Giving people extra votes because of empty land, or slaves, is just a way of saying some people are more worthy of having government reflect their will than others.
It's ludicrous to claim that the constitutional form of government violates the Constitution. Since apportionment of federal senators by state doesn't violate the Constitution, apportionment of state senators by county doesn't either.
States are sovereign, counties are lines on a map. The county that I live in is an artifact of a feudal Dutch patroonship and was 3x larger a 150 years ago. A county about an hour from me is the legacy of a land-grant to a revolutionary war hero and is mostly berfit of people. Why should a mountain be better represented than my family?
Apportionment of US Senators doesn't violate the constitution because it is explicitly referenced in the constitution. The Senate has always been a reactionary force in US politics, placed there to ensure the political power of the south -- since their population of "human chattel" would have limited their political influence. The openly corrupt nature of it's early makeup (ie. no direct election of Senators) was partially addresses via constitutional amendment. The legacy of the Senate isn't pretty -- it is directly responsible for the system of vigilante lynching that terrorized the south, for example.
What's ludicrous is replicating that legacy of regressive policy and difficult to hold accountable representatives in other layers of government.
They were, among other things, aping the British system, where a reactionary upper house was an old feature.
From 1882-1968, over 200 bills were introduced in Congress to make lynching a Federal crime. 7 US presidents called upon congress to address the issue in legislation as late as 1952. None made it through the Senate, I don't recall exactly, but I think that only one made it out of committee. The "solid south" Senators kept these measures bottled up.
Only the extraordinary abilities of LBJ was able to break the ossification in the Senate the blocked civil rights.
From President Truman's Commission on Civil Rights, about two of the "less brutal" lynchings in 1946:
"On July 20, 1946, a white farmer, Loy Harrison, posted bond for the release of Roger Malcolm from the jail at Monroe, Georgia. Malcolm, a young Negro, had been involved in a fight with his white employer during the course of which the latter had been stabbed. It is reported that there was talk of lynching Malcolm at the time of the incident and while he was in jail. Upon Malcolm's release, Harrison started to drive Malcolm, Malcolm's wife, and a Negro overseas veteran, George Dorsey, and his wife, out of Monroe. At a bridge along the way a large group of unmasked white men, armed with. pistols and shotguns, was waiting. They stopped Harrison's car and removed Malcolm and Dorsey. As they were leading the two men away, Harrison later stated, one of the women called out the name of a member of the mob. Thereupon the lynchers returned and removed the two women from the car. Three volleys of shots were fired as if by a squad of professional executioners. The coroner's report said that at least 66 bullets were found in the scarcely recognizable bodies. Harrison consistently denied that he could identify any of the unmasked murderers. State and federal grand juries reviewed the evidence in the case, but no person has yet been indicted for the crime.
Later that summer, in Minden, Louisiana, a young Negro named John Jones was arrested on suspicion of housebreaking. Another Negro youth, Albert Harris, was arrested at about the same time, and beaten in an effort to implicate Jones. He was then released, only to be rearrested after a few days. On August 6th, early in the evening, and before there had been any trial of the charges against them, Jones and Harris were released by a deputy sheriff. Waiting in the jail yard was a group of white men. There was evidence that, with the aid of the deputy sheriff, the young men were put into a car. They were then driven into the country. Jones was beaten to death. Harris, left for dead, revived and escaped. Five persons, including two deputy sheriffs, were indicted and brought to trial in a federal court for this crime. All were acquitted.
These are two of the less brutal lynchings of the past years. The victims in these cases were not mutilated or burned."
It's not ludicrous to claim that the Constitutional form of the federal government would, if replicated in the states, violate a constitutional restriction that applies only to the states, which the Equal Protection Clause does.
I don't know too much about Colorado or Massachusetts, but the issue in New York has nothing to do with voting policy. Our national policy for 50 years has been to sacrifice the overall prosperity of the nation and gut all of the productive sectors. In my father's lifetime, the corridor from Utica to Syracuse to Rochester to Buffalo was an economic powerhouse. Decades of tax and fiscal policy sent industry south and abroad, and turned those places into shadows of their former selves.
Springfield and Holyoke are similar stories in Massachusetts. People out there resent the ever creeping outward Boston metro, but the core of their economy is educating Boston metro kids.
The only reasons that public institutions in these place still function is the tax revenue generated in the big cities.
