[RC] 75 States of America

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Mother Jones
 
How to restore democracy in  the U.S. Senate (and end the tyranny of 
Wyoming)
—By _Michael Lind_ (http://www.motherjones.com/authors/michael-lind) 
January / February  1998

 
 
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Splitsville, U.S.A.
The newest states in the union.   
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   Here's a  quiz question for you: What American institution has used its 
power to thwart  desegregation, campaign finance reform, health care reform, 
New Deal programs,  gun control, and midnight basketball—and gave Adolf 
Hitler time to conquer most  of Europe without American opposition? The answer: 
the United States Senate.  Because of our Senate—the least representative 
legislative body in the  democratic world except for the British House of 
Lords—an ever shrinking  minority of voters has the power to obstruct policies 
favored by an overwhelming  majority of the American people. The Senate is 
the worst branch of government,  and it's going to get even nastier in the 
century ahead. 
 
 
If democracy means anything, it means one person, one vote—a principle  
flouted by the Senate's very design, which is based on an antiquated  
constitutional provision that provides equal suffrage in the Senate for  
government 
units (states) rather than suffrage based on the size of a  constituency. As 
a result, a dwindling minority of Americans elects a majority  of senators.  
California has 66 times as many people as Wyoming—and yet on any given vote 
 Wyoming's two senators can neutralize California's two senators. Texas, 
with  more than 19 million people, has only two senators—as many as Montana, 
which has  less than 1 million citizens. New York, the third most populous 
state in the  union, can be outvoted by tiny Rhode Island (the true Empire 
State).  
This malapportionment favors inhabitants of Rocky Mountain and New England  
states at the expense of Americans who live in densely populated megastates—
not  only Sun Belt states such as California, Texas, and Florida, but also 
states in  the Northeast and Midwest such as New York, Illinois, and 
Pennsylvania. True,  the big states have more members in the House. But this 
misses 
the point: Why  should Idahoans be represented in the House and the Senate, 
while Californians,  Texans, and New Yorkers are effectively represented in 
the House alone? It's not  an even trade. The majority of Americans get 
nothing in return for forgoing  their right to democratic representation in 
one-half of their national  legislature.  
>From the 18th century to the present, the ratio of large-  to small-state 
populations has grown from 19-to-1 to 66-to-1. Today, half of the  Senate can 
be elected by 15 percent of the American people—and the problem is  only 
getting worse. Almost all of the population growth in the United States in  
the foreseeable future will be concentrated in a few populous states (chiefly  
California). By the middle of the next century, as few as 5 percent of the  
population, or even 1 percent, may have majority power in the Senate.  
Even now, only 10 percent of the U.S. population elects 40 percent of the  
Senate. By filibustering, senators representing little more than one-tenth 
of  the nation can block reforms supported by the House, the president—and 
their  fellow senators, who represent the other 90 percent of the population. 
This is  not democracy. It is minority rule. For example:  
The Republican Party held the Senate from 1980-86 only because of Senate  
malapportionment. During that period, Republican senators as a group received 
 fewer votes nationwide than Democratic senatorial candidates. If the 
Senate had  been elected on the basis of population, President Ronald Reagan 
would have  faced a Democratic Senate throughout his eight years in office.  
In 1991, the Senate voted 52-48 to appoint Clarence Thomas to the Supreme  
Court. The senators opposing Thomas (including those from California, New 
York,  New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas) represented a majority of the American 
people—but  found themselves in the minority in the Senate.  
In order to pass his budget package in 1993, President Clinton had to cave  
in to demands by senators from Montana, Arkansas, and Louisiana to lower 
the  gasoline tax.  
Likewise, Clinton's 1993 domestic stimulus program, which was targeted at  
metropolitan areas in megastates like California, was killed by conservative 
 Republican and Democratic senators from underpopulated states such as 
Oklahoma.  
While the Senate exaggerates the power of anti-urban, anti-government  
conservatives in domestic policy, when it comes to foreign affairs, the Senate  
has always been the command post of isolationism. As late as 1940, a 
bipartisan  team of isolationists in the Senate blocked the efforts of 
President 
Franklin  Delano Roosevelt and the House to revise the country's misguided 
neutrality laws  and rescue Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis. 
Thanks to the  unrepresentative Senate, Hitler came close to winning World War 
II.  
The only Americans whose views are consistently magnified  by Senate 
malapportionment are white, rural, right-wing isolationists. If you  are 
nonwhite 
or of mixed race, if you live in a major metropolitan area, if you  are 
liberal or centrist, if you support an internationalist foreign policy, or  
even 
if you are a conservative who lives in a populous state, you should look on 
 the Senate with loathing and apprehension.  
Because of its role in screening executive and judicial appointees, the  
Senate also has a disproportionate influence on all three branches. To make  
matters worse, the senators' staggered six-year terms—intended to insulate 
the  enlightened statesmen of the upper house—have merely ensured that the 
Senate  would be out of touch with the times, as well as out of touch with the 
American  majority.  
Original Contempt  
Most of the Founding Fathers hated the Senate, which  they created to 
satisfy small states, like Rhode Island, that demanded equal  representation in 
the new federal government. In "The Federalist No. 22,"  Alexander Hamilton, 
criticizing the Senate by implication, identified equal  representation of 
the states in the national government as one of the worst  defects of the 
Articles of Confederation. Allotting representatives on the basis  of statehood 
rather than population, he wrote, "contradicts the fundamental  maxim of 
republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority  should 
prevail." Hamilton predicted that "two-thirds of the people of America  could 
not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinction and  
syllogistic subtleties," to be governed by a third of the population. "The  
larger States," he concluded, "would after a while revolt from the idea of  
receiving the law from the smaller." If Hamilton returned today, he'd be amazed 
 
