I thought I heard it on radio. I like the Onion, or used to, but have hardly read it for a long time.
DAMN YOU!:mad:
I wanted to say they formed Devastor!
This would be great! We could finally have the entities Pennsyltucky and Oklabama, places we used to describe as the origins of some poor bastards in the Navy.
OK, for ease of reference, I’ll call my new superstate Armstrong.
I agree that once the state is formed, **Armstrong **will lose all but 2 senate seats. However, it should keep all of its HoR seats, due to those being distributed via population.
So, I’ll pick my 26 states, for various reasons, to create Armstrong.
- California
- Texas
- Florida
- Pennsylvania
- New York
- Illinois
- Arizona
- New Mexico
- Oregon
- Washington
- Alaska
- Louisiana
- Virginia
- Massachusettes
- Arkansas
- Missouri
- Tennessee
- Georgia
- North Carolina
- Ohio
- South Carolina
- New Jersey
- Minnesota
- Hawaii
- Connecticut
- Wisconsin
There you go. 26 states. I chose them for a number of reasons, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on it. I believe, though, I’ve captured enough coastline, population, and I think, other than Alaska and Hawaii, this land mass is contiguous (which is why Arkansas is on my list).
So, once the vote is over, **Armstrong **has only 2 votes in the Senate. But in the HoR, it is still a major force, it still holds the majority (I think, I haven’t run the numbers yet), and can basically call the shots on what gets through or doesn’t.
It doesn’t require a Presidential signature, so other than loud complaining by folks not in the new state of Armstrong, there is little anyone can do about it. Once formed, it still has to follow the laws of the land, including the inability to break itself apart if they decide down the road they don’t like what they’ve done. **Armstrong **is on the map for good.
Assuming the obvious problems of joining 26 state legislatures to agree on a constitution, etc, are handled, what exactly is stopping this from happening?
This looks like a great way to create your own “country” within the US without secession.
I like the future of Armstrong.
So the question is, can this idea be stopped?
Just because a state had a majority in Congress, does not mean they would all vote the same way. They would presumably split their votes among the parties. To be sure, even the parties cannot enforce party line voting. There are only three states whose congressman always vote the same way: VT, WY, and I forget the third.
For historical accuracy, West Virginia, which has been discussed, was a very special case for a number of reason.
The Western part of Virginia is a mountainous region that was not able to compete economically with the rest of the state. it simply did not have the terrain/land to support large plantations to grow tobacco, cotton, or whatever (and as a consequence, no need for slaves). So, as the Civil War approached, the western part of Virginia had already been resentful of the rest of the state because they had less and less influence in state legislative matters. The wealth of the state resided in the eastern and central parts of the state. But, they weren’t able to break away UNTIL the Civil War. The US Government permitted the state to be created, partly to stick it to Virginia, and partly because the Union forces had already occupied the territory that is now W.Va, close to the current eastern border of the new state.
One thing that many people don’t know (or remember) is that congress gave West Virginia a nice chunk of Virginia farm land that is the right “arm” of West Virginia today. Virginia sued the US government in 1877 to get back those counties that were stripped in from them that created that “arm”, but post Civil War Virginia had little pull, and they never got the land back.
I think we can all agree on this.
I’m talking hypothetical here.
Is there any way to stop the creation of my superstate of Armstrong?
Once the superstate is created, the internal squabbling will commence. It’s the creation of the superstate that I’m trying to achieve here. And it doesn’t seem that, as of now, anyone has come up with a legal or constitutional way to stop it from happening.
That depends on whether you consider senators “congressmen”. If you’re using it in the sense of “member of the House of Representatives”, then every state with a single Rep would fit the bill.
Stink Fish Pot, you still haven’t made it clear why any state (much less group of states) would want to do this. OK, so the situation in the House of Representatives would be more-or-less the same, to within roundoff errors, but nobody would actually gain anything from the merger.
