Seeing as how they're going to be building a new capitol in Philly, and can made the lower Chamber bigger than it needs to be at the time, I suspect that any such issue will be kicked down the road a significant amount of time
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Seeing as how they're going to be building a new capitol in Philly, and can made the lower Chamber bigger than it needs to be at the time, I suspect that any such issue will be kicked down the road a significant amount of time
My plan has always been for the total seat change to be “fixed” at a certain allowance rather than a hard cap on House size
That, too.Seeing as how they're going to be building a new capitol in Philly, and can made the lower Chamber bigger than it needs to be at the time, I suspect that any such issue will be kicked down the road a significant amount of time
As I understand before the 1920 census showing urban localities being a majority of the population leading to Congress basically refusing to reapportion that decade because of the fears of rural congressmen they would usually just increase the number of House seats to the minimum necessary to make sure no states lost seats and called it a day (though IIRC 1910 apportionment was also chaotic because by then many thought 435 was an unnecessarily large number of legislators).
It took them 20 years between 1910 and 1930 to finally negotiate the number at which the House would be apportioned at (they chose to keep 435) among other things, such as deliberately allowing states to malapportion their own districts and allow all sorts of other fuckery to allow rural areas to be overrepresented (because rural areas for some fucking reason are completely incapable of dealing with being a minority of the population and not being allowed to be dominant), and also allow Southern states to Jim Crow away what little power their tiny voting Black populations had more efficiently, until the Voting Rights Act did away with that bullshit.
Point is that the debate over apportionment got extremely spicy around this time, and I'm assuming the CSA adopted that deal a while ago (since it would have been very, very good at protecting the plantocracy's interests).
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The Tillmanites rolled out an absolutely absurd apportionment scheme mandating every 90k people or so have a district but that probably won't last.
The apportionment schema moving forward will get interesting in the US, though, because the Democrats are more dependent on both rural Western voters AND urban voters than they were IOTL, and the Liberals are out of power so the precise fuckery the Republicans pursued IOTL can't be used; hence I split the baby with a hard cap on how much the House may grow by each census, or at least will do so.
1916 United States Presidential election - Multipart
"...winning precisely one less electoral vote than Charles Evans Hughes four years prior, thanks to the arithmetic of losing Wisconsin and Oregon but gaining Indiana and Delaware. Underneath the hood, however, Root was dismayed.
Since accepting the nomination in Chicago four months prior he had been assured, repeatedly, that he was walking to a coronation and that not only would he be the first Liberal candidate to earn a popular vote majority since his friend and mentor John Hay twenty years earlier but that he would win a veritable landslide against McClellan and his machine boss cronies, with Liberals picking up Senate seats on Democratic turf such as Minnesota or Iowa while delivering a House majority of as many as 260 members. While Root had majorities in Congress, the "trifecta" in modern parlance that had evaded Hughes and forced his predecessor's need to negotiate directly with Democrats, it was a razor-thin majority dependent on the whims of any one Senator, and the partisan goals of many Liberals would be stymied with the deepening split between the moderates and the conservatives.
The victory was as milquetoast and overshadowed by events as the campaign, what with news of violence erupting in Charlotte the day after polls closed and reports of results strayed in around the country and the ceasefire and armistice being declared but four days later. Thus Root's win was fully suborned to the Republic's triumph, a state of affairs with which Root was utterly satisfied - "I stand only as a servant of the people, but I must first note that whatever trials await me as President pale compared to those faced over the last three years by the soldiery of our Republic," he declared in the first line of his remarks the morning after election day when it was clear he had won - but it left him with little popular mandate of his own in the public consciousness, especially with how close the popular vote margin had been and his relative anonymity as a candidate..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...sad to see Hughes go, for Norris, unlike much of the broadsheet press, did not hold Root in particularly high regard. The new President was more pragmatic than his dire post-Presidential reputation would suggest, but he was conservative temperamentally and as old-fashioned politically as his advanced age would suggest.
The victory of Root has, in later years, been discussed by historians and political scientists alike as the last gasp of Blainism and the brief attempt to make what would come to be known as "Mellonism" work; the former was a successful project for a brief time, the latter a dismal failure. In terms of the former, Root was in some ways the platonic ideal of the Blainist worldview - he was an immensely talented lawyer who had worked his way through a number of Cabinet offices to build experience and thus, in a particularly elitist sense, he was the "best" or most "natural" choice for President, at least in the fairly sterile view that the best politicians were the best administrators. This streak of elite technocracy has never quite been abandoned by the Liberals, particularly considering some of their later choices for Presidential candidates, but Root was the most clear and disastrous distillation of this idea.