The Senate could be seen as a nod to geographic minorities, allowing the few people in, say, Wyoming to have an equal footing with more populous states like New York. Most states have a Senate, it's not just a national thing - unless you think the state Senate is a nod to nominal sovereignty of the counties?
Which is fine to me, tbh. Land doesn't need to vote.
To my knowledge, counties and cities are almost always political subdivisions of the State, so that "nod" to geography isn't justified by that nominal sovereignty.
Usually a state senate is an upper house that has a smaller number of members, and usually has unique "advise and consent" powers over judicial and executive appointments.
Sure, when the question of “how do we make sure the slave states, who have smaller population and even smaller yet free, voting populations than the free states, are able to protect the institution of slavery” was current, all of the structure of the Senate, it's mirror in the electoral college, and the 3/5 compromise for the House made sense.
Quoting this because it's important to note it's not nearly as simple as that. Virginia was the largest state (and largest slaveholding state).
It's pretty evenly split. It's difficult to suggest it's all or mostly about slavery.
It may be compelling but claims like that need evidence, and when you pull in the evidence it's not so convincing.
So for the Senate to have that power, they needed to have equal representation from each state otherwise populous states would have too much influence on the internal government of other states.
That's part of it, anyway. It's more complicated and I'd recommend you read Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention if you're really curious.
Because while they were aware of that, there was more at play than racism and slavery, as Virginia voting against its interests suggests.
Slightly pedantic, I could be wrong, but no serious attempts were ever made to conquer south; less than the attempts to conquer Canada, anyway. History is complex!
The Virginians, that aristocratic lot, would have and did prefer features like the Senate, which would have provided a counterweight to the more radical House. It's that way even today.
I can't speak further to the historical context, but everything I've read about federation/modern/consensus democracies suggest that bicameralism is a benefit (ex http://wikisum.com/w/Lijphart:_Patterns_of_democracy).
Again, that's not saying that's what they were considering then, but also read some of the Federalist Papers (Madison in particular) and how much they were weighing factions/balance of power into some of these solutions.
Uh, I'm not convinced it's working here, chief.
On the Convention count, as you can see, I find some logic in both explanations.
Florida and Texas?
What's the ideological basis for giving "geographic minorities" extra voting power? Should we give extra voting power for other minorities too, based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.?
Should we give Muslims and Jews their own legislative house so the Christian majority doesn't run roughshod over them? Maybe a separate house for racial minorities, or for gay people so that the straight majority doesn't dominate them?
There are a lot of issues that are fundamentally important to people living in one area that those in another don't care about. Water rights for agriculture are a good example.
The most important part, though? If you live in the city and your vote counts 9/10ths of the vote of a person in a rural community, you're probably not going to complain about lack of representation. If you live in a rural community and you have one representative and the city has 12, you may complain and that complaint may turn into violence or rebellion, because you feel you don't have adequate representation even though statistically speaking, you do.
There's a lot of issues important to those demographics, that are, in the world we live in, not important to others.
If you give cis white people 9/10th of the vote of a trans black person, people will absolutely complain about lack of representation. They will lose their minds. Have you been paying any attention to gender/race issues over the past... Well, ever? There are political movements, with street marches, and torches focused on 'taking the country back' from people who are, by most metrics, are getting the short end of the stick.
It's a different story when you look at your literal neighbor and they have more representation than you.
And actually, yes, most of this anger is linked to a feeling that people in rural areas have too little representation compared to major population centers, where most people live. So this illustrates what happens when you've got proportional representation but a completely unbalanced population distribution; it's fine when everything is going well, but when the mills close down and the farms go out of business, you get a lot of angry people who feel they have no political outlet.
The point is that the same underlying principle applies in both cases. If you're going to extend extra voting power for minorities for geography, why not for {set of other personal attributes}?
In practice, most people defending this setup -- it often comes up in discussions around the electoral college -- seem to support it simply because it happens to align with their own political objectives. It gives their state extra votes, so awesome! Understandable, but hardly principled.
> And actually, yes, most of this anger is linked to a feeling that people in rural areas have too little representation compared to major population centers,
Well yeah, they have less representation because we're in a democracy and there are fewer people there. I'm not terribly sympathetic to "I deserve extra voting power because of my lifestyle choice".
