Compartment Four

[solarbird]

More Twitter writing for you today.

Here are the executive actions Biden is expected to take on Inauguration Day

President-elect Joe Biden plans to take 17 executive actions in the first hours of his presidency Wednesday, signing a flurry of executive orders

The headline preview is out of date. 17 exec orders confirmed today. Tomorrow is more pandemic actions. Friday includes restoring Federal collective bargaining rights. Monday is w/e, but Tuesday starts the push to END PRIVATE PRISONS. And it goes on.

We're back in the fucking WHO. We're back in the Paris Accords, it takes 30 days but it's started.. The Muslim Ban is gone. The Census is being de-rigged, which is PRETTY FUCKIN' IMPORTANT for representation. The anti-LGBT discrimination exo is gone. The 1776 Commission is gone.

I've heard some noise about how Biden's not even good at not being Trump and how that was his only redeeming quality.

Fuck. That.

Did I mention border wall construction got stopped?

Next Wednesday is climate change day.

Sounds like a pretty good job so far of NOT BEING TRUMP.

That doesn't even _mention_ going straight at white supremacy in his inauguration speech, after a President who did everything in his power to reinforce it, and lock it in with a fucking INSURRECTION.

Look. I know. He was part of the Obama team, and they gave way too many passes to way too much shit from Bush II. Certain types of US foreign policy aren't going to get better. But you have to understand something.

HE'S REPLACING A FUCKING FASCIST.

And also:

Basically? The US?

It's the fucking Titanic. Okay?

And it's been headed for an iceberg for a long time, some of us have been saying so for a while, everybody else was listening to the band play.

Then Captain Donkeyballs decided to steer it _straight into_ the fucking thing.

Four compartments open to the sea, except...

Somehow, through some _miracle_ of _intense, sustained labour_...

...we got compartment four shored up.

_We don't have to sink._

The ship - the Titanic, the Third Republic - is _fucked_. Okay? But it doesn't have to sink. It needs to be drydocked and overhauled and there need to be some real design changes.

But we don't have to _sink_.

Sadly, there's still a big problem, in that right now, we're still basically at sea, and the shoring is temporary, and improvised, and even with a new captain...

...the old one and his minions are attacking the shoring.

They want that compartment _open_ again, by god.

I've talked about our job a lot. Stabilise this thing. Get it to shore, or dry dock, or whatever - don't stretch the metaphor too far, no metaphor can take that - and get to work on real structural changes.

But we have another job, too. Or at least, a functional requirement.

And that functional requirement is admitting that there's a _difference_ between the captain and crew who steer _into_ the iceberg and _attack_ the shoring are FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT TO the ones trying to put things _back together_.

We can bring this ship, this Titanic, back to shore afloat. Fix the structural problems. Make the damn thing actually work right this time. Or at least get closer to that.

But you have to realise, you have to _admit_, that even if you don't like the new captain and crew's shoring plan, at least they're working on keeping it _above the water_, and not reopening the hull to the sea.

Electing Biden - and actually getting him into office - was changing captain and crew. If you want to call it mutiny, the MAGAts would certainly agree, but fuck 'em.

These executive orders, what's going up right now, and what's going up next week, is obviously the shoring. It's not a complicated metaphor.

It's also not enough to sail the ship.

But if we're lucky, and we work really hard, and we don't give the old captain and crew the opportunity to wreck shit...

...maybe, just maybe, we can get to shore alive and start to rebuild this goddamn boat.

That's where we are. We have a shot.

Don't screw around and blow it.

Comments

[dewline]

Good metaphor.

Canada needs similar work. We have a team working on that, one that can stand to be better, and the opposition to that team up here is allied with that "old captain and crew" on the US side. There's other political parties ready to go to work on holding our captain and crew up here to their higher ideals and desires...if we can get those parties into Opposition next federal election.

And there's seven provinces to fix up as well.

Well, this is what multitasking's for, right?

[solarbird]

See also the Senate, with the trial of Donald Trump.

[jessie_c]

It can't possibly be mutiny when the process to change Captains is written right into the standing orders.

Sorry, MAGAts, not sorry.

[solarbird]

They still consider the first impeachment to be illegal, and I imagine they'd consider the second to be illegal too, law be damned, so I think the analogy holds, even if the reality does not.

[jessie_c]

Oh sure, they think that. They can think what they like. At the end of the day they'll still be wrong.

[sistawendy]

Don't screw around and blow it.

Yup.

If we can't get rid of the electoral college, maybe we can nerf it: proportional representation in every state.

And I don't know how we're going to break the lie machine, but we must break it.

[solarbird]

Expand the house. Dramatically.

We can't ditch the EC, not because we shouldn't, but because we won't get enough states. Not for the reasonable future, anyway.

But the EC votes per state is straightforward: number of senators plus number of representatives.

Increase the size of the House - like, by a lot - and reapportion.

From what I can find online, the first post-Articles House had one representative per every 57,000 people. Roughly speaking. Ours currently is more like 750,000. To get back to original ratios, you're looking at over 13 times(!) as many people in Congress, which means... 435*13=5655.

Yeah, even I think that's a bit unwieldy. So let's reel that in a bit.

The smallest state by population is Wyoming, at 572,000ish. If you wanted to give them two representatives without rounding, that means roughly 2.6 times as many in Congress, or 1140. Currently, there is provision for seating of around 1000 people, including the gallery - and while that should be no excuse, we could limit to that. 2.3 times larger, rounding down to 999, so no ties.

