only white landowners could vote, and were expected to keep up with politics as a result of their abundance of daily time not slaving away with the menial jobs, and travel took weeks across the states to deliver news and ballots. It’s a system of its time, but it inherently creates a two party system, which puts people into an us vs them train of thought, which isn’t how the world works. We have the ability to do ranked choice voting, it works great in countries that have implemented it. Hell, it has even been implemented in some local and state elections in the US already. The parties themselves don’t have to go away, but there needs to be more than two viable options, and that means changing how the choices are made.