Election 2018 Open Thread - Part 1

[AndyHogan14]

Western U.S. and Great Plains > Eastern U.S.

Well, that's been the case since, well, forever. As the wise Bill Walton once said: "if the Pilgrims had landed in California, the east coast would still be wilderness."

[AndyHogan14]

It would be more fair if Puerto Rico, DC, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, and the Marianas (Guam + Northern Marianas) were states...

Yep. I don't think that is the absolute ideal solution - there are other things that would be better in principle. But these are the sorts of ideas that are going to increasingly enter the national conversation. And they are increasingly going to be the #1 goal of Dems, simply because Dems cannot ever do anything else unless and until the issue of the lack of representative democracy in the USA is addressed.

There's no way it would get the requisite 2/3 in both houses and 3/4 of the states, but it would be nice to strip the Senate of its power and make it more of an advisory body like the Lords in the UK. At the very least, I would like the House to have a say on SCOTUS nominees (hearings are still in the Senate, the House would just get a vote), just like they do for a replacement Vice President and that is something that I think could be done via statute.

[AndyHogan14]

There's no way it would get the requisite 2/3 in both houses and 3/4 of the states, but it would be nice to strip the Senate of its power and make it more of an advisory body like the Lords in the UK.

There are ways to get around that if you really want to. When push comes to shove, the Constitution can be amended with an effective simple majority vote via temporarily admitted new fake states (rotten borough states) in order to increase the # of votes that you have. And there are probably various other ways to accomplish the same thing, which I haven't thought of but that might be more artful.

Wouldn't we then need a majority in the Senate to get these temporary states admitted? Quite frankly, I do not see that happening any time soon...no way Democrats are picking up 5 seats in 2020. 2-3 was possible, 5? No way.

In the end, I'd be on board so long as California (a state that would be temporarily split up, I'm sure) is guaranteed to be reunified once the scheme is over.