5 ms·

The Democrats should turn every major city into states of 1 million people each (bigger than the lowest-population rural states) to balance the Senate between u

The Democrats should turn every major city into states of 1 million people each (bigger than the lowest-population rural states) to balance the Senate between urban and rural interests.

seibelj 6y ago
Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas?
- geofft 6y ago
  I don't think so - it runs counter to "one person, one vote." What's the argument you see for it? I think there's a lot of wisdom in protecting the rights of various minorities of all sorts of types, but a) that's a general problem we should solve, and I don't see why urban/rural is a special case b) that's generally solved by either adding supermajority requirements or adding structural protections for certain groups, not by weighting people's votes and flipping who's the majority and who's the minority.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lhecker 6y ago
    Some very important goods are almost exclusively produced in rural areas (food for instance, being produced by few people). The importance of these goods might be as important as the goods produced by people living in large cities (services for instance, being produced by many people). If we start considering the people living in an area as the likely maintainers and experts of their field, I could imagine that we might want to assign the importance of votes based on the total importance of the "produced goods" in that area. That way these "maintainers" have a say in politics relative to their actual importance in society. I guess?
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >That way these "maintainers" have a say in politics relative to their actual importance in society. I guess? Who decides what's important? Who decides the relative importance of "maintainers?" Even if that were a good idea (I don't think it is), there's no reasonable way to make something like that work.
    - geofft 6y ago
      You might be interested in Hong Kong's "functional constituencies" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_Kong) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_... Half of their legislative council is selected by voters in specific constituencies. Among them is specific rural constituency ("Heung Yee Kuk") and one for agriculture and fisheries, but also various more-urban constituencies like tourism, IT, and healthcare. I don't have a good sense of how well this works in practice, and of course it is confounded by Hong Kong being a very unusual jurisdiction to start with. But yeah, I think it would be a more principled approach than having this one feature in our government to nominally give extra voting rights to rural populations in particular. It's difficult to figure out what those importances really are and it's unlikely everyone will agree, but I think everyone can agree that the answer is not that rural voters are the only special constituency. Alternatively, there's a simpler argument - those things that are important in society are important because everyone cares about it, and therefore an urban legislator is unlikely to say "We don't need farms," because the urban legislator needs to eat. If the agricultural constituency says they need some measure, they already have the ability to convince the general voting public in proportion to their importance in society. (Also, it's not like our current system effectively gives rural voters an additional voice. California is our top agricultural exporter, but it tends to vote in the opposite way from the smaller-population states. And even if you did give a specific voice to California's agricultural interests, it's highly likely that they'd disagree with the policies advocated by smaller-population states to reduce immigration and increase deportations, for instance.)
  - amscanne 6y ago
    The argument is simple. It has nothing to do with urban/rural. The United States is a federation of separate legal jurisdictions (states). The House of Representatives has seats aligned with “one person, one vote” and the Senate is aligned with “one state, one vote” in an attempt to balance these interests. The obvious consequence is that federal legislation will only move forward when most states and most people are in agreement — which I think is the intended outcome. This is often framed as “rural voters have more influence” but this is over-simplified: you need agreement from both houses to legislate. Rural voters can’t push their agenda any more than urban voters, but less populous states effectively get a little extra veto authority. Besides, states are quite free to exercise their authority and many have large, active governments. Californians may be happy with their state government, but I’m not sure many smaller states would agree that their large population entitles them to impose their will on other states. The fact that this manifests in the electoral college is weird, but that’s a separate issue from the core argument.
    - ece 6y ago
      The core argument doesn't change if DC and PR become states. The question is do the residents in DC and PR deserve the same rights to pick senators/congressmen/EVs that other states get? We have a two party system, it's a matter of a controlling majority seeing the advantage in DC and PR being states like they did with AK and HI.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - arcbyte 6y ago
        PR absolutely. DC never for very obvious reasons that have been well explained since the founding and haven't changed.
        eli 6y ago
