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McConnell and Feinstein episodes raise age concerns about US leaders
(www.washingtonexaminer.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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I think age limits are an option but are not really going after the root of the problem, nor are they a good solution. Our arguments that the elderly can't represent the youth can be made the other way just the same.
One one end, the districts are too large, so you end up with the shit show we have. You don't end up with local communities voting on who reflects that community best. It squeezes out any opportunity for third parties.
Secondly (Don't get attached to the people in this, the argument carries to any party/district), the democratic party will not allow AOC to run for Schumer's post. There's no supported way to ask the electorate if they would like a changing of the guard. Suggesting to primary someone who has been as successful as Schumer or McConnell would be political suicide. So you're stuck voting for Schumer/McConnell, even if you would prefer the youth candidate... in the NY example, Schumer still gets the votes and the party keeps supporting him. It's a blue seat and that matters more than getting "accurate" representation. I'd push for doing ranked choice primaries for all federal positions.
TL;DR -- smaller districts. New parties. Encourage (or mandate?) primaries against incumbents.
For smaller districts...I like the Wyoming Rule but even that only gets you to 574 seats, still more than half a million people per district.
The original House apportionment, signed by Washington, was 1 seat for every 33k people, which would certainly allow for more unique representation but would also mean more than 10,000 House seats these days.
I'd suggest a district should be no smaller than 1/3 of the population of a single state (190K)... Putting it around 17-1800 reps. It's exactly a 4 fold increase.
Something like 60 metro areas are above 1M and will have representation of 6+ reps, vs currently only 15ish get that today.
We will see more people elected that more accurately reflect the values of that specific area. This also works for small population states.
A house of this size presents logistics challenges and difficulties in determining committee appointments. But that seems solvable with the technology we have available today.
The real barrier is that this will result in a forfeiture of individual power and cede some control to smaller parties. So nobody will actually propose this.