> So this illustrates what happens when you've got proportional representation but a completely unbalanced population distribution
What does "balanced" even mean in this context? Most people lived in rural areas when farming was most people's job, and now that we live in the information age, most people live in cities. Are both of those imbalanced? Because to me, it just sounds like in both cases, people simply adapted the needs of the time.
Simply pointing out that most people live in urban areas to prove "imbalance" is like pointing out that we have far more believers than non-believers around, therefore the religious belief distribution is "imbalanced". Who exactly is deciding what "balance" looks like for things like this?
> It's fine when everything is going well, but when the mills close down and the farms go out of business, you get a lot of angry people who feel they have no political outlet.
There are certainly some people who feel that way, but unemployment is low, and moving to where the jobs are (in the cities) remains an option.
I don't have a ton of sympathy here, given that the very same areas we're talking about usually practically worship the free market and like talking up how "self-reliant" they are (while simultaneously being heavily reliant on government subsidies from urban areas and demanding that the government protect their way of life). It would be nice to at least see a little more ideological consistency, a little less hypocrisy.
[edit] You say the point is that the same underlying principle applies in both cases; I don't agree. Geography doesn't have anything to do with personal characteristics. If you own land, you are tied to it. It's not easy to move, and we don't usually want people to move because if you stay in a place, you tend to improve it. I'm not sure why you brought up that most people arguing about something tend to pick the side that benefits them. I live in New York City. This does not benefit me.
When I referred to rural vs urban population distribution, balanced meant an even distribution. What else would it have meant?
Your sympathy or lack thereof isn't the point. The point is that we have a system that works pretty well - part of the reason is that it was created without depending entirely on people's better nature. Ideological consistency doesn't really play into that.
Geographic distribution of voting power is not an essential component of Republicanism. Although unequal voting power was a feature of traditional Roman Republicanism, that distribution was a hereditary distribution, not a geographic distribution.
More to the point, the US system is so different from the patrician/pleb system of Rome that calling our system Republican while calling (our system minus geographic distribution) not Republican is a pretty freaking arbitrary line in the sand.
Also, it's worth noting that Cicero's greatest effect on Roman politics was foiling a somewhat Haysian rebellion.
> I'm not sure why you brought up that most people arguing about something tend to pick the side that benefits them. I live in New York City. This does not benefit me.
I won't presume to know your political beliefs, but it's worth noting that you could increase the power of your preferred coalition while weakening your own vote.
That wasn't the line in the sand I was drawing. I was saying that a system of direct democracy doesn't support the Kantian Republic we set up, but a system where there is uneven distribution of power based on region does.
We live in both these things.
Well actually I live in Germany at the moment, but I'll be coming back someday!
> Geography doesn't have anything to do with personal characteristics.
Don't be ridiculous, where you choose to live doesn't count as a personal characteristic? You can find endless examples of people who disagree, just ask.
> If you own land, you are tied to it. It's not easy to move, and we don't usually want people to move because if you stay in a place, you tend to improve it.
There are both upsides and downsides to people being tied down. You're right, people who own in a place are more invested in it. On the other hand, we want a certain amount of labor fluidity as different metros and industries rise and fall. There are people who insist on staying in their hometown even though the jobs have all left and aren't coming back anytime soon, and often that's not great for them or the government.
> I'm not sure why you brought up that most people arguing about something tend to pick the side that benefits them. I live in New York City. This does not benefit me.
I'm talking about what I've usually seen. I'm not saying it applies 100% of the time.
> When I referred to rural vs urban population distribution, balanced meant an even distribution. What else would it have meant?
That's absurd. If I talk about "people who live in a major city vs people who don't", then suddenly it's the people living in major cities (proper, not metro area) who are a "minority". The lines here are completely arbitrary.
Or take farmers vs not-farmers. Oh no, it's imbalanced because only like 2% of people are employed in farm work!
> The point is that we have a system that works pretty well
It works reasonably well, but it would still work well, and likely better, if representation was simply one person, one vote, without any special handouts based on where you live or who you are or what you do for a living.
>Or take farmers vs not-farmers. Oh no, it's imbalanced because only like 2% of people are employed in farm work!
I wasn't saying that balance was good and imbalance was bad - I was saying that it had an extremely uneven population distribution, which it does. It's not an 'oh no!' situation, it's another variable.
>It works reasonably well, but it would still work well, and likely better, if representation was simply one person, one vote, without any special handouts based on where you live or who you are or what you do for a living.
