The real reason Republicans have become oddly quiet on the infrastructure bill

Chew Toy McCoy

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Paraphrasing from a Salon article I can’t seem to find now. Beyond a few murmurs of remaining opposition, if you think the Republicans have finally seen the light on infrastructure and popular legislation you’d be mistaken. Instead, they are focusing on voter suppression and gerrymandering and are quite pleased with the results so far. They don’t even need to pretend anymore and feel they’ll be back in control soon enough and will continue to dismantle our democracy.

They are further emboldened by their lunatic voter base with their single hive mind of sticking it to liberals at all costs. They’ll just continue with their lies and outrage feedback loop.
 

SuperMatt

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Paraphrasing from a Salon article I can’t seem to find now. Beyond a few murmurs of remaining opposition, if you think the Republicans have finally seen the light on infrastructure and popular legislation you’d be mistaken. Instead, they are focusing on voter suppression and gerrymandering and are quite pleased with the results so far. They don’t even need to pretend anymore and feel they’ll be back in control soon enough and will continue to dismantle our democracy.

They are further emboldened by their lunatic voter base with their single hive mind of sticking it to liberals at all costs. They’ll just continue with their lies and outrage feedback loop.
Manchin and Sinema are against voting rights. If there was ever a bill worth killing the filibuster for, it’s voting rights. If states can exclude anybody they want from voting, overturn election results in any precinct, gerrymander results so that winning 40% of the vote gives them over 60% of the legislative seats, etc... then we are no longer a democracy... if we ever truly were.
 

SuperMatt

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Another reason Republicans are pretty confident right now.
And the Census is really good news for eternal Republican control of the Senate. With the population becoming more concentrated in the cities, we are close to a situation where more than half the states will be overwhelmingly rural, and most likely have Republican Senators. We will have a majority in the Senate representing maybe 25% of the American population.

What a great system... NOT. DC needs to be granted statehood yesterday, and we should either merge a few states with under 1 million population or else split the big states like Texas and CA into smaller states for more fair representation.
 

Chew Toy McCoy

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And the Census is really good news for eternal Republican control of the Senate. With the population becoming more concentrated in the cities, we are close to a situation where more than half the states will be overwhelmingly rural, and most likely have Republican Senators. We will have a majority in the Senate representing maybe 25% of the American population.

What a great system... NOT. DC needs to be granted statehood yesterday, and we should either merge a few states with under 1 million population or else split the big states like Texas and CA into smaller states for more fair representation.

We also need to greatly expand the number of Representatives in Congress. About 100 years ago each represented about 35k people. Now it’s closer to 750k. Other than maybe large cities, that’s a crazy high number to claim 1 person represents.

However, it seems the Senate is where most legislation goes to die and no amount of number changes in the House is going to change that.
 

SuperMatt

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We also need to greatly expand the number of Representatives in Congress. About 100 years ago each represented about 35k people. Now it’s closer to 750k. Other than maybe large cities, that’s a crazy high number to claim 1 person represents.

However, it seems the Senate is where most legislation goes to die and no amount of number changes in the House is going to change that.
I agree it is odd to have one person represent so many constituents, but at what point do you end up with too many people? If we had 75K population per representative, we’d have over 4000 members of the House.
 

Herdfan

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I agree it is odd to have one person represent so many constituents, but at what point do you end up with too many people? If we had 75K population per representative, we’d have over 4000 members of the House.

Plus it really wouldn't change the overall makeup of the House. We are losing a Rep due to a lack of population growth. So we will have 2 representing approx 1.8M or 900K each. So if you give us 6 to represent 300K, there is a very goods chance all 6 will still be Republicans. Similar things would happen in Blue states. Sure there may be a change here or there, but overall I don't think it makes much difference.
 

SuperMatt

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Plus it really wouldn't change the overall makeup of the House. We are losing a Rep due to a lack of population growth. So we will have 2 representing approx 1.8M or 900K each. So if you give us 6 to represent 300K, there is a very goods chance all 6 will still be Republicans. Similar things would happen in Blue states. Sure there may be a change here or there, but overall I don't think it makes much difference.
There are aspects other than Republican and Democrat. The bigger the population represented by one person, the more likely they will just toe the party line and not do much for the localities they represent.
 

Chew Toy McCoy

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Plus it really wouldn't change the overall makeup of the House. We are losing a Rep due to a lack of population growth. So we will have 2 representing approx 1.8M or 900K each. So if you give us 6 to represent 300K, there is a very goods chance all 6 will still be Republicans. Similar things would happen in Blue states. Sure there may be a change here or there, but overall I don't think it makes much difference.

I think it could possibly change the overall makeup in the house. For example California Republicans or Texas Democrats might have more representation. I also think more representatives means they might actually spend more time listening to their constituents. Right now it’s like saying there’s no difference between a classroom with 20 students or a classroom with 600 students.

I also wonder if this would be a good counter to gerrymandering or if it would make it worse.
 

Chew Toy McCoy

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I agree it is odd to have one person represent so many constituents, but at what point do you end up with too many people? If we had 75K population per representative, we’d have over 4000 members of the House.

It sure would be interesting to see what that would do to party-line voting. There would certainly be hundreds of members in there whose constituents wouldn't agree with/benefit from the party line vote. "I put you in office because of the abortion stuff, not screwing us with this bullshit."
 
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