There’s 50 states in the USA. And 49 of them have something horribly wrong with their state governments. The sole exception? Nebraska. And what does Nebraska do right? They have a unicameral state legislature. Uni-what? Instead of having a senate and a house of representatives (or whatever the equivalent names are in various states), they have just a single chamber.
Some background: the US has a Senate and a House of Representatives. As you may or may not remember from your 10th-grade American History class, this was a compromise between the states with small populations (who favored an equal number of seats for each state) and the large states (who favored seats based on population). Eventually Roger Sherman masterminded the Connecticut Compromise, which led to our bicameral federal legislature.* Continue reading ‘bicameral state legislatures’
You’ve probably heard that Barack Obama is our 44th president, or heard people in the media refer to the George Bushes as “Bush 41″ and “Bush 43″ to tell them apart. This is silly, because 43 different men have been President of the United States. The confusion arises from Grover Cleveland, who was president for two non-consecutive terms, from 1885-1889 and 1893-1897, so he is usually counted as both the 22nd and 24th president. Our system of presidential elections makes it unusual for someone to be elected to non-consecutive terms, but in countries with a prime minister or premier, offices which are typically controlled by the party leader of whichever party holds the legislature, this happens frequently. Consider Wikipedia’s list of Canada’s prime ministers. In eminently sensible fashion, those who served at separate times are simply numbered in accordance with when they first served, regardless of however many separate terms they had. So Stephen Harper actually is the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada. If the Canadians followed our approach, they’d call him the 27th prime minister. Continue reading ‘saying there have been 44 presidents’