to learn that the citizens of large states have not yet revolted against the 
 excessive power of the statelets in America's upper house.  
In the early 1960s, the Supreme Court struck down malapportioned state  
legislatures as unconstitutional, arguing that they violated the principle of  
one person, one vote. In 1963, the Supreme Court declared in Gray v. Sanders 
 that "the conception of political equality from the Declaration of 
Independence  to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the 15th, 17th, and 19th 
Amendments can mean  only one thing— one person, one vote." There you have it: 
The 
federal judiciary  determined that the structural principle underlying state 
senates at that  time—and the U.S. Senate today—was unjust and 
unconstitutional.  
For much of American history, white Protestant rural  constituencies were 
deliberately overrepresented in state legislatures in order  to dilute the 
political influence of urban dwellers, who were more likely to be  European 
immigrants. In the 21st century, the built-in corruption of our Senate  may 
cause a constitutional and racial crisis. Just as European immigrants in the  
cities were stymied by rural Anglo-Protestant "rotten boroughs" in state  
legislatures in the 19th century, so the coming Hispanic, black, and Asian  
majorities in the megastates will have their votes diluted by the  
overrepresentation of the white microstates in the Senate. As the Chicago 
lawyer  and 
writer Tom Geoghegan has pointed out, the House will soon look like  
multiracial metropolitan America; the Senate will continue to look like white  
rural 
America.  
The Senate has always functioned as the last bastion of white supremacy. 
The  balance of slave states and free states in the Senate permitted the South 
to  preserve slavery and weaken the federal government for a generation 
after its  population had been surpassed by that of the North. In this century, 
Southern  senators filibustered anti-lynching legislation, and later 
blocked civil rights  reform. The gridlock they caused was one reason the 
federal 
courts eventually  seized the initiative on desegregation. If the emergent 
multiracial majority in  the United States perceives the Senate as the tool 
of selfish white  obstructionists, pressure will grow on the judiciary or the 
president to take  control and push through reforms that the majority needs 
and approves—at the  cost of further weakening our constitutional order.  
Divide and Rule  
Can anything be done about the Senate and its weighted  vote for white 
reactionaries? A distinguished New York senator once grumbled to  me over 
dinner, "You should write an article saying we should combine all those  
Western 
states into one." Alas, we can forget about creating a single populous  
"state of Deseret" by forcibly consolidating all those states with right-angle  
corners. The microstate delegations to the Constitutional Convention of 1787  
managed to booby-trap the Constitution to protect themselves. Article V 
states  that the American people cannot amend the Constitution to get rid of 
equal  suffrage for the states: "No State, without its Consent, shall be 
deprived of  its equal suffrage in the Senate." And Article IV, Section 3, 
provides that no  state can "be formed by the Junction of two or more States, 
or 
parts of States,  without the consent of the Legislatures of the States 
concerned as well as of  the Congress." Not one, but two poison pill 
provisions.  
Yet there is a way to address the problem of Senate malapportionment, one  
that doesn't require us to abandon the Constitution or to alter the  
two-senators-per-state rule. Let's go back and read Article IV, Section 3, in  
its 
entirety:  

