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The reasons: 1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average.

The reasons: 1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average. 2. Competition is good, monopolies are bad. This initiative encourages more competition and less monopolistic power. Like all competitive systems, costs will be lower and service will be better. 3. Each new state can start fresh. From a new crowd sourced state flower to a more relevant constitution. 4. Decisions can be more relevant to the population. The regulations in one new state are not appropriate for another. 5. Individuals can move between states more freely.

joshdotsmith 13y ago
Crowdsourcing new state flowers is at the forefront of my political concerns right now.
alaskamiller 13y ago
1. All senators now have diluted power. 2. Competition isn't always good. Sometimes competition overrides other values or incentives unfair tactics. 3. Disruption is painful and expensive. 4. More regulations, more laws, more systems. 5. Individuals will now have to show more papers to move about the country.
- cylinder 13y ago
  Competition between states often leads to a race to the bottom. Corporations take advantage of this. Convince some idiots running one state to offer you non-sensical tax breaks and either take them and bleed the state dry in the name of "jobs," or use it as a bargaining chip to put political pressure on another state to offer a similar bargain.
mbesto 13y ago
The only real reason - money. I'm not going to attempt to debate this because will go off into a hundred different ways, but it's pretty clear the motivation is simply about money and nothing else. Note - I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with whether or not it's a good idea.
smacktoward 13y ago
> It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average. On the other hand, California gains an enormous amount of power every four years due to the huge number of electoral college votes it commands. No other single state has anything like California's 55 electoral votes; the next closest is Texas, which has just 38. In other words, California, all by itself, gets a candidate 20% of the way to the magic 270 votes needed to win the Presidency. This makes it very hard for any serious candidate to ignore or otherwise bypass. Splitting California up would dilute this power, allowing candidates to write off parts it more easily. It would be interesting to take the 2012 election results and map them to Draper's proposed new states to see how those "states" would have voted, had they existed then.
- prostoalex 13y ago
  > On the other hand, California gains an enormous amount of power every four years due to the huge number of electoral college votes it commands. Since it consistently goes blue, national campaigns use California for token speeches, mainly for fundraising purposes in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    That blue-ness is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. California went for Reagan in '80 and '84, and for Bush Sr. in '88. Bush Jr. lost it in 2000 and 2004, but he didn't get his doors blown off either; both Gore and Kerry came in at just around 53% of the vote. Given the demographic trends I think CA is likely to tilt blue in the immediate future, but it's not an immutable law of nature that it's a safe Democratic pickup.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Yeah, California only matters for primaries, and for fundraisers.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
TwistedWeasel 13y ago
I dont get why 5 is a reason. I can currently move freely all over California and the rest of the US. How would splitting California up make movement between these areas any more free?
- lutorm 13y ago
  Presumably because if you don't like California, the other states are often far away. You can't just move across the border (unless you live in Tahoe).
colanderman 13y ago
Isn't the point of the Senate not to be proportional to people (like the House is, roughly)? Otherwise why have two distinct legislative bodies?
- smacktoward 13y ago
  It is, but the original idea has already been distorted by two-plus centuries of evolution. The House, for instance, was originally supposed to be extremely close to the people; the first Representatives served districts that had just 30,000 people each. That's roughly the same number of people as live today in Butte, Montana, or Fairbanks, Alaska. A district small enough that everybody could know their Representative personally. As the country grew, though, the House chamber started to get crowded. In the first Congress, the House had all of 65 members; by the election of 1900, there were 386. And this had practical consequences -- all those people had to squeeze into one room. People started to worry that further growth would make it unmanageably large. So in 1911 Congress passed a law, the Apportionment Act of 1911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911), that essentially waved a magic wand and said that from that point on the House would have exactly 435 members, and changes in population would be dealt with by shuffling seats from shrinking states to growing ones rather than by adding new seats. That's more or less the system we have today. The problem is that, as the country kept on growing, each of those 435 seats had to represent more and more people. Today each one contains something like 700,000 people. That's more people in one district than any of the original thirteen states had in their entire state. (Virginia, the largest state in 1790, had just 455,000 free citizens.) Which sort of demolished the idea that districts would be small enough for everyone to know their Representative -- today's House members are even more distant from their communities than the first Senators were. (Which is why there are occasionally calls to radically expand the size of the House; see http://www.democracyjournal.org/8/6587.php http://www.democracyjournal.org/8/6587.php for an example.)
IbJacked 13y ago
> 1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average. The Senators aren't supposed to represent the people, they are supposed to represent the State's interests (though that seems to have been forgotten). The people are represented by the Representatives, the number of which is proportional to population.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > The Senators aren't supposed to represent the people Yes, they are. That's why they are directly elected. > they are supposed to represent the State's interests They were supposed to, originally. > (though that seems to have been forgotten) No, it was reconsidered and the design changed.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    No, historically the Senators are supposed to represent the governments of the states. The amendment screwed that up and we have seen all kinds of budget and regulatory bloat. Plus, the continued concentration of power in DC. It was a bad amendment and it should be repealed or modified.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > No, historically the Senators are supposed to represent the governments of the states. No, historically, the Senators were supposed to represent the governments of the states. You can argue that that design should be restored, but merely pointing out that it used to be that way is hardly an argument. > The amendment screwed that up and we have seen all kinds of budget and regulatory bloat. There's a very loose temporal association (in that the purported effect did happen after the purported cause, but not particularly closely after) with the rapid expansion of the national regulation, but not much other indication of causation; even among Constitutional amendments that were enacted in 1913, you'd have a stronger case for blaming the 16th amendment for that then the 17th (though, there's probably an even stronger argument that the 16th and 17th amendments were both effects of the same trend in nationalization that later led to the expansion of the national regulatory expansion than that either is really a strong contributor to it.)

