when its fair!!!!

Well it wouldn't be the senate, which represent states themselves on the basis of equal suffrage.

I get frustrated with a republican House too, but that's the body. The House is the only reason to say the US has any popular democratic sovereignty whatsoever, especially considering judicial review and the SCOTUS being infallible in law.

The House is perfectly fine as a chamber, it just needs to have either court-drawn districts in all 50 states or have its districts drawn by independent, non-partisan commissions. I prefer the latter due to better results. People said that it can only work in Iowa because the state's borders allow for easy partitioning but the California districts are just fine. There are only a few states in the country where redistricting with a fair remap would be difficult, but it's worth it.

The House is broken entirely because the mapping system is broken, and it allowed for a party to gain a majority who set its sights on further breaking the mapping system once they became the majority. There's nothing wrong with the body itself, it just needs a much better system of remapping. At this point we have to look several election cycles in the future, to 2017, 2018, and 2020, and hope that races go a certain way so we have a chance at fair districts in some states. It's ridiculous.

Edit: And in terms of historical development the House has actually advanced at a much better rate than the Senate has, which of course has led to most of the abuses that we have in the Senate today.

This post was edited by JayKwik on May 18 2013 11:16am

The districts aren't as skewed as your portrayal and since the parties trade each other districts when they're being drawn up you can bet that it won't go too far one way without a huge stink coming out of it.

It is all done according to the census and spoils system politics. The process hasn't changed significantly in a very long time...it is just the way the wind is blowing. One party is no better than the other in this regard.

There IS a huge stink that's come out of the recent wave of gerrymandering, given that it's now at historic levels, it just sounds like you haven't realized that yet. The districts are extremely skewed, you should take a look at them sometime. We've reached this point now that things are finally beginning to "sort themselves out" downballot with the generations of a a liberal Republican/conservative Democrat holding a seat in reliable opposition territory over. The parties don't actually trade one another seats anymore either, that behavior which already happened at a very small frequency would be completely gone were it not for a few states still having to do their remapping on compromise because neither party has full control. When one party holds full control of a state, they don't give the other party anything at all. The process was relatively stable but has changed significantly in the last two remaps, and especially after the GOP wins in 2010. Both the number of states where hyper gerrymandering is taking place and the level of drift in districts have reached an all-time high.

The "both parties do it" argument is as usual lazy, nonfactual, false equivalence horseshit because this is incredibly easy to measure. You can see the disparity on a a state control-by-state control basis (the GOP has about a 4x edge, holding 21 states to 5 states where full-control gerrymandering can be implemented, so even if the Democratic states had the same aim they wouldn't be able to have anywhere near the same effect), and you can also measure the difference in commitment to cleaning up this problem. Most of the states under regular Democratic control have pushed for independent commissions to draw their lines, or have at least settled for court-drawn lines. That's something that the other party obviously has no interest in doing. If this was really a "one party is no better than the other" situation then California would have simply drawn a 53-0 or a 51-2 map for the Democrats and remained in control of the House.

This is why we aren't getting local representation anymore. There's nothing local about the NC 3rd and 12th and the FL 22nd. There's a chance you get these types of districts through fairer mapping practices (like the NJ 6th and CA 23rd) but it's a far, far better system. If we were just incurring mild gerrymandering like we were 3 or 4 decades ago then there wouldn't be as noticeable a difference, but the hyper gerrymandering that's come after 2010 makes the differences stark.

I for one would love a joe biden presidency

Think of the entertainment value

Joe Biden would actually make a pretty remarkable president, his "gaffe problem" is overexaggerated just like his "plagiarism problem" was that kept him out of serious contention for so many presidential cycles. He doesn't have much of a chance of winning his party's nomination in 2016 but had they ever given him the nod in the past they would have been rewarded. Were he somehow at the top of the ticket in 2008 the first Obama/Biden term would have largely looked the same but everything would have been stronger. The stimulus would have been better, the healthcare reform would have been better, Dodd-Frank would have made more sense, and every fiscal "compromise" would have been better too, instead of just Obama throwing his support behind the GOP plan at the last second like we got over and over and over again. It wouldn't be all exciting and historic and flashy but it would have been a lot better governing, and we would have likely avoided all this violent/moronic rhetoric and the teabag astroturf "movement."

The problem is not the government.
The problem is us letting the government have too much power.

I like Biden too. He would be better than Obama because he is more than an inch deep.

Will the gentleman from the State of Exxon Mobil please be seated?