        The reasons seem neither obvious nor static to me. The founders never intended to leave 700,000 Americans in DC without voting representation. Are you under the mistaken impression that DC Statehood would give DC undue influence over the Federal government?
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Rural areas are 19% of the US population, and a severely overweighted part of national politics. The population considerations at the founding were pre-urbanisation, and have basically flipped, percentage wise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...
- spoonjim 6y ago
  The only wisdom would be that the rural areas provide food security. I see that as only justification for overweighting their needs in the realms of agriculture/food markets, not a blanket supervote.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate. This is known as the Connecticut Compromise[0] and, if it had not been adopted, we likely wouldn't have had a Constitution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise Edit: Added detail WRT the Connecticut Compromise.
  - _chris_ 6y ago
    >> Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? > The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate. No, they were trying throw a bone to states like Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, which were land-locked out of Western expansion. It was the more 'rural' states that actually preferred to balance Congressional power on population. [ed: As the more rural states saw their own populations likely to increase over time. The Senate's existence had absolutely nothing to do about balancing rural vs urban interests].
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >>>>> Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? As GP said above -- a counterweight to to heavily populated areas. Which the more rural areas were at the time. The more rural states (like Virginia at the time) had most of the population, which is why they preferred representation based on population. The argument was one of population (whether current or expected), as writings by all involved in it will tell you explicitly. Regardless, the US Senate was created with two senators from each state provided equal representation to each state in that house. Which was and still is, a counterweight to heavily populated areas. Rural or urban really doesn't make a difference. Edit: Clarified rural vs. urban importance WRT US Senate representation.
      - spoonjim 6y ago
        Amending the Constitution is functionally impossible but adding states is very easy. The Senate is gravely tilted towards Republicans so at the present moment where Donald Trump has handed the Senate to Democrats, they must add as many states as possible. Maybe they can get to 25.
- paxys 6y ago
  Right now in America it's inner cities and other urban areas that need more favorable representation.
- arp242 6y ago
  Elections and politics are about people, not trees or acres of land.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
I tried to research how this could happen: a city "seceding" from it's state. I didn't really find anything. I think it would introduce a fascinating effect: since cities are the financial lifeblood of states, the suburbs on the border would flock to be in that budget, rather than the rapidly diminishing one. Kansas City is the #1 city I can think of that should secede though. It's population is doubly diluted by two states.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  The tough part is that the state legislature (of the state before secession) would have to approve it.
- js2 6y ago
  > I didn't really find anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic
- Communitivity 6y ago
  If a city seceding was viable, then New York City would have done it. Upstate New York might have gone along, though not the politicians. Upstate and the city are wildly different in culture, political beliefs, tolerance levels, and more. Many upstaters also hate that many assume the city when someone says 'I'm from New York'. Both have amazingly nice people in places, and bad ones in others. But if secession hasn't happened there, I don't see it happening with any city (which is good in my opinion). Also, I used to live in upstate NY.
eli 6y ago
I get what you're saying but this conflates two issues: people who live in PR and DC have zero voting representation in Congress. Let's fix that and then separately address the problems of the whole system.
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  That's by design. And it's not like PR hasn't had numerous referenda.
- robk 6y ago
  DC should just be absorbed into Maryland
  - lalaithion 6y ago
    And while we're add it, let's merge the Dakotas with Wyoming!
    - eli 6y ago
      Merge the Dakotas, make Florida it's own country and admit DC and PR -- you don't have to change the flag!
  - eli 6y ago
    Neither Maryland nor DC wants that and there is no mechanism to force them. Do the residents of DC not deserve their own state?
- spoonjim 6y ago
  I don’t think they should do PR because it won’t be a reliably Democratic vote. Do you think the Republicans would admit a state that wouldn’t be reliably Republican? Democrats need to play a harder-nosed politics.
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    I wonder if the Republicans could consider policies that would be completely unpalatable to anyone non-Rural/non-White....
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Also keeps the urban and rural types from pissing each other off by passing laws at the state level. It's a win all around but politicians love power so of course no group of them will entertain the idea of carving up states and reducing their power.

