Congress

I Didn’t Need to Watch the State of the Union to Know What It Is.

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I’m pretty happy I didn’t watch Trump’s State of the Union last night, unlike many of you who read this blog. From what I gather, he gave the longest speech in history, for the second straight year. Yeah, no thanks. Honestly, listening to this guy ramble for hours about how wonderful he is and how great things are is bad for your mental health. You lose brain cells and you might even be tempted to respond to him. There is no point to that. You are persuading no one by arguing about him. You are also not debating a normal politician. If job growth is tepid at best, he’ll tell you he created a billion jobs. Facts and figures don’t matter. For the most part you’re not debating any sort of actual policy. He talks about immigration for instance, and his chaos in the streets policies to deport illegal people here are less effective than Clinton and Obama simply taking people out of prisons who were arrested for crimes and were here illegally. The guy finds a way to even do things that people want in the dumbest way possible, and there’s no point acting like he’s anything but an ignoramus. The people voted for him, and they’ve got him for four years, if they still want to watch, go on ahead. My guess is the ratings were piss poor.

I also don’t watch for all the other theatrics that go on in the room. Honestly, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the Congress are three loathsome institutions at this point, filled with strange people and strange ideas that aren’t doing much good for the public. I don’t need to watch Democratic members who did go yell at the President so they can get their 20 seconds on TV and raise money off of it by text message later. While Trump may be the center piece of decline in that room, let’s not pretend the rest of the room are not complicit in their own ways for reducing our country to a carnival side show. Congress has become successively worse over the last 30 years at doing anything beyond basic appropriations bills to fund stuff they want to do, and even then they often times fail to do it on time and end up shutting down the government. Our current Congress is among the least productive in the history of man kind, a symbol of failure in Western society that deserves scorn from all angles. Even when someone proposes something broadly popular and supported from all sides, you’re lucky if you can get it a vote, let alone pass it through both houses. And the court? They created our current mess. We won’t waste more words on them.

So how is our country doing? Health care, housing, and food all cost too much, and they are all things that are essential to our survival as human beings. We’re actively rolling back protections for our air, water, soil, and food, poisoning the Earth we live on in the name of what? I don’t know, let’s just say profits. Our government is dysfunctional. Our economy is not meeting the public’s needs. Our people are fighting on social media over nonsense. Yeah, we’re doing great. The state of our union is “stronger than ever.” This is just what Americans died in wars for, right?

We’re a shitshow. And if you watched it, that was on display. Me? I had nothing to do last night, but I was too busy for that.

The Solution to the Re-Districting Wars? End Districting as it is.

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Texas gave 42.46% of it’s votes to Kamala Harris. California gave Trump 38.3% of their votes. North Carolina gave Harris 47.1% of their votes. Maryland gave Trump 34.08% of the vote. Indiana gave Harris 39.7% of it’s votes. Illinois gave Trump 43.47% of the vote in 2024. I could go on.

I picked these states specifically for a reason, but I could have picked almost any state. These are all states being mentioned as either currently gerrymandering their Congressional map or potentially. To be clear, their current Congressional maps we contested 2024 under do not match the electoral results of their state by any stretch of the imagination, and all are proposing to make it much worse. Think about it this way, at least a third of the people you would see walking down the street today in those states voted for the person who lost the election in their state. Their lucky if a fifth of their state’s Congressional delegation is in their party, and probably none of their Senators are. Congress has been totally dysfunctional since at least 2010, but the seeds of that started much earlier. Now there’s a decent argument that the entire institution is undemocratic, that it represses the voting rights of our people. The Presidency was designed to not be directly elected by the public. We stopped doing that with Congress long ago. We hold direct elections for Congress, they’re just patently unfair and misrepresentative of the public. The legitimacy is gone now. We knew the Senate was a farce. Now the House is too.

The only way to fix this, and I mean the only way, is to scrap our current district based system. Apportion the Senate based on population, there is no way California should live in a tyranny of Wyoming, and there’s no way Texas should have to with Vermont either. This is beyond stupid, and the concern of small states not being able to stop larger states is basically null and void if we’re going to be a hyper polarized country. Same in the House though. Why are we arguing over lines when the elections aren’t producing representative bodies anyway? Just apportion each state a number of seats based on population, and let them popularly elect them. Make some rules, so the whole Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania isn’t Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but put everyone on a ballot and let people vote. You’d start seeing concerns besides partisanship show back up. If Pennsylvania votes 52%-46% for Democrats in 2026, then the result should be 9-8 Democrats. There shouldn’t be a way for a state legislature to partisanly make it 12-5 if the voters are giving two out of every five, or more votes to each party. This is madness.

As long as you have line drawing, you will have this partisan gamesmanship to steal a few more seats. You can’t end it. So just end it. Vote like a parliamentary system and get a Congress that represents the voters. Then we can talk about ending all the procedural garbage the nerds on Capitol Hill created to make sure nothing gets done.