Of course, the idea was already starting to lose some of its wings as early as the 1890s, when John Hay - Root's mentor, friend and political hero - was starting to fade in popularity and effectiveness in the year before his assassination. Both of the Liberal Presidents who followed since then - the conservative Joseph Foraker and the moderate in Hughes - had at least worked their way up the political ladder electorally, as successful and popular swing-state governors, leveraging those records into national notoriety and nominations. Root, like Hay, had never run for public office in any form until his Presidential nomination, and that handicap showed. While one would have expected Democratic publications such as those owned by the Roosevelt family to savage Root, even Liberal-friendly papers in his home city of New York mocked his choice to largely campaign from the comfort of his brownstone in Philadelphia as he made vague, substance-free policy declarations and claimed that he was foregoing a campaign out of "decorum" to remain at the President's side as the war dragged to its conclusion. While his partnership with Hughes was indeed close and he had been something of a proto-President as it was, this assurance was dismissed in many surprising corners as rank laziness on Root's part to avoid the rigors of campaigning, which he detested, or perhaps because he would have felt pressure to resign his current beloved office otherwise. Root's image as an aloof administrator lacking a popular touch was not helped by a campaign drawn straight from the Blaine era [1], in which a disproportionate amount of focus was placed not on Root's vision for peace or the very real sense in the electorate that the Democrats didn't exactly have a firm plan either, but rather accusations of McClellan's ties to Tammany Hall. Whatever one may have thought of the Tammany operation, Liberals had over-learned their victory in 1912 and assumed that dogwhistling about Irish party bosses was a successful campaign maneuver, but with most voters too young to have remembered the scandal-plagued 1870s or 1890s, and with a series of Liberal corruption scandals being much fresher in memory at the height of war, the attacks fell flat, [2] and Root badly underperformed expectations of a ten-point landslide. While the election was relatively close in the popular vote, he improved on Hughes' margins in New York and flipped Indiana, while McClellan failed to make inroads in the crucial Midwest with the exception of Wisconsin.
Norris had suspected that Root would prove a worse candidate than Democrats expected at the outset of the campaign, and was pleasantly surprised by how McClellan acquitted himself considering that he found his party's candidate far too conservative instinctively for his tastes even as he was a fair champion of the Democratic platform. Nonetheless, the 1916 campaign was dogged by voter apathy thanks to three hard years of war; the Liberals were insipid but had successfully prosecuted the campaign to its end mere days after Root's election, and the electorate rewarded them for them, though not to the extent that Liberals had hoped or Democrats had feared. What resulted was thus a closely-divided government in which Democrats would still have a fair deal of influence.
The defeat of McClellan, narrower than first thought as it may have been, served a second purpose - finally kneecapping the dominance of the New Yorkers. It was now two straight elections in which both major-party nominees had hailed from New York, and the fourth straight election in which Democrats had nominated a New Yorker to lead the ticket. Norris suggested that voter apathy about the Root-McClellan contest was in part to blame for low turnout, and that much of that apathy - at least amongst Democrats, for he did not claim to speak for Liberal voters unenthusiastic about the 72-year old bureaucrat their party had nominated - stemmed from the very real sense that national politics had become a contest between New Yorkers to then make decisions for the rest of the country. While Norris eschewed the idea ascendant amongst some in the West that the capital had an almost colonial relationship with states past the Mississippi, he nonetheless did think there was something to the very real problem of the past three Presidents over what would by the end of Root's term be sixteen years having been from New York, and as early as November of 1916 he was already laying the ground to prevent another Empire State coronation in 1920. A major part of that effort was his appointment by Fitzgerald, himself a New York Irishman, as Deputy Minority Whip, with Marion de Vries' decision to retire from House leadership after fourteen years as the Democratic whip both under Sulzer and Clark placing Fitzgerald in that role now in the minority and with his powerful Nebraskan ally at his side..."
- The Gentle Knight: The Life and Ideals of George W. Norris
[1] Sensing a theme here?
[2] The “partially rewarding the patience of @Curtain Jerker” part of our election update
Since accepting the nomination in Chicago four months prior he had been assured, repeatedly, that he was walking to a coronation and that not only would he be the first Liberal candidate to earn a popular vote majority since his friend and mentor John Hay twenty years earlier but that he would win a veritable landslide against McClellan and his machine boss cronies, with Liberals picking up Senate seats on Democratic turf such as Minnesota or Iowa while delivering a House majority of as many as 260 members. While Root had majorities in Congress, the "trifecta" in modern parlance that had evaded Hughes and forced his predecessor's need to negotiate directly with Democrats, it was a razor-thin majority dependent on the whims of any one Senator, and the partisan goals of many Liberals would be stymied with the deepening split between the moderates and the conservatives.
