And of course they exercise this sovereignty through a complete lack of independent action. :dubious:
I think one important thing hasn’t been mentioned here.
When the Constitution was drawn up, the two houses had two very different purposes. The House was meant to represent the people - hence the members of the House were elected directly by the people. If there were more people in New York than Rhode Island, then New York deserved more representation.
The Senate, however, was meant to represent the state legislatures, not the people. Until 1917, the Senate was made up of people elected by the state legislatures, not the populace. As such, New York’s senators didn’t represent the people of New York as much as they represented the State of New York. Since all state legislatures are, in theory, equal (feel free to insert a joke about the dysfunctional New York legislature here), all the states received equal representation in the Senate.
Zev Steinhardt
You have some misconceptions to clear up. First, if 52% of the population of an Eastern state votes Democrat and 52% of the population of a Western state votes Republican, it’s a big stretch to say that the Democrats live in the Eastern state and the Republicans in the Western state. And the whole “red state/blue state” nonsense is only based on Presidential votes. Montana, for example, has Democrats for Governor, both Senate seats, and the Democrats control both State houses, yet it’s still classified as a “Red” (Republican) state.
Secondly, California and Washington are pretty liberal states, and last time I checked, they were Western.
You’ll need to explain this one to me. How, exactly, does Wyoming “boss around” Massachusetts?
The status of a territory-plus-government “being independent” (or even partially independent) and being capable of exercising “independent action” (to some extent) are two different things.
State governments may not act inconsistently with the federal constitution or federal law. Federal law is supreme. Furthermore, the states do not control and may not control a wide range of things (currency, immigration, citizenship, residency, tariffs/duties, borders, etc.) that are key to “independence.” A state may not restrict travel into or out of it from other states. A state may not restrict any U.S. citizen from becoming a resident or citizen of that state. A state may not engage in diplomacy or military action independent of the federal government.
I was just going to post what zev did. There is another, even simpler, explanation for the situation that the OP notes, though. If , through gerrymandering or accidentally, Republicans won seats by a few votes, while Democrats wone by landslides, you can get into situations where the makeup of Congress does not reflect the national vote. I think one of the reasons that so many seats changed hands in this election was that districts were drawn to make it likely one party had a majority, but not too big of a majority. If the variance in voting was greater than expected, those in safe seats lost anyway.
Yes, that was the idea. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, nor that it was a good idea in 1787.
Thank-you!! I am always bringing that up in threads about red/blue states. I think that crap is the worst meme to enter our political conversation in a long time.
People complain about the Senate for its anti-democratic characteristics, but I’m more concerned with the House of Representatives. It’s the house that’s supposed to represent the people proportionately and it doesn’t really come close. If the half a million people of Wyoming get one representative, then the 34 million people of California are significantly under-represented in the House.
My modest constitutional amendment proposal would be to:
(1) draw House districts without regard to state borders, eliminating the requirement of at least one representative for each state. They’re supposed to represent the people anyway, right? And this is the 21st century – we’re Americans before we’re Wyomingans, or whatever. Along with this would be some kind of non-partisan district drawing commission that would be required to draw compact districts following logical socio-economic boundaries and barred from looking at voter tendencies.
(2) Maybe, look to a New Zealand system, which tops up the district representatives with party listers in order to give parties proportional representation.
Nevertheless, it still presents a highly useful picture, provided it is (1) structured as a continuum rather than a dichotomy and (2) broken down to the county level. See here. And, just for ubercool hallucinatory stimulation, see the map adjusted for actual population here.
But they do control things that fall outside of that wide range, hence the “partially.”
I think you are getting too hung up on the terminology. I was just trying to provide the information that the states were separate governments that have their own will and not just administrative districts of some sort. This makes them, at least to a degree, independent actors. Any entity that is allowed some independent action is partially independent, even if that disagrees with a specialized definition of the word in certain disciplines.