joshdotsmith 13y ago

Crowdsourcing new state flowers is at the forefront of my political concerns right now.

alaskamiller 13y ago

1. All senators now have diluted power. 2. Competition isn't always good. Sometimes competition overrides other values or incentives unfair tactics. 3. Disruption is painful and expensive. 4. More regulations, more laws, more systems. 5. Individuals will now have to show more papers to move about the country.

cylinder 13y ago
Competition between states often leads to a race to the bottom. Corporations take advantage of this. Convince some idiots running one state to offer you non-sensical tax breaks and either take them and bleed the state dry in the name of "jobs," or use it as a bargaining chip to put political pressure on another state to offer a similar bargain.

mbesto 13y ago

The only real reason - money. I'm not going to attempt to debate this because will go off into a hundred different ways, but it's pretty clear the motivation is simply about money and nothing else. Note - I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with whether or not it's a good idea.

smacktoward 13y ago

> It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average. On the other hand, California gains an enormous amount of power every four years due to the huge number of electoral college votes it commands. No other single state has anything like California's 55 electoral votes; the next closest is Texas, which has just 38. In other words, California, all by itself, gets a candidate 20% of the way to the magic 270 votes needed to win the Presidency. This makes it very hard for any serious candidate to ignore or otherwise bypass. Splitting California up would dilute this power, allowing candidates to write off parts it more easily. It would be interesting to take the 2012 election results and map them to Draper's proposed new states to see how those "states" would have voted, had they existed then.

prostoalex 13y ago
> On the other hand, California gains an enormous amount of power every four years due to the huge number of electoral college votes it commands. Since it consistently goes blue, national campaigns use California for token speeches, mainly for fundraising purposes in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  That blue-ness is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. California went for Reagan in '80 and '84, and for Bush Sr. in '88. Bush Jr. lost it in 2000 and 2004, but he didn't get his doors blown off either; both Gore and Kerry came in at just around 53% of the vote. Given the demographic trends I think CA is likely to tilt blue in the immediate future, but it's not an immutable law of nature that it's a safe Democratic pickup.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Yeah, California only matters for primaries, and for fundraisers.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago

TwistedWeasel 13y ago

I dont get why 5 is a reason. I can currently move freely all over California and the rest of the US. How would splitting California up make movement between these areas any more free?

lutorm 13y ago
Presumably because if you don't like California, the other states are often far away. You can't just move across the border (unless you live in Tahoe).

colanderman 13y ago

Isn't the point of the Senate not to be proportional to people (like the House is, roughly)? Otherwise why have two distinct legislative bodies?

smacktoward 13y ago
It is, but the original idea has already been distorted by two-plus centuries of evolution. The House, for instance, was originally supposed to be extremely close to the people; the first Representatives served districts that had just 30,000 people each. That's roughly the same number of people as live today in Butte, Montana, or Fairbanks, Alaska. A district small enough that everybody could know their Representative personally. As the country grew, though, the House chamber started to get crowded. In the first Congress, the House had all of 65 members; by the election of 1900, there were 386. And this had practical consequences -- all those people had to squeeze into one room. People started to worry that further growth would make it unmanageably large. So in 1911 Congress passed a law, the Apportionment Act of 1911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911), that essentially waved a magic wand and said that from that point on the House would have exactly 435 members, and changes in population would be dealt with by shuffling seats from shrinking states to growing ones rather than by adding new seats. That's more or less the system we have today. The problem is that, as the country kept on growing, each of those 435 seats had to represent more and more people. Today each one contains something like 700,000 people. That's more people in one district than any of the original thirteen states had in their entire state. (Virginia, the largest state in 1790, had just 455,000 free citizens.) Which sort of demolished the idea that districts would be small enough for everyone to know their Representative -- today's House members are even more distant from their communities than the first Senators were. (Which is why there are occasionally calls to radically expand the size of the House; see http://www.democracyjournal.org/8/6587.php http://www.democracyjournal.org/8/6587.php for an example.)

IbJacked 13y ago

> 1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average. The Senators aren't supposed to represent the people, they are supposed to represent the State's interests (though that seems to have been forgotten). The people are represented by the Representatives, the number of which is proportional to population.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The Senators aren't supposed to represent the people Yes, they are. That's why they are directly elected. > they are supposed to represent the State's interests They were supposed to, originally. > (though that seems to have been forgotten) No, it was reconsidered and the design changed.
- protomyth 13y ago
  No, historically the Senators are supposed to represent the governments of the states. The amendment screwed that up and we have seen all kinds of budget and regulatory bloat. Plus, the continued concentration of power in DC. It was a bad amendment and it should be repealed or modified.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > No, historically the Senators are supposed to represent the governments of the states. No, historically, the Senators were supposed to represent the governments of the states. You can argue that that design should be restored, but merely pointing out that it used to be that way is hardly an argument. > The amendment screwed that up and we have seen all kinds of budget and regulatory bloat. There's a very loose temporal association (in that the purported effect did happen after the purported cause, but not particularly closely after) with the rapid expansion of the national regulation, but not much other indication of causation; even among Constitutional amendments that were enacted in 1913, you'd have a stronger case for blaming the 16th amendment for that then the 17th (though, there's probably an even stronger argument that the 16th and 17th amendments were both effects of the same trend in nationalization that later led to the expansion of the national regulatory expansion than that either is really a strong contributor to it.)