politics

The perspective that I'm approaching this from is that some people and politicians will use any crack as leverage to break a system. Any changes that are made need to be done in such a robust way that abusing it in an unanticipated way would be extremely challenging. Anything that can be used for positive change can also be misused for regressive, negative change, unless it's managed very, very carefully.

The more justices sit the bench, but more likely they are to reach non-extreme outcomes.

Not necessarily correct. As it stands, we have 5 extremely far-right judges (Thomas, Alito, Goresuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), one that's moderately right-wing (Roberts), and three that are moderates-pretending-to-be-liberal (Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Even if we managed to nuke two conservative justices and capped it at 7, that would still be a 4-3 conservative court, and probably still a far-right court. Term limits would certainly help, but I strongly suspect that SCOTUS would shoot down term limits unless it was a constitutional amendment. Moreover, you could still get cases where a justice vacated their seat early and a president ended up being able to pack the court with justices that matched their ideology, much like Trump did with Kavanaugh, Goresuch, and Barrett.

But we have to break it to fix it.

I don't think that's wise. Breaking it in order to fix it assumes that the majority of the people will want to fix it. As we've seen with the number of people that support outright fascism, I simply don't believe that. I do think that we need some form of ranked-choice so that there's not a duopoly, but I also think that, given where we are now, that needs to start at a local level and work up to a state level before we even consider taking it national.

RE adding states and capping the house, your opinions are at odds.

Not exactly. The house is supposed to represent the people of the state, and that's based on population, with an absolute floor of 1 (technically, each state gets 1 representative, and then the remaining representatives are apportioned by population; practically, each state has at least two representatives). Senators represent the state, and each state gets two, in total. Given that states have a population, that means that senators in low-population states can be representing a much smaller number of people. The idea was to balance states that were far more rural against states that were much more urban, and force compromises.

Rather than intentionally undermining the bicameral system, I think it would be more productive to break the duopoly by creating some form of ranked choice voting at a local and state level (...and I believe that a few states have preemptively banned it because it worries the parties in power so much). The primary reason that the system seems so broken is that you have two parties that, while not truly monolithic, tend to vote that way. E.g., my state--Georgia--is quite pro-gun, but the two Senators--Warnock and Ossoff--will vote against 2A rights because they're Democrats, even though that's not the will of the people in the state as a whole. (My rep, Andrew Clyde, is good on that single issue, and fucking awful on everything else. Which makes sense, since he owns a gun store.) (That also gets into other questions about whether elected representatives are supposed to follow the will of the people, or whether they should do what they feel is best for the people, and these are not the same thing. I tend to lean towards elected officials doing what is best regardless of the will of the people, but that assumes you're electing smart people with integrity.)

land doesn’t vote, people do

Yes, but. The general idea is that you need to balance the states in some way. Ignoring for the moment the two-thirds compromise (because jesus fucking christ...!), the less populous southern states never would have joined with the union in the first place had there not been some way to balance their needs and desires against the needs and desires of the more populated northern states. When the other 37 states joined, that was the basis upon which they joined, including the way that the constitution could be amended. I understand the interstate compact, and it's a clever way to get around amending the constitution, but note that the states that have approved it so far tend to be more left-leaning. It will likely be an uphill battle to get right-leaning states to agree to that, since they would likely see it as a dilution of their votes. (E.g. Texas is unlikely to sign on, because it's the second most populous state and gerrymandered to shit so that Republicans dominate it despite not having a huge statistical advantage over Dems. Texas would want to keep all of their delegates red.)

In my opinion, I'd rather see the constitution amended to change these things, rather than creating work-arounds that can themselves be undone. The compact only works as long as the states don't change their laws to unwind it, and you could very well see a state like California do that if their electoral votes went to someone like Trump or DeSantis.

their job is much MUCH harder than the right.

Oh, absolutely. I don't disagree. I don't have great solutions there aside from one-on-one discussions, and that's much harder to do than mass media.