It’s not like Mitch can singlehandedly control the whole senate.

> It’s not like Mitch can singlehandedly control the whole senate.

He's Senate Majority Leader. That's literally exactly what he does.

Besides, he's whipped his party so hard they basically never break rank. Even Mitt "I'm not like the others" Romney votes with him nearly 100% of the time.

His power as whip is not absolute. It's not like a parliamentary system where they are actual consequences for not voting the party line.

Take a look at any number of votes in the past year. There are plenty of Republicans who don't vote on party line (Republican and Democratic)

If you don't vote the party line then you get shown the door during your next election. They turn off the money spigot and nominations stop coming and they help your opponents (same party) get the R nomination. None of the current R senators have the backbone to go against that. Oh they say they will but when the day comes to vote, it's all just hot air.

> It's not like [there] are actual consequences for not voting the party line.

There absolutely are, they just happen to be a side-channel in this particular system.

They do have a say. They're free to contact their senators just like citizens from all the other states (on either side of the issue).

Yes...that’s how the government works. I’d recommend taking a civics course.

We thankfully don’t (yet) live in a country where New York, LA, and Chicago control everything.

Yes, instead we live in a country where a few small rural states wield vastly outsized influence.

So much better!

Of the ten least-populous states, half are solidly Republican and half are solidly Democratic.

Why should the vote for president of someone in Wyoming be worth 5.5 times as much as a voter in California?

Because that's the only way there would be a federal government in America.

What choice would you have made in 1787?

We're way beyond 1787.

The Reapportionment Act of 1929 is the cause of the worst distortions.

It fixes the HoR at 435, and is the main cause of the gross imbalance of power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

Actually, it doesn't.

Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.

As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.

Yes but the Electoral College is House+Senante.

So Wyoming gets 4 EC votes.

So... WY gets 4 EC votes with it's 578k population.

My state of NC only gets 15 with it's population of almost 11M.

In what universe is that fair or just?

A universe where were the United States of America, not just America.

We were supposed to be a group of states with a fairly limited federal government. I think it’s really unfortunate that’s been largely done away with.

The alternative view is that CA, MA, and NY already get a Democrat candidate 95/270 or 35% of the way to the Presidency with just 20% of the population. Do those states really need a greater impact?

That's rather a disingenuous way to twist the numbers.

Those states are 20% of the population and 17% of the EC.

By taking advantage of the tiny states the EC can be won with less than 30% of the vote

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/02/500112248/how-to-win-the-pres...

"Fair and just" is out the window as soon as others get to decide how the fruits of 40% of my labor gets spent without my consent. At this point, we might as well just change the rules as we go along because you can't really point to the system we have now and say "it's fair" or "just" in a 100% clearly defined and unambiguous sense that we can all agree on.

That is because the people of the USA don't want the ~40e6 people in California to be able to dictate policy for the ~2 million people in Kentucky. Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.

> Most Americans are perfectly okay with this because there hasn't been any serious effort at an Amendment to grant each citizen with similar amounts of power in the Senate.

This doesn't follow. There is no way to amend the Constitution by a national popular vote so the opinion of the majority of Americans is irrelevant to the question of any Amendment's passage.

A more likely reason such an Amendment wouldn't exist is that a majority of states favor the status quo, because most states are small and benefit from their current outsized representation in government.

One of the mechanisms for beginning the amending of the USA constitution is via a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress. The USA House of Representatives assigns political power approximately proportionally to population and it has never passed any proposed amendment to proportionally elect Senators or delegates of the Electoral College.

Source: Article V

Edit: Corrected 3/4 -> 2/3

Edit2: I stand corrected. The Bayh-Celler proposal was passed by the House and filibustered in the Senate in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

> One of the mechanisms for amending the USA constitution is via a 3/4 vote of both houses of Congress.

I believe this is factually incorrect. I'll offer Article V of the Constitution as my citation. Do you have a contrary citation to support this claim?

40e6 people in California aren't a bloc. The blueness/redness of a state is nothing more than the arbitrary balance of urban vs rural population. States are "purple" in actuality.

The major geographic divide in US politics is urban vs rural, not state vs state

His constituency is all of Kentucky. Senators do not split their states, they represent it as a whole.

McConnell rules through the consent of half the senate, not alone.

This is literally the purpose of the senate. We are a union of states, and the senate is where each state is granted equal power. One could argue that states should have been defined differently, but the point was that large states should not have absolute control over small states.

Edit: I'm loving the downvotes without comments. They're clear indication that some people are either not arguing in good faith or that they simply do not understand how and why the us is set up the way it is.

The only reason Mitch Connell withheld the nomination was to prevent a vote he would lose. Kentucky's representative prevented a vote where California's representatives would have had a say. Kentucky decided that California did not need to be consulted on this matter. This sort of behavior is hostile to representative government.

Nonsense. The entire basis of the US government is the dual sovereignty of States and the Federal government.

What slavery? 2020 is bad but it isn't that bad.