Originally published at: The Status Interview - Or How To Write Up a Senate Purge List - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Over the last couple days I’ve argued both that the denouement of the shutdown standoff was a flub and an embarrassment and also that the overall situation is going reasonably well. This isn’t defending the members of the Democratic caucus. I don’t need to defend or attack them because I’m mostly indifferent to them. I’m…
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Someone wrote an article that tracks with something I’ve been thinking a while now. We need to get rid of districts entirely for House elections. One big jungle elections where the top X number of vote-getters serve in Congress for their state, where X is the number of seats that the state is allowed.
We could go farther and say X + 2, and the top two state vote-getters serve in the Senate, and every one else in the House. Hell, we could dream big and say the top X vote getters serve in the House and have another election country-wide where the top 100 vote-getters serve in the Senate. Senate is kind of a national position anyway.
I dunno… how does that not just replace House Reps with a bunch of “Senators-lite”? It seems like a big difference to have to win a state-wide race than just a district. Districts deserve to have a chance to elect someone that represents the majority of people in their district, which may be very different from the rest of the state.
Elimination of the filibuster is something I could support. However, I suspect, and would support a reform that kept the ability for a committed minority to require a supermajority to move forward.
I say committed minority because I would support a filibuster reform that simply flipped the requirement. Now the requirement is to get 3/5 of the body to agree to end debate on a question. A change to the rule that required 2/5 of the body to block an end to debate would, in my opinion, change the nature of that Senate rule.
Right now, it’s easy to block, easy to stall, easy to simply push something aside. A rule that required 41 Senators to be present in the chamber whenever a question was called, which can happen at almost anytime, would require those against a provision to be truly committed to it. They would have to stay in their offices, stay over weekends, stay when the Senate could be called back into session. In other words, it would require a commitment to block.
The normal case would become very hard to accomplish again and again, but there are times that ability could be useful.