Here we are

I may be misremembering, but I believe the way things were originally designed was that the Senate was supposed to represent the states, not the people. The house represented the people. That's why the Senate has equal representation (because the states were meant to have equal say), and the house proportionate to population.

That is correct. The state legislatures generally (if not always) picked the senators, but due to huge state corruption, it was almost always political qui pro quo, and some states even going full terms without selecting sla sentaor. This led to the 17th amendment (which you'll here rednecks and/or white supremacists asposing, because states' rights.)
Edit to add: Wikipedia knows it better than I do.
- Appreciate the extra details and the link!
This is correct, and this part of the system works fine. What should have happened though is a population break point where a state has to break up if they exceed a certain population. CA should be at least 3 states. New York needs a split as well, probably a few others. There is no way a state can serve its population well when the population is measured in the tens of millions.
- I agree in theory, but big cities are where things get muddy.
  When a single city (e.g. New York City, population ~8 million just to use the biggest example) has a population larger than entire states, how do you "split" the state of New York? If the city itself, excluding any of the surrounding "metro area", was its own state, it would be the 13th most populous in the US and also the smallest by area.
  Do we carve up each of the boroughs as a separate state, and give New York City 10 senators? It would be more proportional representation for the people of NYC, but also their close proximity and interdependence would very much align their priorities and make them a formidable voting bloc. And even then, you could still fit 4 Vermonts worth of people into Brooklyn alone. How much would we need to cut to make it equitable? Or do we work the other way as well and tell Vermont it no longer gets to be its own state because there aren't enough people?
  For states like California, which still have large cities but not quite to the extreme of New York, how do we divide things fairly? Do we take a ruler and cut it into neat thirds, trying to leave some cities as the nucleus of each new state? Or do we end up with the state of California (area mostly unchanged), the state of Los Angeles, and the state of The Bay Area?
- Recipe for outright disaster as duplication of shit gets way out of control. We have too much already.

They came up with the best thing they could agree on at the time. They did not intend on it to become sacred, untouchable, and without the ability to change with the times, and sometimes we have changed it. Just not quite enough times.

- 19 years, in a letter from Jefferson to Madison.
  To James Madison from Thomas Jefferson, 6 September 1789
  He thought that firstly no document or law could be forever relevant, so it needed revisioning occasionally, and the 19 years seems to tie into the idea of each generation taking a new look and either accepting existing laws as still good or making changes.
- The French Revolution created an easier method for reforming The Republic and rewriting their constitution.
  They enshrined the revolutionary aspects of revolution instead of its leaders.
  That said the Federalists got part of the idea from ancient Lycia on having proportional representation and then added in keeping it in check by another chamber with equal footing.
  https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230906-the-ancient-civilisation-that-inspired-us-democracy
  It is a good idea. But we need more Congresspersons to lower the people each congressperson represents. It was ~95,000 in 1940 ... in 2020 it is closer to 750,000 per congresscritter.
They came up with the best thing they could
Bad people with bad motives create bad systems of control.
- That's easy to say centuries in the future where so much has changed. What would you have suggested given their experience and history to that point? Be careful, because what seems like a morally just and simple proposal would have been accepted a lot differently then. The "bad" motives were to find a common ground for very different colony populations, and it had to start somewhere. And they tried something that hadn't ever been tried, so don't condemn them too quickly.

It's a government by rich owners for rich owners and it's working as designed

I mean, that's most governments

Don't forget, those senators translate to electoral college votes.

Them plus the house reps, which are artificially capped at a low number, again benefitting the low population states
Diddnt they cap the amount of house of representatives?

One person, one vote.

In Germany we have two votes, one for a local representative and one for a party. In itself it's a pretty decent system
- Yet, the local representatives in the pairlaments (Bundestag, Landtag) represent districts of approximately the same population number. Thus, in our first chamber, no vote has more value than another.
  But in the Bundesrat, which comes closest to the US senate, states with higher population number do have more representatives than small states, which weakens the inequality of votes, yet still one vote from Bremen (population 700k, 3 representatives) has 13 times as much value as one from NRW (p. 18 mio, 6 rep.).
- The German system is what the US would have been if they would have regularly updated their constitution.
But then the poor would run the country instead of a handful of unimaginably rich individuals! What kind of democracy would THAT be?
- We don't know but it was guaranteed to be different.
But look at the US popular vote. Even with different representation of the populace, this election would still have been fucked. We do need massive reform of the US voting structure, but this is not the biggest thing. Getting rid of first past the post in favor of at least ranked choice would make a much bigger difference.
That would open the door for a true left wing party to actually have a voice.
- Ranked voting is a very good thing all countries should implement.

It is as it needed to be to get the states to sign on. But times have changed, and it needs to as well

Can we get 25 million volunteers to move proportionally to red states for the next few years?

I moved to a red state. Absolutely awful. Don’t do it. Texas is an irremediable shit hole.
- West Virginia checking in
- Move to the parts where it isn't (Austin, Houston).
Half a million movers per month would both wreck California and rural states real quick.
- California can take 2 for the team.
- They want to pass a law that says you have to get the majority of the majority of counties and they have 256 mostly small rural counties some with less than 100 people in them.
  I did the math and you could hold the majority of the majority with as little as 4% of the vote.
  If you try to be cute and take over a bunch of small counties the law could just be further amended or you know they could just not find your bodies.
  I'm staying in blueland

Representative democracy is unstable and corruptible by design and it can't be anything else.

