If you want proportional representation (which I’m not sure is a view held by the majority of American voters, but let’s assume this is an objective to be achieved), you can have that with any number of representatives. You don’t need multi-member districts; you wouldn’t even need districts at all - you could simply apply proportional representation at the federal level, or the state level, or with some compromise in between (which is the German model - first, proportional representation is used at the federal level to compute how many seats each party gets; then the principle is applied again in a second stage to allocate those seats of each party to the respective state sub-organisations of each party).
But I like this way of strategic thinking. From the perspective of the Democrats, this would be an easy way (because it woudl only require an ordinary Act of Congress rather than a constitutional amendment) to reduce the weight of the two-senators-per-state rule, and its bias in favour or Republican-leaning rural states, in the Electoral College.
The rule should be something along the lines of “take the population of the least populous state as of the last census and divide the population of each state by that number. Each state receives that number of Representatives, rounded down”.
So the size of the House changes every 10 years, but the proportional power of each state is more equal. I played with it once (can’t find that spreadsheet) and I think it would have added 40 or so seats currently.
I like this. It would not require an amendment, a law could be passed to implement it. Perhaps the Democrats could put it on the list of things to pass when they take power next year. Unfortunately, in the current hyper-tribalistic state of the country, it would make the Census even more politicized than it already is. But I think the gain would be worth it.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of congress thinking the split is unfair, and ‘the argument over the names’ is hardly the biggest disagreement they’d face. There’s a lot of state debt in California, and a lot of state programs with heavy funding, and a lot of taxes getting tossed around. There would be a lot of compromises involved in how to split up and/or handle these organizations, and the trying to squeeze out the Republicans would make it much more difficult to do make agreements. And what happens to the water supply? The current Colorado River Compact has California as a signatory, not whatever hypothetical split states come up. Not only would the states have to agree with how to handle who gets the river water that was formerly California’s, but the other states involved would have to agree with the new compact. There’s almost no chance they’d rubber stamp any agreement, since they already think the compact is unfair to them.
I don’t think that splitting up the state is nearly as easy as people here seem to be assuming. I also don’t think it’s a bad idea or impossible, but it would not be a simple matter of firing off some legislation that says ‘California is now X new states, here are there names’.
The ‘divide California into new states’ thing in my OP is all about “senate packing” and not at all about different parts of California having philosophical differences and actually wanting to break away and have their own go.
Folks upthread mentioned some ideas tossed around before like the Two States of Nor Cal and So Cal, or the idea of some northern counties wanting to become their own private Idaho. But my hypothetical is about adding eight or ten Democratic seats to the US Senate. Nothing else.
Maybe the 4 or 5 new states of California would all have identical constitutions and laws etc., etc., because it would really still be one big state in every way except it would now have a bunch more senators.
Of course this would all have to be done with the support of the president, the Dems in Congress, as well as the California state assembly and Gov. It would be totally impossible if ever attempted in the normal way (hand-shaking, speechifying, TV ads, baby-kissing). But there would be nothing normal about it.
A fait accompli, It would be total scorched-earth, fuck-you-in-your-trachea politics. A little payback for the GOP fucking up SCOTUS and everything else.
Would this make such a difference to the status quo? House seats are apportioned on the basis of population numbers (as derived from the census) already. The only thing that brings in unevenness is the “at least one seat per state” rule; your rule would reduce the deviations from perfect population proportionality that this rule brings about. But the effect is not very pronounced. There are only seven one-seat states anyway. The more representatives a state has, the closer the current apportionment will get to perfect proportionality.
Yes, any state can divide itself as long as Congress agrees. But they are extremely unlikely to agree. Other states don’t want to see their influence in the Senate reduced.
Would they agree to add states like Puerto Rico and DC, as some people are suggesting now?
I assume that the only way DC would get a senator would be statehood? The congress cant just pass a law saying “…DC stays a district and DC gets one senator” since the senate is defined in the constitution. Also, can the congress rep from DC be given full congressional standing and voting rights by act of congress?
IIRC, Puerto Rico (why do I keep hearing that name in my head with the Trump pronunciation) had a referendum on statehood not too far back and the “YES” won, but the voter turnout was underwhelming since the “NO” side instead urged a boycott.
Why would DC be unlikely do you think? If the Dems control the White House, the Senate and the House after the election, wouldn’t they maybe like to add two senators for DC?
Normally, I don’t think they would because it might piss off too many voters. But in these crazy times? Don’t the Dems finally want to take the gloves off?
DC is geographically tiny and has a completely urbanized population of ~700,000. There is no industry or agriculture, and little commerce. There’s a single municipal government and nothing else. It doesn’t really seem viable to make it a state. (Granted, Wyoming has a lower population, but it also has a vast area and diverse economy.)
I’ve long been in favor of granting DC and the territories true Representatives in the House, but not Senators. I think that strikes a reasonable balance between fair representation and preserving the interests of the states as co-equal members of the union. That would require a constitutional amendment, though. Right now only actual states can elect Representatives. (That’s why the commissioners from DC and the territories can’t actually vote on the floor of the House.)
That seems to be the main thrust of all the ideas in this thread, but I don’t think most Dems are interested in waging war in the manner you suggest. Most people including Dems and independents are just yearning for a return to normalcy at this point.
There’s been a bunch of referendums. The last one in 2017 had three options (statehood, status quo, or independence) and the not-statehood factions all boycotted, making “statehood” the de facto winner but with a tiny turnout. The previous referendum in 2012 had a majority in favor of statehood.
And there will be yet another referendum on election day this year, which will finally be a binary yes-or-no statehood question.
This is a version of the “Wyoming Rule,” the key difference being the “rounded down” clause in your hypothetical.
Normal rounding would give us about a 550-member House.
Most importantly, some version of the Wyoming Rule plus passage of the Fair Representation Act would make Congress much more representative of the electorate in general.
DC has a two major (interconnected) industries: government and lobbying. They could tax lobbyists on how many times they meet with congressmen and other government officials and tax bureaucracies on the number of regulations they implement or elliminate. And for commerce, they get loads of tourists. Those are, I assume, already taxed in various ways.
I’m going to need it explained to me in far greater detail why the 600,000 residents of Wyoming deserve far greater congressional representation than do the almost 800,000 U.S. citizens living in the District.
Wyoming is a sovereign state, and DC is merely a possession of the US, much like any other where the people’s representatives get no say in their government except locally and those local officials can be overruled by people elected elsewhere. Population is irrelevant. Everyone except 3 people could leave Wyoming, and they’d all be in Congress one way or another; they’d probably still argue over which has to sit in the house.
So that’s the reason. I can’t answer “deserves” because that’s not relevant.
That’s how all of the legislative powers are phrased. Congress gets to declare war, Congress gets to found a post office, etc. The Constitution later says that the President gets to veto anything passed by both houses of Congress, except for resolutions on adjournment.
That would not be enough to make DC a state - you need a constitutional amendment for that (for which you need a supermajority among the states). It’s true that an Act of Congress is enough to admit a new state to the Union; but the District of Columbia is itself defined as something other than a state in the constitution, so it can’t be a federal district and a state at the same time. In addition to the act admitting it as a state, you would need to amend the DC-related provisions in the constitution.
The Constitution does not define the federal district in any detail. It gives a maximum size, but that’s all. A law could redefine it to be a small subset of DC: the area near the Mall. It would contain the White House, Capitol and a bunch of federal office buildings. The rest of DC could then become a state. There’s precedence for this, since part of the original district was returned to Virginia.