North and South Dakota are two states instead of one so that Republicans could have an extra two senators. Hawai'i and Alaska were admitted to the Union together so that neither party would gain an advantage in the Senate from the addition.

So yes, you can gerrymander Senate seats. It's just harder and less reliable than House seats.

If you're willing to change the definition of the word gerrymander, sure.

I wonder is this one reason some in the US Establishment are opposed to Peuto Rico being a state? Since it would probably be 2 Democrats?

There is no question about it. Same with the District of Columbia and various other places that should arguably already be states. They'd be likely to provide Democratic Senators, so there is a gigantic roadblock to keep this from happening.

Likewise, the promise of 2 Democratic senators is the main reason that Democrats are pushing for DC statehood rather than the more logical outcome, which would be retrocession of the city of Washington to Maryland.

It's more difficult to make an argument against Puerto Rican statehood, but DC is expressly not a state, and should either remain a federal district with no voting representation or be part of Maryland (as stated elsewhere).

I'm totally on board with starting over with new state boundaries.

Unlike the House, which represents the people, the Senate represents the states. That's why each state has 2 senators regardless of its size and population: I think the idea was to prevent oppression by large states.

The Senate representing the states was abolished a century ago when the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted. Today senators are chosen by popular election the same as congressmen, they just have wildly disproportionate electorates with some elected by half a million and some by tens of millions.

So splitline-partition the country.

The intent of the Senate was to preserve the independence and influence of the states. If you splitline-partition the country, you are eliminating the means of achieving this goal, and it would be simpler to abolish the Senate. It can be argued that the current system of directly electing Senators has already made the institution unrepresentative of the interests of the state governments, but your proposal would further alienate Senators from their home states.

Screw the states. Most of them only exist by historical coincidence anyway, rather than genuine cultural commonality.

I mean, hell, at this point, a lot of "state lines" are either way too far in (resulting in close-by cities within the same broad metro-area having no common government in the Northeast) or way too far out (resulting in close-by cities in the Bay Area having no common government that doesn't also serve rural Central California).

The point of drawing constituency lines is to unite people who have common interests while giving mutual autonomy to people with competing interests. The current states in the USA do none of that: they basically just systematize the shapes of former colonial land-holdings.

There is no constitutional provision that would ever allow abolishing the Senate. The Constitution of the USA prohibits any amendment that could change the disproportionality of the Senate.

An amendment can alter the text of any portion(s) of the constitution. While I agree that abolishing the Senate would be a radical change, I do not know of any restrictions which would bar it.[1] Even if this were not possible, a constitutional convention could be held to make the change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Five_of_the_United_Sta...

Technically it says that "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate" so the Senate could presumably be abolished by constitutional amendment if all states agreed. (I wonder about replacing the Senate with another legislative house and giving the existing Senate largely ceremonial responsibilities without formally abolishing it -- would that count as depriving the states of equal suffrage in the Senate?)

Presumably any amendment that would abolish or sufficiently alter the Senate would simply remove that article as well.

The phrase "the Constitution prohibits this amendment" doesn't make any sense because an amendment to the Constitution cannot by definition be unconstitutional.

Perhaps that was meant to say, it would make the Constitution internally contradict itself?

It prohibits an amendment to eliminate the equal representation of States in the Senate, but it does not prohibit either of:

1. An amendment eliminating all actual powers of the Senate, either with our workout creating some new body to which those powers are transferred, or

2. An amendment eliminating the restriction on amendments eliminating the equal representation of States in the Senate.

I'm actually really intensely curious how one would design a voting system for people to choose what subentities to belong to. How would you populate the ballot? Would you run a clustering algorithm on the votes?

What if New Jersey and Michigan just decide they want to be as they are, but excluding Camden and Detroit respectively?

Or would you do something whimsical like draw lines based on football/baseball teams and cleave states like CT in half?