Blame Connecticut. It’s their fault. It would up benefiting the South, but it was Delaware and CT mad about larger states having more a say.

The South actually wanted proportional representation. They were growing faster and had more land.

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

It would be somewhat OK if the House was much more powerful relative to the Senate, similar to how the (unelected) Canadian Senate rarely if ever opposes the will of the House.

I don't even care so much about the Bicameral Compromise; but I do care that the electoral votes apply toward electing the President.

The reapportionment act of 1929 is screwing us over in the electoral college. The House should have a LOT more representatives, which would make the it more fair.
But more representatives would make it more difficult for big businesses to bribe them, and nobody is going to vote to dilute their personal power, so changing that is a nonstarter.

Why don't the more populous states, the larger of the two groups, simply eat the small states?
- I know you're kidding but that's not allowed per Article IV section 3

Extremely low IQ meme considering this is the intended purpose of the senate.

Disagreeing with the intention of some 1700s guys is extremely low IQ?
- The meme assumes this was somehow not be design. The entire function of the Senate is to counterbalance that in the same meme, California has more representatives in Congress overall + more electors.

To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.

to be fair? fuck that. the states represent people, just arguing 'states rights' is disingenuous at this point.
land shouldn't vote, but the way our government currently is functioning, regardless of what our slaveholding 'founding fathers' intended, is an absolute mess.
and I don't accept your argument in good faith.
edit. a word
It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states
U wot
Electorates per capita work better because they give the population of a country an equal amount of electable government. Positioning them as just Californians makes them a lower class citizen of the United States with lesser representation.
It also means that criminals will recognise the power of the Republican states and side with them for effect.
- From one perspective, per capita is fair, but from another perspective it isn't. The Constitution actually did a reasonable job of trying to address both cases, it just didn't adequately account for such a huge swing in population and technology. One could argue that that is a failing of the people that came afterwards, since the Constitution also provided mechanisms for modification.
  For an example of where it is not fair, consider an agreement between three groups and we all agree to vote on decisions that affect all three of us, say 'how things are taxed' or how often elections are held. Each group gets a vote, and 2 out of 3 wins. If that's the agreement we entered into, my group would expect to get a vote now or a hundred years in the future even if your group grows it shrinks, it's an agreement at the group level. Especially if we made considerations for a different type of vote that does take group membership size into account. It would be pretty shitty for your group to get big and insist that it should make all the decisions for me.
No, it would be fair if California and the 20 other states had the same say. Laws should be by people, for people. Every person should have the same voting power and political representation. In a democracy, people vote, not land, or "states", or anything else. People.

I always thought it'd be interesting if one senator were elected only by the most populous municipality in each state.

The Kentucky fried chicken chef guy is absolutely SLAYING those short shorts and boots 🔥🤩

Edit: apparently I already made this joke and forgot about it lmao

Brave of the Bri'ish to remind America they exist as we're on the cusp of our own outright Empire phase.
It's not poor countries that speak a different language that empires like to annex first.

Don't blame the founding fathers that all these hippies moved to California /s

The hippies were already there. The tech CEOs and Hollywood actors are an invasive species.

Disingenuous. That's 21 states and 42 senators.

Now do representatives, which was originally supposed to match population distribution.

Alaska and Hawaii.
- Alaska and Hawaii what?
  From context I assume you mean they have a different number of senators? One? None?
- Not sure why Hawaii is included in this meme. Hawaii has only had 1 Republican senator since it became a state in 1959.

We have the technology to implement some direct democracy and get away from all this "represntitive democracy" that doesnt work so well. Let people vote on the actual issues and we'll get progressive policies pretty quickly, we wont get into wars, we'll spend much less on defense, and the corporatists wont be able to buy influence as easily.

i honestly don't believe that any of this would be true. Unless you went the libertarian route and pretend that the people know better than the government at all levels. Maybe i'm just cynical. But there's a federal government for a reason so.
- so you dont beleive in democracy, sounds like.

yeah...

It's the senate.

You forgot to look at the house lmao.

Land doesn't vote, but groups do. The Constitution was written to accommodate both points, the Senate so each state has an equal vote, which is fair in respect to the fact that the Constitution is and agreement between states, and Congress where states with more people get more votes, because that is a legitimate perspective as well. It's not perfect to start with, and it's been modified poorly over time (representation hasn't been kept proportional in Congress), but it is fair to say that each state having an equal vote is one valid point of view, and the founders realized that it wasn't the only valid point of view.

Don't attribute the 'states rights' phrase to me as though I'm on the wrong side of the civil war or something. The country can't be entirely directed by states regardless of population, but the states can't be directed by other states based solely on population either.

While they benefited from it later at this point Virginia was a population powerhouse, the actual states pushing for this were the small New England states, I think some of them only gave up their giant western claims(google 'long connecticut') in exchange for it.

It was also a compromise. Proto-Federalists wanted a direct democracy determined by population, Proto-Democratic-Republicans wanted each state to get one vote. In the end they split the difference, House was determined by population, Senate by states, and the president by a hybrid system that didn't fully give either what they wanted.

If you went back in time to stop the electoral college you could just as easily get a 'One vote per state for president, 26 votes wins' system instead of a direct democracy.