Summary of political beliefs

[greenforest32]

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

[greenforest32]

Admittedly, I wrote my platform mainly for the UK In the US, I'd probably have different views on the constitution etc. I also sacked some issues such as gun rights that aren't issues in Britain and replaced them with hunting, which is

I understand, I wasn't asking anyone specifically, just writing down a thought I had.

[greenforest32]

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.

Why shouldn't populous states override less populous states?

It is exactly what I'm thinking about. Bicameralism undermines equal representation of the people.

Either we're going to have an upper legislative chamber that represents the state governments equally regardless of their population or we're not. If not, the Senate should be abolished no?

[greenforest32]

Nothing has changed for me since I posted here in early October

Lots of FF beliefs though I tend to disagree that there shouldn't be any initiatives/referendums:

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I can definitely see why people would be opposed to an initiative system when you look at some of the stupid crap passed in states (we have plenty of that here ) but I do think it is a useful destructive power at the moment when you consider that the legislators of most any party in this country are bought off and ultimately represent the people who fund their campaigns and thus will never pass certain economic legislation supported by the supermajority but opposed by the campaign funders.

In that absence of legitimate representation, I think going to the people directly to pass through the corruption is useful though it does enable the special interests to pass all sorts of other bad legislation (super-majority requirements, term limits, etc) through uninformed voters but it's not like they couldn't pass these things legislatively...

And veto referendums (citizens contesting laws passed by the legislature) aren't as bad as initiatives either I think. They seem like a good way to counter overreach (Ohio utilized this recently I believe), though I don't think it's a good idea to have veto referendums on civil rights/liberties or on judicial decisions.