The victory was as milquetoast and overshadowed by events as the campaign, what with news of violence erupting in Charlotte the day after polls closed and reports of results strayed in around the country and the ceasefire and armistice being declared but four days later. Thus Root's win was fully suborned to the Republic's triumph, a state of affairs with which Root was utterly satisfied - "I stand only as a servant of the people, but I must first note that whatever trials await me as President pale compared to those faced over the last three years by the soldiery of our Republic," he declared in the first line of his remarks the morning after election day when it was clear he had won - but it left him with little popular mandate of his own in the public consciousness, especially with how close the popular vote margin had been and his relative anonymity as a candidate..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...sad to see Hughes go, for Norris, unlike much of the broadsheet press, did not hold Root in particularly high regard. The new President was more pragmatic than his dire post-Presidential reputation would suggest, but he was conservative temperamentally and as old-fashioned politically as his advanced age would suggest.
The victory of Root has, in later years, been discussed by historians and political scientists alike as the last gasp of Blainism and the brief attempt to make what would come to be known as "Mellonism" work; the former was a successful project for a brief time, the latter a dismal failure. In terms of the former, Root was in some ways the platonic ideal of the Blainist worldview - he was an immensely talented lawyer who had worked his way through a number of Cabinet offices to build experience and thus, in a particularly elitist sense, he was the "best" or most "natural" choice for President, at least in the fairly sterile view that the best politicians were the best administrators. This streak of elite technocracy has never quite been abandoned by the Liberals, particularly considering some of their later choices for Presidential candidates, but Root was the most clear and disastrous distillation of this idea.
Of course, the idea was already starting to lose some of its wings as early as the 1890s, when John Hay - Root's mentor, friend and political hero - was starting to fade in popularity and effectiveness in the year before his assassination. Both of the Liberal Presidents who followed since then - the conservative Joseph Foraker and the moderate in Hughes - had at least worked their way up the political ladder electorally, as successful and popular swing-state governors, leveraging those records into national notoriety and nominations. Root, like Hay, had never run for public office in any form until his Presidential nomination, and that handicap showed. While one would have expected Democratic publications such as those owned by the Roosevelt family to savage Root, even Liberal-friendly papers in his home city of New York mocked his choice to largely campaign from the comfort of his brownstone in Philadelphia as he made vague, substance-free policy declarations and claimed that he was foregoing a campaign out of "decorum" to remain at the President's side as the war dragged to its conclusion. While his partnership with Hughes was indeed close and he had been something of a proto-President as it was, this assurance was dismissed in many surprising corners as rank laziness on Root's part to avoid the rigors of campaigning, which he detested, or perhaps because he would have felt pressure to resign his current beloved office otherwise. Root's image as an aloof administrator lacking a popular touch was not helped by a campaign drawn straight from the Blaine era [1], in which a disproportionate amount of focus was placed not on Root's vision for peace or the very real sense in the electorate that the Democrats didn't exactly have a firm plan either, but rather accusations of McClellan's ties to Tammany Hall. Whatever one may have thought of the Tammany operation, Liberals had over-learned their victory in 1912 and assumed that dogwhistling about Irish party bosses was a successful campaign maneuver, but with most voters too young to have remembered the scandal-plagued 1870s or 1890s, and with a series of Liberal corruption scandals being much fresher in memory at the height of war, the attacks fell flat, [2] and Root badly underperformed expectations of a ten-point landslide. While the election was relatively close in the popular vote, he improved on Hughes' margins in New York and flipped Indiana, while McClellan failed to make inroads in the crucial Midwest with the exception of Wisconsin.
Norris had suspected that Root would prove a worse candidate than Democrats expected at the outset of the campaign, and was pleasantly surprised by how McClellan acquitted himself considering that he found his party's candidate far too conservative instinctively for his tastes even as he was a fair champion of the Democratic platform. Nonetheless, the 1916 campaign was dogged by voter apathy thanks to three hard years of war; the Liberals were insipid but had successfully prosecuted the campaign to its end mere days after Root's election, and the electorate rewarded them for them, though not to the extent that Liberals had hoped or Democrats had feared. What resulted was thus a closely-divided government in which Democrats would still have a fair deal of influence.
