Of the new 249-member body, I propose the following:
- 123 Representatives elected to two-year terms.
- 84 of which will be called District Representative; and
- 39 are called At-Large Representatives.
- 126 Senators elected to 4-year terms. The elections for Senators will be staggered so that one-half (63) will be elected every-other two-year cycle.
More important is the type of districts and the type of elections.
- The 84 District Representative will be elected from 28 districts of 3 Representatives elected proportionally. These would currently be districts of about 450,000 citizens.
- Four of the Representative Districts would be combined into one Senate District for a total of 7 Senate Districts. In each of these 7 Districts, there would be 18 Senators, with 9 of them elected for four-year terms every two years. These 7 Senate Districts would be quite large (1.8 million citizens) but with 9 Senators being elected proportionally, the low election threshold (10%) would allow a very diverse set of Senators to be elected, representing varying views across the whole district.
- The remaining 39 At-Large Representatives would not have districts, but would instead be elected statewide. They would be elected using a Party List system (more on Proportional systems in a later post) and would be used to "even-out" the Legislature to make sure the political parties and coalitions statewide are reflected properly in the General Assembly. There would, for example, be a 5% threshold meaning that if a minority party got 5% statewide, but for some reason at the district level, they did not get 5% of the seats, they would pick-up At-Large seats to get their fair representation.
4 comments:
Hmmm, now the unicameral idea I'd have problems getting behind but this idea I can get behind.
This proposal is not for a unicameral legislature. It is bi-cameral in that it still has a senate and a house with one senator for four representatives. The senators, because of their longer tenure, will have primacy, just as they have today. Representatives will become the pupils or acolytes of the senators.
Just because they vote in the same room at the same time doesn't make it unicameral. The proposal here contains two separate legislative cultures, as easy to exploit as the two we have today. If I were a large contractor and wary of having to be publicly accountable, I think I'd welcome this proposal as something that would simplify my job without having to dance in public.
Mr. Cain, I disagree. It is fundamentally unicameral; you can disagree that it is a good structure or that it won't work, but it is unicameral in its simplest terms. Every member, despite tenure, will have an equal vote. Committees will still be decided by the whole.
Your suggestion that the proposal is "as easy to exploit as the two we have today" tells me that you don't support unicameralism, so why split hairs about what unicameralism is?
I truly believe that bi-cameralism, by spliting the legislative process into two grroups that end up brokering agreements behind closed-doors, probably provides your "contractors" an easier environment to work in, not harder. Make them dance once in public and we'll know exactly where they stand. They dance twice and we don't know what to think--which is why most of those entrenched tend to like bi-cameralism and would be more concerned by the democratic forces behind unicameralism.
I agree we need reform, but this is the wrong way.
Fairest would be to permit each county to elect one senator and apportion the House by population alone. This would insure fairer representation for Downstate (My home, sweet home.) However, thanks to the Geniuses on the Warren Court, this idea of representing anything but racial minorities has been declared unconstitutional, so I propose the following plan:
The House should consist of a number of members from each county equal to the number of two-hundred fortieths of the states population residing in each county, and rounded to the nearest whole number. Each county should have at least one, this would bring the grand total (at least for 2002-2012) to 278 Representatives.
The Senate should consist of between 52 and 60 members, always an even number. They would be elected from districts comprising of whole counties, or one couty electing many senators in the case of those which have sufficent populations to do so. The Lt. Governor should be the president of the Senate and cast the deciding vote if necessary, because if this vote must be cast, it should be by someone who represents the state as a whole.
I respect the proposal of party-list representation, but disapprove of it, it puts too much power in partisanship alone, an elector should always choose a person based on their individual beliefs. Therefore, the form of proportional representation I propose permits each person to cast one vote for any candidate for representative, and one for senator, regardless as to how many seats are to be filled. For example, in cook county, which would be allotted 104 representatives, republicans would not run near that many candidates because they could not in their wildest dreams hope to win that many Chicagoan seats, instead they’d run about half that many and come up with more a less divided number of votes for their candidates, and an approximately accurate number of representatives to the number of votes Republicans in general receive.
An exaple of this plan, the following counties would have approximately the following number of representatives:
Champaign - 3
Cook - 104
DeKalb - 2
DuPage - 18
Kane - 8
Kankakee - 2
Lake - 12
Madison - 5
McHenry - 5
McLean - 3
Peoria - 4
Rock Island - 3
Sangamon - 4
St. Clair - 5
Tazewell - 2
Vermillion - 2
Will - 10
Winnebago - 5
The other 84 counties would elect one representative each.
My plan may not address all of the same isslue as yours, as I am mainly concerned with Gerrymandering. an added bonus to this plan would be a likely decrease in smear campainging, because candidates (in more populous counties) would to a certain extent be running against those of the same party.
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