Akhlut wrote:Also, at the time, the state was the primary unit of American politics, and the federal government was relatively unimportant because it was so far away from most of the country in an era before railroads and telegraphs. So that 'every state deserves representation' aspect was more important, because of the fear that a state, as opposed to "the people in the state," would start using the federal government to its advantage.
I think that that fear is still founded (though using our current system is almost certainly not the best way to go about it), however. While we are working with federal level government and policy, it still affects member states and can do so harmfully if there aren't certain barriers in place that can help to prevent it (for instance, Western states trying to redirect water from the Great Lakes to their own states due to their own stupid water usage). Hence, I like the German model that Serafina mentioned where it is proportional, but the number of representatives is a lot smaller, with only between 3 and 6, depending on size.[/quote]At this point, the great bulk of the small states are the ones that simply do not contain major urban areas. I could bear something like the German system, but the current system has gotten utterly ridiculous. There's a combination of three factors in play:
-Senators, being elected primarily to represent their states, have great job security as long as they can keep bringing federal money to the state.
-The small rural states rely heavily on federal money, strengthening this effect.
-Senators are ideally placed to fight a rear guard action against anything they don't like, and the ones more successful are almost immune to being thrown out of office for doing so.
This allows a relatively small cadre of small states to almost guarantee a full stop on anything that is unpopular (or spun as unpopular) in their home states, even if it harms people in other states that vastly outnumber their constituency, and even if it
does not harm their constituency itself.
Therefore, the "every state deserves representation" argument holds very little water because, as a practical matter, the states are not independent entities. Maybe they were in 1800, but they aren't now. They do not have a right to representation in and of themselves. Their people do... but why should the half million people of Wyoming have a right to as much representation as the thirty-five million people of California?
The only purpose that serves is to make it possible for a political party to screw over thirty million Californians by appealing to three hundred thousand Wyominians. Where's the justice, or the good government design, in that?
To protect the interests of Wyoming in general if the interests of California in general try to infringe on them, would be my general argument. If the ten most populous states (who, between them, hold 50% of the population) decided that they needed to completely hand over all federal land in Alaska over to development companies, who could stop them? While an unlikely scenario, I'm using it as an illustrative anecdote.
The problem is that historically we've seen this being almost impossible. The party that's dominated small-state rural politics since the 1970s is also the one that is
less friendly to the environment, as well as to the relatively poor people who often make up a majority in those states. It's gotten entirely perverse.
At this point, if California votes to screw over Wyoming for the sake of some critical interest of California,
so what? It's not as if we don't routinely pass laws that seriously inconvenience 2% of the population for the other 98% in other situations. Why should the people of Wyoming be exempt purely because they happen to live in a large stretch of relatively low-value land that was more or less arbitrarily made a territory back in the 1800s?
Thus, we run into another problem: states currently suck at what they are. Some of them are way too big, others are way too small. We either need more of them or less of them (which would also allow for a more intelligently made legislature). I think that is a much bigger issue of contention. Our Senate would be a lot more fair and just if our divisions of states were a lot more fair and just. If we redivided all the states to make sure they each included 10 million, then that'd be a lot easier on everyone all around, I imagine (for instance, stick the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Montana together and you get a state with about 10 million people in it, or one roughly equivalent to Ohio or Michigan in terms of population).
Dividing up states, or merging them, aren't going to happen. The small states have every reason not to want to merge; they have more political leverage this way. The large states aren't going to want to divide, as a rule, and that can't be done without state consent anyway because of
another ancient provision in the Constitution.
The current status quo is almost the only one imaginable that gives rural states in remote parts of the country major political leverage; it's no wonder they don't have a problem with it. The wonder is that people in Texas or California or Maryland still think that having two senators per state regardless of size is a good compromise. Sure it's a good deal...
for someone else.
MKSheppard wrote:Incorrect. States have significant amounts of autonomy and freedom of action within the constitutional framework, and can pass restrictions more powerful than federal laws -- witness California's regulations on everything. It's why you have to read "the state of California has determined that this product causes cancer" on a bottle of water.
It's also worth noting that the states do pay for a significant portion of the National Guard apparatus.
Yes. "Unusually powerful provincial governments." They support provincial militia/reserve formations, as many historical nations' provinces have. They do have the power to pass local regulations, some of which have national impact because of the sheer size of their economy (California and Texas in school book purchasing, for instance).
But they aren't independent countries, and the federal government isn't a loose alliance for the states-as-independent-actors to resolve their grievances. Ever since the Seventeenth Amendment at the latest, the federal government was very much a separate entity from the states, and one that held the states subordinate. Politicians seeking federal office routinely appeal to nationwide affairs in addition to provincial ones. Huge swaths of American policy are dominated by decisions made at the federal level: including the decision
not to regulate what the provinces do.
At this point, the most important policy effect of giving small states equal representation in the Senate has precious little to do with preserving state independence and a great deal to do with giving rural conservatives power out of proportion to their numbers.
But why should the half million people of Wyoming have a right to as much representation as the thirty-five million people of California?
California has 53 Representatives. Wyoming has one.
Yes... and yet here I was, talking about the Senate the whole time.
Also; I like how you leave out the fact that the House and Senate have unique powers assigned to each body as part of checks and balances:
- The House has the exclusive authority to initate revenue and spending bills.
- The House has the exclusive authority to initate an impeachment trial.
- The House choses POTUS if there is a deadlock in the Electoral College.
Checks and balances are an elementary school civics concept that ought to stay there. At best, they were a lovely idea that didn't work out in practice, because the fear of one house of Congress growing to dominate the other came true... in the Senate's favor. The Senate now controls the action of the US legislature quite effectively, through parliamentary rules that let the Senate to deadlock action on anything as long as a modest minority opposed remains.
We
already have a failure of checks and balances, Shep, you just aren't admitting it. The entire point of changing the number of Senate seats per state would be to break the deadlock by at least forcing the Senate to answer to a more representative sample of the American public.
Face it, our system is packed with measures that only exist because they appeal disproportionately to the 20% or so of our population that is still rural.
No, they exist as part of a deliberately staggered series of checks and balances that the Founders larded the government in as insurance against any one group of people from becoming inordinately too powerful.
The measures in question are legislative, not constitutional. Like farm subsidies. Or the gutting of the American welfare system.
The constitutional measures the Founders larded the government with (good word choice!) all have the same effect: to allow small states disproportionate power compared to their numbers.
This is not a good thing, any more than it is a good thing when a state fails to redistrict for several decades, allowing rural counties with ten thousand people as much leverage in the electoral college as cities wit ha hundred thousand. "One man, one vote" works. Giving a veto over all signficant government activity to a body in which half a million men can cancel out the votes of thirty-five million does not work.
Even if you disagree on what needs to be done to deal with the present crisis, the fact that
effectively nothing is being done really ought to trouble you more. Especially since I see you constantly advocating radical policy changes: doesn't it bother you that such change is impossible because the system is so frozen it can't do more than nibble around the edges?
It made sense in the days of a weak federal government that mainly served as a forum to resolve interstate disputes, handle collective defense and foreign affairs, and formalize the creation of new states from the frontier. It does not make sense today.
More seriously, I'm not inherently opposed to a system that is more proportional that what we currently have, but I'm more in favor of one that preserves the ability of smaller polities within the nation to maintain some autonomy for their own self-interest. 
