Possibility Check: Unicarmel US Legislature

Hello everyone it's nice to meet you all. I've been a lurker for quite a while and recently decided to join in on the "fun" if you will. Personally I have always been pretty interested in history in general so this seemed like a nice place to stop off at. Now onto the premise of this thread: a Unicameral US Legislature.

I know that the division of the US Legislature into two bodies was the result of compromise and a little bit of cultural inertia more or less but still. I personally have always viewed it as rather flawed, having two bodies doing the same thing always seemed a little redundant to me. As such I've been thinking of possible ways to solve this in a realistic fashion and I think I figured something out. Inspired in part by a CGP grey video my solution is to have members of the legislature be divided into two types.

Let me explain: The basic premise would be the US legislature, which would be called the Congress, having two types of Members of Congress(MC): Representatives and Delegates. Representatives would represent the states and would be appointed by said states legislature with a total of 2 per state. In contrast Delegates would instead represent the people and would be elected by said people with a total of 1 senator per 100,000 persons until their numbers reached 500. In effect what I am advocating for would be for the US House and Senate to have beeen fused into a single body sorta. Besides the way by which they are elected, or not, the MCs will otherwise be the same being able to vote for bills and serve alongside one another.

This system theoretically allows for a single house of Congress while satisfying the interests of both parties, having both the states and people being represented at the same time. Plus unicameral bodies are usually cheaper so that is nice.

So, could something like this have been possible during the formation of the USA?
 
Unlikely. The redundancy is a feature, not a bug. This, along with most other downsides to a bicameral legislature listed in your post, have never caused any serious problems for the United States.

Further, the Senate, as constituted, is more than just a chamber in the legislative branch, with some powers properly assigned to both the Executive and Judicial branches.
 
Certainly not back in 1786! I read your OP to see if perhaps you'd be suggesting sometime later a reform might fuse the houses, say sometime after the Civil War.

Back in the days of the Revolution and Constitutional Convention, the notion that the several States of the Union were sovereign nations that had agreed to form a Confederation for mutual benefit was quite dominant. I myself think that in reality we were already really one nation even then, that the several colonies that rebelled and set themselves up as independent States were in fact part of one bigger nation before the rebellion and the division into separate colonies/states does not really mean they were separate nations but that they were a large nation that found this mode of subdivision and devolution of powers useful. But my view is perhaps mystical and over-romantic, based in part on a vindication of the soundness of Abraham Lincoln's vision of one nation, and a perhaps hyperbolic claim it had always been so.

At any rate, right or wrong, the idea that the many states were in some sense the true sovereign governments of the American people was a strong and widely accepted one, and so one pillar of making the Union legislature bicameral was to separately represent the combined people of the whole Union in one body--and the combined federation of the many states in another. From that point of view it doesn't make sense to merge them.

Which is why I wondered if you'd look to some later period, say after the Civil War when Lincoln's vision had been manifested by Union victory.

But the fact is there were also quite other reasons to divide the bodies up, and I wonder if you've read the Federalist Papers on the matter. People like Alexander Hamilton who were forthright elitists argued that splitting the houses and making distinctions about their dignity and their functions served as a check on rapid, volatile mob sentiment that might dominate the lower house but not the longer-term, staggered elected, and most importantly more dignified--read, more aristocratic--upper house.

The Colonies of course had had experience of bicameral legislatures before considering how to govern on a continental scale, and the fact that after the adoption of the 1787 Constitution hardly any state in the Union ever experimented with unicameralism should demonstrate that it is more than a matter of inertia carried over from the British Parliament. Indeed in the Articles of Confederation period a number of states tried all kinds of systems including unicameral, and the convergence on a standard bicameral model for nearly every American state government, no matter how small, suggests that the reasons run very deep.

I suspect a unicameral system would be symptomatic of a more radically democratic society, one that put more trust in the good will and intelligence of honest representatives of the people than in mechanical checks and balances that tend to automatically favor the already established. The one state I know of that has a unicameral legislature today, Nebraska, may not seem like a beacon of liberalism nowadays but adopted this unique system back in the fevered days of Populism, when the prairie states went quite radical indeed.

I also suppose such state governments would demand a heavy level of popular participation in politics and a close eye on the doings of the legislature. Whereas Americans at least today tend to vote their party or the spin of the most recent TV campaign, and then leave government to the bicameral legislatures on autopilot.

Given that bicameralism is normal to Americans and has prevailed as long as we've had the Constitution, I'd think it would take some really massive discontent with the functioning of two houses to power a movement to change it, even one that as you suggest preserves the overall balance of power the Constitutional compromise between a representative House and a chamber of state government delegates Senate was meant to accomplish.

And by the way I don't think dissolving two reps appointed by the states into a much larger sea of reps directly elected by the people would have at all a similar dynamic of balancing small state power and big state power the compromise accomplished, because with two houses each chosen differently, the overall dynamic of each house is different, whereas 100 state-appointed reps would just be swallowed up in the much larger number of regular Representatives and would be the opposite of what people like Hamilton wanted--they'd be less dignified, not more.

If we wanted to achieve the same sort of dynamic regarding big state versus small state power, we'd have to have equal numbers of state appointees and directly elected representatives--either cut the number of the latter down to 100 (which would mean a whole lot of states would have just one rep, and the disparity of population between the biggest single-rep state and the smallest would be huge) or raise the number that come in identical sized delegations no matter what the population to match the size of the proportional delegation. So if we round up the number of proportionally elected Reps to 500, we'd also need 500 state reps, or ten from each state.

Also staggered terms so the Senate does not turn over by more than a third of its membership with each election is another key distinction, meant to stabilize potentially volatile popularly elected bodies. If the 10 state delegates were in fact selected by state governments the staggering would not be such a hardship (but it might also be less necessary).

Since I think the idea that any part of the US government should be a council of state governments is archaic and reactionary, I'd like those 10 each to be elected by popular vote rather than appointed by state governments myself--elected at large with a single transferable vote system or something like that, to let minority parties get a meaningful foothold. In that case putting just 3 or 4 up for election every cycle out of 10 would weaken and dilute the potential benefit of having 10 to elect at large by some kind of proportional system; proportional for just 3 is much coarser than for 10. Not everyone thinks raising the fine-tuned representativeness of a legislature with a lot of specialized parties is a good idea of course. But if you follow their logic, it seems to lead to the current system with two different houses.

Anyway we'd be looking at a unicameral body of 1000 legislators, and I'd feel it is ridiculous to multiply the power of the small states relative to the large ones, and that the whole body should be half the size and all elected by the people directly on equal terms. In short I'd simply get rid of the Senate completely, eliminate staggered terms and hope democracy is sufficient to get a decent government.
 
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