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The House

I am not a scholar of American governance, but from what I have read about the early years of our government the House was viewed as being more authentically representative of the will of the people than the Senate or the two other branches of government. Their powers were proscribed accordingly in the Constitution, with the Speaker of the House being after the Vice President in the line of succession.

Some time ago I realized that in my lifetime the House no longer represented the people authentically. A state would be divided in one proportion between registered Democrats and Republicans and their House seats would have a very different proportion. The state legislatures often showed the same imbalance.

A simple and thus incomplete answer has to do with the drawing of districts by the party in power every ten years. Technology has advanced to allow the drawing of districts with incredible precision to lead to maximum representation for those doing the drawing. Districts lack compactness and often reach across states to groups together certain blocs.

To my knowledge there is no process to force a more just mechanism other than the bully pulpit. SCOTUS has ruled that political gerrymandering is not prohibited by the constitution.

We are currently without a Speaker of the House and have been without one for several weeks. The Republican party does not have a consensus candidate that they can elect with their own votes and the idea of working with the Democrats seems anathema to them. They are not a functioning governing party right now and haven't been at least since Trump became the head.

I would prefer improvement of this mess to radical changes but I look at McCarthy, Jordan, Greene, Boebert, et al and don't see the path to improvement.

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