The Democrats should turn every major city into states of 1 million people each (bigger than the lowest-population rural states) to balance the Senate between urban and rural interests.

seibelj 6y ago

Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas?

geofft 6y ago
I don't think so - it runs counter to "one person, one vote." What's the argument you see for it? I think there's a lot of wisdom in protecting the rights of various minorities of all sorts of types, but a) that's a general problem we should solve, and I don't see why urban/rural is a special case b) that's generally solved by either adding supermajority requirements or adding structural protections for certain groups, not by weighting people's votes and flipping who's the majority and who's the minority.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lhecker 6y ago
  Some very important goods are almost exclusively produced in rural areas (food for instance, being produced by few people). The importance of these goods might be as important as the goods produced by people living in large cities (services for instance, being produced by many people). If we start considering the people living in an area as the likely maintainers and experts of their field, I could imagine that we might want to assign the importance of votes based on the total importance of the "produced goods" in that area. That way these "maintainers" have a say in politics relative to their actual importance in society. I guess?
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >That way these "maintainers" have a say in politics relative to their actual importance in society. I guess? Who decides what's important? Who decides the relative importance of "maintainers?" Even if that were a good idea (I don't think it is), there's no reasonable way to make something like that work.
  - geofft 6y ago
    You might be interested in Hong Kong's "functional constituencies" system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_Kong) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_... Half of their legislative council is selected by voters in specific constituencies. Among them is specific rural constituency ("Heung Yee Kuk") and one for agriculture and fisheries, but also various more-urban constituencies like tourism, IT, and healthcare. I don't have a good sense of how well this works in practice, and of course it is confounded by Hong Kong being a very unusual jurisdiction to start with. But yeah, I think it would be a more principled approach than having this one feature in our government to nominally give extra voting rights to rural populations in particular. It's difficult to figure out what those importances really are and it's unlikely everyone will agree, but I think everyone can agree that the answer is not that rural voters are the only special constituency. Alternatively, there's a simpler argument - those things that are important in society are important because everyone cares about it, and therefore an urban legislator is unlikely to say "We don't need farms," because the urban legislator needs to eat. If the agricultural constituency says they need some measure, they already have the ability to convince the general voting public in proportion to their importance in society. (Also, it's not like our current system effectively gives rural voters an additional voice. California is our top agricultural exporter, but it tends to vote in the opposite way from the smaller-population states. And even if you did give a specific voice to California's agricultural interests, it's highly likely that they'd disagree with the policies advocated by smaller-population states to reduce immigration and increase deportations, for instance.)
- amscanne 6y ago
  The argument is simple. It has nothing to do with urban/rural. The United States is a federation of separate legal jurisdictions (states). The House of Representatives has seats aligned with “one person, one vote” and the Senate is aligned with “one state, one vote” in an attempt to balance these interests. The obvious consequence is that federal legislation will only move forward when most states and most people are in agreement — which I think is the intended outcome. This is often framed as “rural voters have more influence” but this is over-simplified: you need agreement from both houses to legislate. Rural voters can’t push their agenda any more than urban voters, but less populous states effectively get a little extra veto authority. Besides, states are quite free to exercise their authority and many have large, active governments. Californians may be happy with their state government, but I’m not sure many smaller states would agree that their large population entitles them to impose their will on other states. The fact that this manifests in the electoral college is weird, but that’s a separate issue from the core argument.
  - ece 6y ago
    The core argument doesn't change if DC and PR become states. The question is do the residents in DC and PR deserve the same rights to pick senators/congressmen/EVs that other states get? We have a two party system, it's a matter of a controlling majority seeing the advantage in DC and PR being states like they did with AK and HI.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - arcbyte 6y ago
      PR absolutely. DC never for very obvious reasons that have been well explained since the founding and haven't changed.
      - eli 6y ago
        The reasons seem neither obvious nor static to me. The founders never intended to leave 700,000 Americans in DC without voting representation. Are you under the mistaken impression that DC Statehood would give DC undue influence over the Federal government?
sdenton4 6y ago
Rural areas are 19% of the US population, and a severely overweighted part of national politics. The population considerations at the founding were pre-urbanisation, and have basically flipped, percentage wise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...
spoonjim 6y ago
The only wisdom would be that the rural areas provide food security. I see that as only justification for overweighting their needs in the realms of agriculture/food markets, not a blanket supervote.
nobody9999 6y ago
>Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate. This is known as the Connecticut Compromise[0] and, if it had not been adopted, we likely wouldn't have had a Constitution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise Edit: Added detail WRT the Connecticut Compromise.
- _chris_ 6y ago
  >> Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? > The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate. No, they were trying throw a bone to states like Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, which were land-locked out of Western expansion. It was the more 'rural' states that actually preferred to balance Congressional power on population. [ed: As the more rural states saw their own populations likely to increase over time. The Senate's existence had absolutely nothing to do about balancing rural vs urban interests].
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >>>>> Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas? As GP said above -- a counterweight to to heavily populated areas. Which the more rural areas were at the time. The more rural states (like Virginia at the time) had most of the population, which is why they preferred representation based on population. The argument was one of population (whether current or expected), as writings by all involved in it will tell you explicitly. Regardless, the US Senate was created with two senators from each state provided equal representation to each state in that house. Which was and still is, a counterweight to heavily populated areas. Rural or urban really doesn't make a difference. Edit: Clarified rural vs. urban importance WRT US Senate representation.
    - spoonjim 6y ago
      Amending the Constitution is functionally impossible but adding states is very easy. The Senate is gravely tilted towards Republicans so at the present moment where Donald Trump has handed the Senate to Democrats, they must add as many states as possible. Maybe they can get to 25.
paxys 6y ago
Right now in America it's inner cities and other urban areas that need more favorable representation.
arp242 6y ago
Elections and politics are about people, not trees or acres of land.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

