An appeals court Tuesday sided with a lower court judge who determined Trump colluded with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in bringing and later dismissing a case seeking $10 billion in damages from the IRS.
Florida-based U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in July found that the lawsuit that served as the hook for the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund amounted to collusion as the two parties were never truly averse. She also sanctioned two Trump attorneys in the process.
The president, who sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, struck an agreement with the IRS in late May to dismiss the case, with the DOJ then creating an “anti-weaponization” fund to provide payments to those who claim to have been wronged by the government.
The Electoral College would be tolerable if the size of the House wasn’t arbitrarily limited. If Wyoming’s population of ~580k is one district, then California at ~39.5m should have 69 districts instead of 52. Overall, the EC should have something like 150 additional votes to distribute.
If the House were to use the representation it did when it was artificially limited in 1929, the House would have roughly 1500 members and gerrymandering would be effectively useless.
The 435 number seems random because it is. That’s simply how many representatives there were at the time when it was made permanent. That artificial limit effectively makes it a second Senate, defeating the purpose of its existence.
Congress can fix it at any point. The Permanent Apportionment Act was passed by a simple majority. It can be repealed or replaced with a simple majority as well. But that would dilute every member’s current massively outsized power, so they won’t.
Also, it might be tolerable if the Senate were representative, too. Or at least if states were right-sized to actually represent all the people in them.
California has sixty-six times the number of people in Wyoming.
Both states get 2 Senators.
That is just absurd. There is just no other way to look at it. There is no reasonable way to think that we need to offset the needs of 39 million people as a “state” with the needs of 590 thousand people as a “state”, and they get treated as the same thing.
There needs to be some threshold at which we start adding more Senators to states with so many people in them. That, or we start, at least for the sake of Senators, combining states together into one, and they get two among them.
I love the idea of combining Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota and I think they’d still have less people than California. Give that gigantic landmass 2 Senators.