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but  no new 
State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other  State; 
nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts  of 
States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as  
well as of the Congress.
Why not form new states within the jurisdictions of the existing 
megastates?  Why not divide in order to rule? This is not as crazy as it 
sounds. 
Commentator  Walter Russell Mead has suggested that no American should have to 
live in a  state with more than 4 or 5 million citizens. If the 
4-million-population rule  were applied to the large states, California might 
be 
subdivided into eight new  states; Texas, five; New York and Florida, four; 
Pennsylvania, Illinois, and  Ohio, three; and Michigan and New Jersey, two.  
Eight Californias? Five Texases? Four New Yorks? Why not?  
With 25 new states in the union, the Senate would be far more 
representative  of the American people. The citizens of the nine largest 
states, who 
today send  a mere 18 senators to Washington, would soon have a total of 68 
senators to  defend their interests against senators from microstates like 
Vermont and  Wyoming. The overall Senate representation of the voters in 
present-day  California, Texas, and New York alone would jump from 6 to 34. The 
House  functions with 435 representatives; a Senate with 150 members would be 
quite  manageable.  
This scheme would be perfectly constitutional under Article IV—as long as 
the  small states as well as the populous states consented. Obviously the 
megastates  would have to strike a deal with the microstates, so that they did 
not then  subdivide into still tinier units (nanostates?). Under this 
proposal, states  like Wyoming would still have roughly four times greater 
representation in the  Senate than California's eight new states of 4 or 5 
million 
citizens apiece—and  would have reason to be grateful that California didn't 
divide into 32 new  states.  
How could the microstate politicians be persuaded to go along with the  
dilution of their unjust authority in the Senate? Perhaps the megastate 
majority  in both parties would give the microstate senators no choice. The 
moment 
the  Senate's malapportionment becomes a popular political issue, both 
parties are  likely to sacrifice the wishes of their Rocky Mountain and New 
England  minorities in order not to offend the megastate voters who will decide 
which  party controls the House and the presidency.  
Lose a State, Gain a Caucus  
In 1997, British conservatives paid the price for  ignoring an equally 
vexing problem of constitutional reform. The Conservative  Party was decimated 
when voters in Scotland and Wales flocked to the  Labor-Liberal Democrat 
alliance that promised local legislatures for the two  regions. In this 
country, 
the direct election of U.S. senators was proposed in  minor-party platforms 
as early as 1876; it became part of the Democratic Party  platform in 1900; 
and it was not achieved until the 17th Amendment passed in  1913. This 
proves that, even in the United States, once a national majority is  aroused, 
the Senate can be reformed—eventually (for 20 years, the Senate did not  even 
let the amendment come to a vote, even though the House had approved it  
five times).  
Selling subdivision to residents of Florida, New York, California, and 
other  populous states should be much easier. (I am referring to legal and 
consensual  division, of course, not to militiamen declaring that a ranch is a 
republic.)  The states of the American union do not correspond to real 
geographic, social,  or economic groups—and never have. Most of the state 
boundaries were drawn by  surveyors, with little or no regard to the actual 
contours 
of the landscape. The  map of the American states is like a section of wire 
mesh pressed down atop an  abstract expressionist painting. The high 
mobility among Americans, coupled with  the present high level of foreign 
immigration, renders state patriotism tenuous.  Indeed, the voluntary division 
of 
some states would delight many of their  inhabitants. In the 1960s there was a 
proposal to make New York City a state. In  1992, voters in a majority of 
California counties voted in favor of splitting  California in two. Citizens 
of adjacent counties in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma,  Nebraska, and Texas 
recently sought to form a new state, West Kansas. In Texas,  it would be sad to 
see the Lone Star flag lowered for the final time. But though  the state 
song calls Texas an "empire wide and glorious," Texas is not an  arbitrary 
political unit, but a distinctive cultural region, like New England or  the 
Pacific Northwest. Lose a state, gain a caucus.  
Conservatives and populists who today denounce the centralized rule of the  
statehouses in Sacramento or Albany or Austin should be delighted with the 
idea  of two dozen smaller states, whose legislatures would be more 
responsive to  their smaller, more manageable constituencies. Liberals, too, 
should 
be  pleased—voting power would shift away from almost exclusively white 
hinterland  electorates toward urban, Hispanic, black, and immigrant voters. 
Libertarians  could celebrate the choice of lifestyles offered by the states of 
Orange and  Marin. And neo-Progressives who want to eliminate redundant 
levels of government  might at last get their wish—at least in unitary 
city-states like those based on  New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. 
Provision might be made for any  state, once its population reaches 8 or 10 
million, to split into two new states  of 4 or 5 million citizens. Depending on 
the growth of the U.S. population and  its density, the number of stars on 
the American flag might rise from 50 to 75  to 100.  
Short of scrapping the Constitution altogether, the  voluntary division of 
the big states into new, smaller states is the only way  that the citizens 
of megastates can end their semicolonial subjugation to an  electoral 
minority in the microstates. It may also be the only way to avoid a  race war 
between the two houses of the U.S. Congress in the 21st century, when  the real 
"white house" will be the Senate. If the majority cannot rule by  
constitutional means because of the Senate, then it will rule by  
extraconstitutional 
measures, through an imperial presidency or an imperial  judiciary. We can 
use the Constitution to reform the Senate—or trash the  Constitution to get 
around the Senate. The choice is ours. 

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