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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 Represe

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?
  - geofft 6y ago
    You'll appreciate that the current proposal on the table for DC statehood leaves a "Capital District" consisting of the National Mall and surrounding federal buildings (including the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court), and only turns the rest of DC into a state. See the map at the bottom of https://statehood.dc.gov/page/resource-center https://statehood.dc.gov/page/resource-center . If you haven't been to DC or looked closely at a map, it might surprise you that the vast majority of it is an ordinary city with residences and shops and schools, and the seat of federal government is a pretty small area. I didn't actually realize that until poking at a map and talking with friends who have lived in DC - I had the impression that DC was already small and most non-federal stuff was across the border in Virginia or Maryland, but that isn't actually true. DC is larger in area than SF! (Also, federal districts like DC are relatively rare: most other countries don't have them. The hypothesis may not have changed since the founding, but we have a couple of centuries of experimental data now. Even the UN has buildings in Manhattan that are part of Manhattan and the US and not a separate UN exclave - I can and do bike down First Avenue, with UN buildings on both sides, without going through a border crossing.)
geofft 6y ago
Sure, so the question I was responding to was, why not carve up states with multiple metro areas into multiple states? Why not have e.g. North and South California, if we're going to have e.g. North and South Dakota? The reason this is a difficult question is that, while the US is a federation of states, there's no real guidance on what a state should be. The idea of "one person, one vote" is pretty clear. We can debate what the voting age should be, whether non-citizens should vote / what type of residence status you should have, whether your right to vote can be rescinded as a criminal punishment, etc., but we're starting from a common framework. Even in cases where we know that certain sub-populations have higher birth rates than others, there's no serious proposal to try to "correct" for that effect, because it's not seen as incorrect. The principle of "one state, one vote" has no corresponding mental model for us to follow. If the US had no states, and someone said "States are a good idea," how would you draw the boundaries? Why would you draw a line across the Dakotas but not across California? Why would you separate Wyoming and Colorado? Why would Manhattan and Long Island be assigned to New York? (Note that residents of a state have very limited ability to have opinions about their state boundaries - new states require "the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Concretely, if Californian voters wanted to split North and South California, but senators from other states said no because it would change the balance of power in the Senate, it wouldn't happen.) And again - what is special about rural voters and only rural voters that they need this system? Why not give renters an extra veto, or the working class, or people in service industries, or racial minorities, or religious minorities, or field-of-employment minorities, or whomever? You can do this straightforwardly by having a Senate with either elected or appointed members from specific constituencies. Hong Kong, for instance, elects half its legislators from "geographical constituencies" and the other half from "functional constituencies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_Kong) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_... These are generally industries, but one of them is specifically a representative of rural interests. Because of specific sectarian conflicts, Lebanon's legislature is divided equally between Christians and Muslims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Lebanon#Allocation_of_seats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Lebanon#Allocati... And they have a concrete reason to want this (it was negotiated as part of a peace settlement after a 15-year civil war). I don't think the US has anywhere near as strong of a reason to privilege rural voters. Also - the current system doesn't even privilege rural voters. It privileges rural voters in states without significant numbers of urban voters. There are tons of rural voters in states like New York and California who do not get to control their state government because major cities are more populous. California is even the biggest agricultural exporter among the states, so it's hard to say that the current system actually does give rural voters extra veto authority. All it does is what you said - it gives less populous states extra veto authority. This is the same axis as "one person, one vote," just in the opposite direction. So what's the reason for it?

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?
- geofft 6y ago
  You'll appreciate that the current proposal on the table for DC statehood leaves a "Capital District" consisting of the National Mall and surrounding federal buildings (including the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court), and only turns the rest of DC into a state. See the map at the bottom of https://statehood.dc.gov/page/resource-center https://statehood.dc.gov/page/resource-center . If you haven't been to DC or looked closely at a map, it might surprise you that the vast majority of it is an ordinary city with residences and shops and schools, and the seat of federal government is a pretty small area. I didn't actually realize that until poking at a map and talking with friends who have lived in DC - I had the impression that DC was already small and most non-federal stuff was across the border in Virginia or Maryland, but that isn't actually true. DC is larger in area than SF! (Also, federal districts like DC are relatively rare: most other countries don't have them. The hypothesis may not have changed since the founding, but we have a couple of centuries of experimental data now. Even the UN has buildings in Manhattan that are part of Manhattan and the US and not a separate UN exclave - I can and do bike down First Avenue, with UN buildings on both sides, without going through a border crossing.)

geofft 6y ago

Sure, so the question I was responding to was, why not carve up states with multiple metro areas into multiple states? Why not have e.g. North and South California, if we're going to have e.g. North and South Dakota? The reason this is a difficult question is that, while the US is a federation of states, there's no real guidance on what a state should be. The idea of "one person, one vote" is pretty clear. We can debate what the voting age should be, whether non-citizens should vote / what type of residence status you should have, whether your right to vote can be rescinded as a criminal punishment, etc., but we're starting from a common framework. Even in cases where we know that certain sub-populations have higher birth rates than others, there's no serious proposal to try to "correct" for that effect, because it's not seen as incorrect. The principle of "one state, one vote" has no corresponding mental model for us to follow. If the US had no states, and someone said "States are a good idea," how would you draw the boundaries? Why would you draw a line across the Dakotas but not across California? Why would you separate Wyoming and Colorado? Why would Manhattan and Long Island be assigned to New York? (Note that residents of a state have very limited ability to have opinions about their state boundaries - new states require "the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Concretely, if Californian voters wanted to split North and South California, but senators from other states said no because it would change the balance of power in the Senate, it wouldn't happen.) And again - what is special about rural voters and only rural voters that they need this system? Why not give renters an extra veto, or the working class, or people in service industries, or racial minorities, or religious minorities, or field-of-employment minorities, or whomever? You can do this straightforwardly by having a Senate with either elected or appointed members from specific constituencies. Hong Kong, for instance, elects half its legislators from "geographical constituencies" and the other half from "functional constituencies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_Kong) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_... These are generally industries, but one of them is specifically a representative of rural interests. Because of specific sectarian conflicts, Lebanon's legislature is divided equally between Christians and Muslims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Lebanon#Allocation_of_seats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Lebanon#Allocati... And they have a concrete reason to want this (it was negotiated as part of a peace settlement after a 15-year civil war). I don't think the US has anywhere near as strong of a reason to privilege rural voters. Also - the current system doesn't even privilege rural voters. It privileges rural voters in states without significant numbers of urban voters. There are tons of rural voters in states like New York and California who do not get to control their state government because major cities are more populous. California is even the biggest agricultural exporter among the states, so it's hard to say that the current system actually does give rural voters extra veto authority. All it does is what you said - it gives less populous states extra veto authority. This is the same axis as "one person, one vote," just in the opposite direction. So what's the reason for it?