It would actually weaken “Armstrong” in congress. The twenty-six states you listed currently collectively have 339 out of the 435 votes in the House and 52 out of the 100 votes in the Senate. Acting collectively, they have a majority in both halves. But if they unified, they’d have the same number in the House but drop down to only 2 out of 50 votes in the Senate.
Agreed. But that’s my point. Even though they are reduced to 2 votes in the senate, like every other state, Armstrong would be no weaker in the Senate. On the other hand, they could (assuming they could agree on the voting strategy, which I concede is a major “if” and potential fatal flaw in a real world scenario), control the HoR to churn out anything they’d want, making passage of any major legislation a lot more likely in the Senate due to deal making. Other states would have to agree to support Armstrong’s legislation if they wanted to get any of their own legislation through the HoR.
OK, how about this for a “potential” reason… (and I agree that this would be extremely unlikely in the real world, I’m just trying to find out if it could be stopped legally, because it could be a loophole to undermine the US as a country).
Let’s say that all of the states I’ve listed are part of the Marcellus shale region of the US, which is currently being explored. That exploration has come under a great deal of criticism, and the extraction of that natural gas could cause irreversible damage to the land, and the people, animals, etc, living there. So, they all decide to band together to create one state that would be able to halt the exploration of gas, and if it were to continue, it would be done on Armstrong’s terms.
Or maybe it’s something else, like the western part of the US doesn’t like the eastern US, so they create **Armstrong **to give them more power in Washington.
No matter how you slice it, **Armstrong **would be a force that could not be ignored. **Armstrong **would have a massive economy, pay massive amounts of taxes, and be able to drive things like natural resource exploration.
But Armstrong would be weaker after the merge, than they were before.
That doesn’t make much sense. Assuming they’re already in such agreement, why wouldn’t they just remain as seperate states and act in concert? By doing so they would have a majority on both the House and Senate. Why give up a real Senate majority for a politically meaningless change in the House?
Yeah, they can already try to come to agreements, anyway: That’s what politics is all about. It’s just really hard to find anything California and Texas can agree on, and it wouldn’t get any easier by them merging.
How can you say they’d be no weaker in the Senate? Instead of having 52 votes out of a hundred - a majority - they’d have two votes our of 50 - a small minority.
Plus, you should also take into account their greatly reduced influence over constitutional amendments.
And you’re ignoring the obvious point that others have made. The degree of co-operation need to join 26 states together far exceeds the degree of co-operation needed to co-ordinate the voting of 26 states in the federal government. If they could agree to join, it follows that they could also agree to the less extreme but more effective method of co-ordinating their stance at the federal level. What more do they get by joining into one state? They reduce their voting power at the federal level, and they give up the ability to organise local and domestic affairs in a diverse way, which is the whole point of a federal system. Moving from co-ordinated voting to unification of states is a lose-lose strategy.
These are all valid points, as you and others have pointed out. However, I’m not looking so much for a *logical *assessment as I am a *legal *assessment. i.e., can what I’m proposing be legally stopped?
But to address some of the issues, of course the superstate of **Armstrong **would lose 50 of its 52 votes in the Senate after the state is created. However, there is no way that an alliance of 26 states would hold for long. So, getting the states to agree to be one state would be the more likely scenario. To agree to “conspire” without turning themselves into a superstate like **Armstrong **would never last, so to make it work, one state would have to be created. One state = 2 votes in the senate. Just like every other state.
In the HoR, however, they would still maintain control by virtue of their majority of the population.
It’s conceivable that a federal court would rule it unconstitutional on the grounds that the states would effectively be merging without getting proper approval.
ok… then what is the proper approval?
From what I’ve read in the constitution, and this thread, there doesn’t seem to be any way to legally stop this, no matter how “stupd” the idea may be.
I don’t think it could be stopped if they really wanted to do it. The Constitution does allow for states to combine. The only thing that has prevented it from happening is the difficulty of getting the bill passed in the different legislatures required and the states’ reluctance to lost power in the Senate as we’ve described.
I would love to see the state of Jefferson come to fruition. It really is a different culture in that area.