I tried to research how this could happen: a city "seceding" from it's state. I didn't really find anything. I think it would introduce a fascinating effect: since cities are the financial lifeblood of states, the suburbs on the border would flock to be in that budget, rather than the rapidly diminishing one. Kansas City is the #1 city I can think of that should secede though. It's population is doubly diluted by two states.

spoonjim 6y ago
The tough part is that the state legislature (of the state before secession) would have to approve it.
js2 6y ago
> I didn't really find anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_Republic
Communitivity 6y ago
If a city seceding was viable, then New York City would have done it. Upstate New York might have gone along, though not the politicians. Upstate and the city are wildly different in culture, political beliefs, tolerance levels, and more. Many upstaters also hate that many assume the city when someone says 'I'm from New York'. Both have amazingly nice people in places, and bad ones in others. But if secession hasn't happened there, I don't see it happening with any city (which is good in my opinion). Also, I used to live in upstate NY.

eli 6y ago

I get what you're saying but this conflates two issues: people who live in PR and DC have zero voting representation in Congress. Let's fix that and then separately address the problems of the whole system.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
That's by design. And it's not like PR hasn't had numerous referenda.
robk 6y ago
DC should just be absorbed into Maryland
- lalaithion 6y ago
  And while we're add it, let's merge the Dakotas with Wyoming!
  - eli 6y ago
    Merge the Dakotas, make Florida it's own country and admit DC and PR -- you don't have to change the flag!
- eli 6y ago
  Neither Maryland nor DC wants that and there is no mechanism to force them. Do the residents of DC not deserve their own state?
spoonjim 6y ago
I don’t think they should do PR because it won’t be a reliably Democratic vote. Do you think the Republicans would admit a state that wouldn’t be reliably Republican? Democrats need to play a harder-nosed politics.
- deanCommie 6y ago
  I wonder if the Republicans could consider policies that would be completely unpalatable to anyone non-Rural/non-White....

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Also keeps the urban and rural types from pissing each other off by passing laws at the state level. It's a win all around but politicians love power so of course no group of them will entertain the idea of carving up states and reducing their power.