7 ms·
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution: “The legislature, in cooperation with the properly constituted authority of any adjoining state, is empowered to chan
by jnwatson 5y ago
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution:
“The legislature, in cooperation with the properly constituted authority of any adjoining state, is empowered to change, alter, and redefine the state boundaries, such change, alteration and redefinition to become effective only upon approval of the Congress of the United States.”
Essentially they’d need approval from WV, MD, and an act of Congress. Highly unlikely.
This issue is one of the many defects in democracies: your power sometimes rests in the way somebody drew a border a long time ago.
- ilamont 5y agoYet people regularly try to push these ideas, from the earliest days of the Union when part of New Hampshire wanted to secede and join Vermont or form a new state in the Connecticut River valley (https://www.flowofhistory.org/the-rebellion-in-western-new-hampshire-and-the-lt-proposed-union-with-vermont-1776-1784/ https://www.flowofhistory.org/the-rebellion-in-western-new-h...) More recently, there was that expensive California idea pushed by Tim Draper, as well as a new country in the Pacific Northwest including parts of Canada and the U.S.
- knubie 5y agoThe Cal 3 proposal actually made some sense as it would have given the people living there more representation in congress in the form of 4 new senators, as well as more local control. You would think that there would be broad support for the proposal considering a lot of people in these large left-leaning states often complain that their vote is not "worth as much" as a vote in a less populated state.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoNobody on either side liked the Cal3 proposal because it just turns one California into three Illinois. You'd still have major urban areas mostly controlling each state but fighting the rest of the state every step of the way. It works from a "keep the number of red and blue senators" fairly constant perspective but it doesn't actually solve anybody's complaints about lack of self-government.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 5y ago> The Cal 3 proposal actually made some sense Not really, even on the scale of “crazy proposals to divide California into multiple states” , of which there have been a couple hundred since it was admitted to the union. > it would have given the people living there more representation in congress in the form of 4 new senators, as well as more local control Sure, and Cal58 (each existing county as its own state) would give them 114 new senators, and even more local control, by the same standards. Cal3 retained the main “problem” most recent “split California” proposals aim to fix, the perceived representation problem (particularly in the statewide executive and U.S. Senate) resulting from the deepest red parts of the State (which are on par with some of the deepest red parts of the country) being diluted in a big blue state. Two of the three Cal3 states (NorCal, Cal) would have been solid blue, including the one with the reddest parts of the existing State (Cal), and the other (SoCal) would have (at least, from the political state at the time) been fairly competitive (though also pretty solidly blue, in Presidential terms, if 2016 and 2020 worked out the same way by county.) It also would have turned a lot of broad issues in the State, which cross the proposed borders, into potential federal issues, reducing local control (and also reducing the possibility of any favorable action in the presence of federal hostility – common given the structural rightward tilt of federal representation [which, while it would help a tiny bit with, it wouldn't neutralize] – or deadlock.) > You would think that there would be broad support for the proposal considering a lot of people in these large left-leaning states often complain that their vote is not “worth as much” as a vote in a less populated state. You would think that if you were thinking shallowly about that one complaint, and not the whole host of issues involved in splitting up an existing state.
- fsckboy 5y agoor when part of Massachusetts did spin off and become Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Maine
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoMassachusetts claim to Maine in the first place was opportunistic and tenuous to begin with whereas the borders of WV and MD (or many of the other states people want to rearrange) have been where they are now for 100+yr.
- munk-a 5y agoI strongly believe we only really think that in retrospect because the borders changed long before any of us were born. Additionally, while splitting off Maine was for a good cause - it was essentially just a hack to keep the senate balanced in the lead-up to the civil war.
- deater 5y agoMaine brook off because during the War of 1812 England conquered a huge chunk of Maine and the good people of the rest of Massachusetts were too cheap to do anything about it.
- _jal 5y agoI think of it as Fantasy Cartography, or maybe Fantasy Nation State-Building. Frequently, but not exclusively, found among those who enjoy feeling historical grievances.
- lumost 5y agoThese stories are also a reminder that dissolution is an ever present mechanism to overcome gridlock. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing radical proposals to break the deadlock in the US Senate start to gain steam.
- nradov 5y agoThere is no mechanism for dissolution.
- true_religion 5y agoWell there is war, but the last guys who tried that picked the wrong side of morality and furthermore lost badly. Since then, no one thinks secession is very credible in the USA.
- Breza 5y agoPlus there's a huge amount of power that comes with being part of the United States. Imagine having to renegotiate every treaty from scratch.
- munk-a 5y agoKillington (located pretty much dead center in VT) has been trying to seceede into New Hampshire recently[1] - so these sorts of border flipping movements aren't as rare as you might assume. It was doing this, of course, purely for tax reasons because the town is mostly composed of several large corporations. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killington,_Vermont_secession_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killington,_Vermont_secession_...
- dane-pgp 5y ago> This issue is one of the many defects in democracies: your power sometimes rests in the way somebody drew a border a long time ago. If you have the power to move to the other side of the border, then that at least limits the difference between perfect democracy and reality. Admittedly the costs involved in moving does make this option similar to a poll tax, though. More generally, though, I wouldn't phrase things in terms of "defects in democracies" but rather "examples of how some implementations of political systems fall short of the goals of democracy". Other examples would be lax campaign financing rules, non-proportional voting systems, and gerrymandering (which is the opposite problem, i.e. someone drawing a border very recently).
- setpatchaddress 5y agoI could see Congress going along with this in exchange for DC statehood. But, while we're talking about things that won't ever happen, we should also combine the Dakotas into one state. Lot of government administrative resources wasted for very few people actually living there. And we're paying for four senators, where two is way more than necessary to represent that population.
- da_big_ghey 5y agoVery convenient proposal for eliminating 2 red state senators, I see.
- taylorfinley 5y agoPopulation of California: 39,656,838* Population of North + South Dakota: 1,645,198* Persons per senator in California: 19,828,419 Persons per senator in the Dakotas: 411,300 Getting highly-overrepresented people to give up their overrepresentation is a hard ask. *latest US Census figures
- nickff 5y agoIt's not over-representation, as the senate was never supposed to represent citizens, it was supposed to represent the states. At the time of the declaration of independence, there were some states much larger than others; Virginia had a population of ~747k, and Delaware was at ~59k.
- taylorfinley 5y agoI certainly agree that this disparity exists by-design. We can disagree on the word used to describe it, but the fact remains: For every person in a state represented by a senator's vote in the Dakotas, there is nearly 50 people in the state of California. This is ~400% the disparity you cite between Delaware and Virginia. Certainly that growth in disparity is not entirely unforeseeable by the founders. The system is functioning as intended. My point was that you aren't likely to get people to voluntarily choose to have less power.
- 5y ago
- Turing_Machine 5y agoI don't know that I'd say highly unlikely. That kind of thing has happened several times. Unusual, yes, but not wildly so.
- clarents 5y agoGiven the geometries of modern gerrymandered borders, maybe it's not so bad to rely on borders drawn a long time ago.
- aaron695 5y ago> This issue is one of the many defects in democracies: your power sometimes rests in the way somebody drew a border a long time ago. You don't have legs? Being hard to change is a feature. Currently organisations that don't have strong and hard to change ties to the past are being destroyed. AA still works because of an old set of rules. ACLU now works against what it stood for because it didn't have a hard set of rules. Pre-internet perhaps being hard to change wasn't a feature, but post internet it certainly is.
- pyuser583 5y agoIf WV and MD approve, why wouldn’t Congress?
- jnwatson 5y agoThe Democrats are in charge, and it would remove population from a very blue state and give it to a mostly red state.