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A comment on U.S. Labor Secretary throws support behind classifying gig workers as employees. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Labor Secretary throws support behind classifying gi... by epistasis on Thursday April 29, 2021 @04:13PM (#26986119)
I think the bigger problem is the lack of citizen representation. Individual legislators are servicing an absolutely huge number of constituents, which means that their elections cover absolutely massive amounts of people, necessitating massive amounts of money for campaigns. Which means that the influence comes from donors, as they are the ones who enable reelection.

It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried.

Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help.

Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too.

And of course, overturning Citizens United...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Labor Secretary throws support behind classifying gi... by BitwiseFool on Thursday April 29, 2021 @06:20PM (#26987529)
"Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help."

While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able.

That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. Labor Secretary throws support behind classifying gi... by AngryData on Friday April 30, 2021 @08:57PM (#27001758)
The House of Reps has been frozen since 1929 with the Reapportionment Act, we were originally suppose to add new electors/reps with every census and sometimes sooner if population change is fast enough. It is also the reason why some small states have slightly more power in the House of Reps, the lack of new Reps has made their fair share of Reps drop below the minimum number of Reps. With more Reps overall, their share rises and surpasses the minimum number, fixing that particular problem.
[ Parent | on HN ]