The defeat of McClellan, narrower than first thought as it may have been, served a second purpose - finally kneecapping the dominance of the New Yorkers. It was now two straight elections in which both major-party nominees had hailed from New York, and the fourth straight election in which Democrats had nominated a New Yorker to lead the ticket. Norris suggested that voter apathy about the Root-McClellan contest was in part to blame for low turnout, and that much of that apathy - at least amongst Democrats, for he did not claim to speak for Liberal voters unenthusiastic about the 72-year old bureaucrat their party had nominated - stemmed from the very real sense that national politics had become a contest between New Yorkers to then make decisions for the rest of the country. While Norris eschewed the idea ascendant amongst some in the West that the capital had an almost colonial relationship with states past the Mississippi, he nonetheless did think there was something to the very real problem of the past three Presidents over what would by the end of Root's term be sixteen years having been from New York, and as early as November of 1916 he was already laying the ground to prevent another Empire State coronation in 1920. A major part of that effort was his appointment by Fitzgerald, himself a New York Irishman, as Deputy Minority Whip, with Marion de Vries' decision to retire from House leadership after fourteen years as the Democratic whip both under Sulzer and Clark placing Fitzgerald in that role now in the minority and with his powerful Nebraskan ally at his side..."
- The Gentle Knight: The Life and Ideals of George W. Norris
[1] Sensing a theme here?
[2] The “partially rewarding the patience of @Curtain Jerker” part of our election update
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Man, this election was there for the taking. Nominate a guy like Champ Clark and he wins the poison chalice instead of Root.
Of course, keeping Mellon far away from the levers of power would reduce (but not eliminate) the worst of the slump.
EDIT on second reading...looks like our least favorite CSA President eats a lead breakfast before the Armistice. Couldn't happen to a better scumbag.
Of course, keeping Mellon far away from the levers of power would reduce (but not eliminate) the worst of the slump.
EDIT on second reading...looks like our least favorite CSA President eats a lead breakfast before the Armistice. Couldn't happen to a better scumbag.
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Please be Eamon DeValera who replaces him....
Please.
That would be so delicious.
Worth mentioning that both House and Senate still had a filibuster and large cloture threshold at this point IOTL.
Our pal Eamon looks to be setting his eyes upon political office in Jersey, instead of Massachusetts.
JPK Sr. is perchance a bit young - but one never knows. James Michael Curley or John F. Fitzgerald would be good choices, though, especially the latter as he tried to move into the Senate in OTL.
Perhaps not a lead breakfast per say, but it does sound like there's some extrajudicial activities which precipitate the government coming around to agreeing to peace. Whether thats rioting by the good people of Charolette, a coup, or something else ... I suspect we shall see soon
The thought of Vardaman arrested and put on (show) trial ... is not without its merits
Ah!
Yeah I don't remember where he was going, tbh. Just that he was going somewhere...
Perhaps, though McClellan did well with a very tough hand dealt to him. And yes; this is one of those OTL 1928/1976/2004 elections (or TTL 1888/1900) that you in hindsight don’t want to have won.
I haven’t totally decided when exactly Éamon pops up but, yes, Jersey
The Senate I knew about, but the House as well?
We’ll get there soon!Perhaps not a lead breakfast per say, but it does sound like there's some extrajudicial activities which precipitate the government coming around to agreeing to peace. Whether thats rioting by the good people of Charolette, a coup, or something else ... I suspect we shall see soon
The thought of Vardaman arrested and put on (show) trial ... is not without its merits
Just Vardmann?Perhaps not a lead breakfast per say, but it does sound like there's some extrajudicial activities which precipitate the government coming around to agreeing to peace. Whether thats rioting by the good people of Charolette, a coup, or something else ... I suspect we shall see soon
The thought of Vardaman arrested and put on (show) trial ... is not without its merits
Cotton Ed Smith. Hoke Smith at least bear an amazing amount of fault here....
I had read somewhere that the House had a supermajority cloture requirement at some point, but it seems that was wrong and they limited debate time on all measures except by the majority and minority leaders in the 1840’s.
Sorry.
dcharles
Banned
Probably because they grow.the food that keeps a majority of the population alive. Some people, for some reason, think that's important.
I'm curious to see if integralism will make the jump from Catholicism to being a general right-wing to far-right traditionalist/corporatist ideology? A Day in July detailed integralist movements in Romania, the Don Republic, Japan (pre-1936 coup), Germany etc. arising who were not so strongly tied to a Catholic underpinning/basis for the ideology.
For posterity, the 1916 election, in wikibox form (it will be an tragedy when New York one day ceases to become the swing state to end all swing states)
IOTL, he first served in public office in 1917. He died 1975. Considering De Valera is the sort of guy to die in office, he could easily end up serving for well over 50 years and knock William Sprague down a peg.
How do you get the map so nice? Like, there's always those borders I'm too lazy to paint over, this is clean.