750,000/2.3 = one representative per 326,000 people. Not really that close to the original, but much closer, and with still a manageable number of people in the House.

Gerrymandering becomes slightly more difficult, thanks to having less ability to stuff Democrats into one giant district. Everyone gets somewhat more personal representation. It becomes a bit easier to challenge incumbents.

But this is in no small part about the EC, let's be real. So.

In this scenario, Wyoming gains a second House member, and also goes from 3 EC votes (or 191,000 voters per EC member) to 4 (143,000 votes per EC member).

Washington State, on the other hand, goes from 10 house members to 20, and in the EC, goes from 12 (or 641,000 per EC member) to 25 (or 308,000 per EC member).

That's also going from 3.6 Washington State votes equalling one Wyoming vote to 2.2 Washington State votes equally one Wyoming vote. It's still rather bad, but it's _much less_ bad.

And all it takes - ALL it takes - is legislation. Nothing Constitutional, no state-by-state approval. House votes, Senate votes, President signs.

That's it.

[talkswithwind]

This, so much this.

We've had the event that provided a reason to develop remote voting, so the size of the chamber shouldn't be a reason to keep the size of the body down.

[kevin_standlee]

My target number is 690, or approximately the cube root of the US population. (It might be a little higher once the 2020 census figures are in.) Then tie the number to the cube root of the population (you can round it up to the next-highest odd number if ties bother you) so it changes (probably upward) ever ten years. This is large enough to catch up to a century of growth without putting us on a path to making the Congress too large to manage, as it wouldn't reach 1000 until the population reached 1 billion, which I don't expect to happen for quite a while yet.

The other fixes that do an end-run around the Electoral College: citizen's redistricting commissions to reduce gerrymandering; adopting the "Maine/Nebraska" method to select electors (one elector per congressional district plus two bonus votes for the statewide winner); Instant-Runoff/Ranked-Choice Voting, which gives minor parties a better chance of winning and more of a voice in the process.

Or just join the National Electoral Vote Compact, so the national popular-vote winner gets the presidency.

All of the above are legal without needing a constitutional amendment, which is politically impossible, given that the smaller states would never ratify it.

Alas, the chance of "Uncapping the House" in this ten-year cycle appears low, as there are so many other priorities on the administration's plate. Also, it's likely that the Senate would block it as it dilutes the voting power of smaller states. It's apparently not enough that the small states are hugely over-represented in the Senate; they have to be over-represented in the House, too.

[wrog]

One thing I've noticed about redistricting commissions, at least the way Washington state does it, is that with the legislature still in charge, the commission becomes all about incumbent protection -- so you get gerrymandering to create safe districts for everybody. Hence why last time around you got CD 8 going over the mountains to grab more R areas to give Dave Reichert a safer seat while Rick Larson's district was split E-W and he was given all of the coastal areas to make *his* district McDermott levels of bullet-proof while the eastern part became the new CD1, and it's something of a fluke that Suzan DelBene was able to win it.

I think the only right way to do it is algorithmically; which means we'll have to fight over the algorithm, but I think in the long run that'll still give better results than endless gaming that we get.

And I suspect National Popular Vote Covenant is going to kick in a lot sooner than they'll get to expanding the House. But if you're going to expand the House, may as well do the 5000 person body, which will (1) actually be able to get more work done, because there'll be more reps to staff the committees (2) will have an easier time with fundraising because the individual campaigns will get way cheaper and there'll be fewer people to call. If we need to expand the Capitol, let's just do that, or yeah, install a whole lot of remote meeting software and equipment; it's not like the Feds can't afford it.

[kevin_standlee]

California's Citizens Redistricting Commission is not subservient to the legislature. That is, the legislature can't override the commission. The structure of the commission is such that it does not appear to be driven to "pack" districts and protect incumbents, and the districts do not seem to have the odd jogs and wiggles that used to happen to (for example) extend tendrils into Sacramento to include a specific precinct that included a specific legislator's home so he would have a "safe" district that extended all the way to the Oregon border.

[wrog]

ok, that member selection process looks interesting. So 30,000 people applied in 2010 and the Auditor somehow whittles it down to 5,000 -- I see that there are criteria set out in law, but is that all they're doing? (it's weird that they talk about conducting interviews, etc..., so it sounds like there's more going on?) and then it's a lottery from there?

(One thing that wouldn't work in WA is we don't have registration by party, so I'm not how we'd do that piece of it.)

The current WA process is that each of the legislature caucues (House Ds, House Rs, Senate Ds, Senate Rs) -- which have nothing to do with (and are sometimes at odds with) the respective party organizations, btw -- appoints a member and then those four collectively appoint a non-voting chair. 3 of the 4 members have to agree on a plan. The legislature by 2/3 vote can make minor amendments. If the commissions fails then the Supreme Court gets to do it.

[kevin_standlee]

Yeah, the process needs to be divorced from the legislature entirely. In California it has led to legislative districts that more accurately reflect the actual political demographics of the state. That doesn't mean it's 100% Democratic — just like Washington, there are large areas of the state that are very conservative — but it's far more realistic. Also, the adoption of the "top two primary" instead of party primaries tends to result in somewhat more centrist candidates. I'd prefer an Instant Runoff/Ranked Choice ballot for my elections, though.

Nevada, where I live, has the option of "None of These Candidates" on the ballot, but it's fake. It won once, in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor in the first election after I moved to Fernley; however, in that case, whoever ran second "won" the election.

[melchar]

If the MAGArats want to call it mutiny, then we should make sure that walking the plank is the punishment for the replaced captain & crew.