I don't know any place that follows that rule, and theoretically I can find some ways that it wouldn't work better or at all if it was a much more direct democracy without subsidies of any kind.
The Soviet Union was a nondemocratic federal republic—a federal republic that is not a democracy.
Many Americans would prefer the US to be a democratic federal republic, that is, a federal republic that is also a representative democracy.
A nondemocratic republic is not a goverment of, by, and for the people. It is, at best, just the last of those three.
Jealousy is not a particularly sound or convincing ideological justification.
> And actually, yes, most of this anger is linked to a feeling that people in rural areas have too little representation compared to major population centers, where most people live.
It's worth pointing out that MA is a bit of a special case nationally. In most of the Midwest, for example, the resentment (and power/money) flows the other way.
Operating on and creating a framework of laws that operate on flawed concepts of human nature leads to operational failures. It's one of the main problems with economics, traditionally. The right laws and system of government works with an understanding of human nature including jealousy, laziness, greed and other weaknesses.
In fact, one of the arguments used at the constitutional convention against Madison's proposed Negative was jealousy on the part of the representatives, as the Senate would hold powers that the representatives did not. It's not an incredibly convincing argument to me, but it happened.
MA isn't that much of a special case, as it's the case in the majority of states and Federally. I'm surprised that it's not in places like Iowa - especially as urban populations grow while rural decline, but maybe that's balanced by the majority of industry being related to agriculture.
On the one hand, you say we shouldn't give other minorities extra power because without geographic distance jealousy/tension would overwhelm the political system.
I can't help but point out that you're making this claim on a thread attached to a story about a violent rural rebellion against urbanites! I.e., geography doesn't defuse those tensions.
So given that those tensions exist no matter what, is there any justification?
> It might not be a reasonable, logical justification, but it exists.
So to be clear, there's no reasonable justification for giving geographic minorities extra voting poewr that doesn't also justify giving other minorities extra voting power.
The only justification is grounded in realism: a fear of jealous-inspired violence toward neighbors that geographic distance would presumably prevent.
How does the very article we're commenting on not completely refute this argument?
> MA isn't that much of a special case, as it's the case in the majority of states and Federally.
It's a special case in the majority of land mass (this is just a tounge-in-cheek joke ;-) )
Federally, I disagree. Democrats won the popular vote in the Senate and Presidency but control neither. That's largely attributable to urban voters in states that allocated their electoral votes to (R).
Exactly - Shay's rebellion occurred in large part because rural voters didn't feel that they were adequately represented in their government. The Federal government didn't have enough power to oversee what was happening and the State government was made up of people from other districts, who then proceeded to disenfranchise people in the rural areas in order to more completely concentrate voting power in the urban East.
>So to be clear, there's no reasonable justification for giving geographic minorities extra voting poewr that doesn't also justify giving other minorities extra voting power.
The reasonable justification, beyond infrastructure spending, differences in industry and geographical considerations is that other minorities don't have a history of rebellion. In a centralized power structure, rural areas DO have a history of rebellion, successful rebellion, especially when they feel their interests are not served by the central government.
I suppose we all would've spilled less ink if you had just led with "might makes right" :-)
That's true.
The same is true for discrimination based on other mutable or immutable characteristics, though. It's all well and good to ingore minority issues, until you get a lot of other angry people with no political outlet. (Because presumably, one person, one equal vote is not good enough for them.)
That's exactly why the Federal government doesn't ignore them, and why States shouldn't either. But you shouldn't be able to carry discriminatory policies with you.
Elsewhere, you've suggested that rural areas deserve to get extra votes, because they are likely to participate in an armed revolt. In that case, why shouldn't we give men extra votes, compared to women? Most armed revolts are carried out by mostly men. Should we ration out political power to the most violent minority group of people that we can find? Maybe give the former Confederate states each an extra senate seat or two, and a handful of congressional ones?
Yes. Though that method is more inefficient than the ones we already have.
The Constitution's purpose is the suppression of the majority. At every end it is designed to impede 'progress'.
Three houses of government, a bi-cameral legislature, voting rules which require large majorities of representatives, voting rules which require large majorities of states, differing term lengths, and "hard" limits on federal power (admittedly this section of the constitution has failed).
If we wanted the majority to get what they wanted we would just vote in referendums.