I like a lot of what I read from this Winston guy but one thing I've always struggled with is unitary (states) vs federal states. Specifically, the idea of having increased local/regional government power through increased federalism and having a unicameral national legislature by abolishing the upper legislative chamber. I have no problem with unicameral unitary states (I'd love to see all the U.S. state legislatures become unicameral).
I really hate the U.S. Senate's absurd rules and while the idea of balancing out the legislative process between small and big federal states by having one chamber based on population and one based on equal representation of the states sounds good in theory (the populous states cannot override the least populous states and the least populous states cannot override the populous states thus leading to compromise), it does seem to benefit the smaller states much more substantially.
I've heard of other proposals to diminish the power of the upper chamber by weighting the vote of each member according to the population of their region/state/etc or giving the lower chamber the ability to override the upper chamber (think this is what they do in Japan) but that just makes the upper chamber seem redundant.
Does it make sense to have a unicameral legislature in a regionally diverse country like the U.S. with its federal system?
Does it make sense and is it fair to have a legislative chamber representing land or sub-national governments instead of people?
Bleah