Amendments to crimp the House of Representatives' power

[Simfan34]

Seriously, PR wouldn't change anything. We live in a two party system. Deal with it. For all this talk about "social engineering" you people seem to be trying to stuff extra parties- and the ones we have are uniformly terrible- down our throats.

For a proud capitalist like you, I'm surprised you don't seem to believe that adding competition increases the quality of supply.

Yes, but when the consumers have to bear the costs of competition...

[Antonio the Sixth]

Seriously, PR wouldn't change anything. We live in a two party system. Deal with it. For all this talk about "social engineering" you people seem to be trying to stuff extra parties- and the ones we have are uniformly terrible- down our throats.

For a proud capitalist like you, I'm surprised you don't seem to believe that adding competition increases the quality of supply.

Yes, but when the consumers have to bear the costs of competition...

What is that supposed to mean?

[wilji1090]

Why not term limits for the House and the Senate?

Three terms for the House. Two terms for the Senate.

[Bleeding heart conservative, HTMLdon]

Why not term limits for the House and the Senate?

Three terms for the House. Two terms for the Senate.

There is not any evidence that leads to a conclusion that term limits would make anything better.  In fact, I think it makes the situation worse.

The problem isn't that we aren't cycling through enough candidates, the problem is that the candidates we have are engaged in a constant campaign and are having to respond to interest groups rather than the interests of the country.  Congressmen are having to spend more and more of their time raising money rather than doing their job.  Term limits doesn't fix that.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

The bench is really too weak to justify term limits. In too many districts, we'd just end up with someone worse.

[SteveRogers]

PR would solve the gerrymandering problem, sure, but PR probably wouldn't be a good fit for the U.S. We've got a candidate-centered rather than a party centered electoral system here. The American tradition (self-nomination, direct primaries, etc.)  would make voting for closed party lists instead of individual people a non-starter here. STV would probably be more "American", but unfortunately it's probably too complicated for the average voter to understand.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

The Senate is by it's nature much more undemocratic. The reasons why the House is crazier are

1. gerrymandering

2. That people don't seem to realize how crazy their representative is compared to how they pay attention to their Senator. Akin is a perfect example. He spent 12 years in the House (and another 12 in the state legislature) being an extremist with no one noticing, and lost by a decent margin in his Senate bid after people realized what an extremist he is.