Let’s look at it another way. I’m from Luxembourg, you’re forming a United States of Europe. Convince me to join a United States of Europe in which Luxembourg never has a voice on the national stage.
They have a voice, per citizen their voice is equivalent to that of all the other citizens.
Is Luxembourg special? Do they deserve preferential treatment simply for living in Luxembourg? Should they have more power in our government because of where they live?
Ah, but I’m a lifelong citizen of Luxembourg. I grew up here, my kids were raised here, I plan to die here. I love Luxembourg, we have a different culture than England or Italy. We have different ways of doing things and different ways of looking at the world. We have different concerns and different priorities.
If we stay independent, we will be making decisions for ourselves. If we join your union, we are going to give up some of our independence. Is the best you are willing to offer is a system in which the Federal legislature is determined solely based on population, and thus Luxembourg will have no mechanic that protects it from our extremely small size in relation to say, Italy or France?
Maybe not. But this is just a good argument as to why I shouldn’t join your union, not an argument as to why I should join your union and lose some of what made Luxembourg an independent nation. I’m not asking you to talk about what is fair for the people of Italy, I’m asking you why I should want my country to merge into a large union in which you are positing we have no special powers as a former sovereign state.
I find your arguments so far to not be compelling. I’m happy staying here in Luxembourg with the Grand Duke.
Martin Hyde, you are bizarre. It appears you want me to debate the structure of your imagination.
In the US states rights do not trump Federal rights, we had a bit of a dustup on that account before, you may recall.
I certainly understand why a Rhode Islander would want to maintain a far larger share of federal power than he was entitled too, and if that was the question for this particular OP you and I would agree and be on our merry.
It’s a thought exercise. To answer the question as to whether or not the Senate’s “time to go” has been reached it might make sense to understand why the Senate exists. It exists precisely because of the issues I was bringing up.
It wasn’t a matter of convincing people from Connecticut and Rhode Island what was and wasn’t fair. The people of Connecticut and Rhode Island had mostly managed their own affairs, with varying (at times minimal) oversight from Parliament for generations. You have to be able to convince Connecticut and Rhode Island there is some reason they should join up with you.
So let’s go back to the guy from Luxembourg who is being asked to support his country being folded into a federal system in which the individual geographic divisions will have no actual representation in the national legislature. That’s fine if all 800m people in the new United States of Europe are essentially the same, and their geographic dispersal is essentially just as random as the dispersal of faux-snowflakes in a snow globe.
But that isn’t the reality. The reality is that people in France are French, while that doesn’t mean they have monolithic political beliefs, it does mean they have a set of beliefs that make them unique among their neighbors. The French obviously have a certain idea about how government should be ran, how it should be structured, how elections should happen and etc. Germany has different opinions, collectively, than France. This is reflected because the laws of Germany and the laws of France are not synonymous. How many Germans would willingly substitute the entirety of their laws with those of the French? Or vice versa?
Where this becomes important is, in the United States of Europe countries like Denmark and Norway are just as unique as France and Germany. But Denmark and Norway combined have less than 10% of the population of either of those countries. So yes, in a system with no legislative representation for the geographic units, each Norwegian and each Dane would have the same representation as each Frenchman or each German. However, the French caucus to the national legislature would be 15 times the size of he Norwegian one. When it came to influencing things like appropriations, legislation that affects certain industries (for example Norwegian jobs are very much dependent on the energy sector, but Germany and France won’t have the same concerns as Norway in these matters), and all kinds of other things, you are basically telling the Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Dutch, and all the other even smaller countries, “hey trust us, we’ll all be citizens of the same country, and even though the French caucus will be way bigger, the representatives represent citizens of the nation, not any specific people. We’ll quickly abandon our concepts of French, Norwegian, etc, and just act in the best interests of all. You have no concerns about the massive French and German caucuses tilting everything to the advantage of their geographic/cultural bloc to the detriment of the rest of Europe!.”
Well, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to convince you to give something up, people being selfish and all. But people always make this argument, “representation of this sort is the only way that (some small state) will have its voice heard”. But that makes no sense… sure the 600,000 odd inhabitants of Wyoming have WAY more influence right now than they would if there were no senate. But what about the 600,000 odd inhabitants of San Francisco? What about any other group of 600,000 people picked for any reason (geographical or not). What’s special and magical about that particularly grouping (they all live in Wyoming) which means that their groupness is important and without the senate they would be unrepresented in government?
(I mean, obviously, the answer is, “because it’s a state, and because the USA is a federation of states”. But if you’re presenting it as an issue of fairness, well, it just isn’t one. You and your 600,000 Wyoming brethren are VASTLY overrepresented in the national government compared to any other group of 600,000 people. Sure, if the senate didn’t exist, you 600,000 people would have fairly little influence… BUT SO WOULD EVERY OTHER GROUP OF 600,000 PEOPLE!!!)
The issues you are bringing up, as they relate to the here and now, are pure fiction. A Rhode Islander has more in common with someone from Connecticut when compared to someone from San Francisco and Los Angeles.
And the ‘here and now’ is all that is relevant.
I just do not understand my next door neighbors, we come from different worlds. I should get one vote and they, communally, should only get one vote because we’re so different.
The Compromise didn’t create the Senate. Read your cite. The plan the Framers were working from was bicameral from the beginning. The Compromise merely changed representation in the upper branch to a per state basis rather than by population. Nor is it one of the least democratic institutions in the world. It is popularly elected at least, far too many people in the world don’t even have that much.
I would agree though that it’s an institution we don’t need and getting rid of it, or at least significantly reducing it’s significance, would be a major improvement.
I’m afraid you have the history wrong. As I alluded to, the Virginia Plan was already bicameral before the Great Compromise. The idea that the House was intended to represent people and the Senate to represent states is an Ex Post Facto justification for a compromise based on practicalities rather than principles. The Constitution came out like it did because either the “large” states were going to concede representation by state in one branch of the legislature or there wasn’t going to be a Constitution.
If the Framers wanted Senators to represent states as states then they would have used the representation from the Confederation Congress in place where each state had a single vote and states could instantly recall Congressmen whose votes they didn’t like. The reason they instead insisted on Senators with long fixed terms and separate votes was because the upper branch of a legislature was intended to represent property. The idea was that it would be filled by wealthier, more cosmopolitan, members who would resist the “leveling spirit” of the common men who would directly elect the lower branch.
I would argue that the Senate’s original role (empowering the wealthy at everyone else’s expense) is alive and well. People tend to “forget” the role of the Senate because they never learned it in the first place. History at the high school level and below is more about instilling patriotism than in giving Americans the information they need to understand the world around them.
I’m afraid this is not so. The American population was mobile from first settlement throughout the expansionary period. That’s how we expanded. In fact one of the stumbling blocks to framing the Constitution was overcome when the Northwest Ordinance was passed during that summer. New England states without western lands to settle were assured of their people being able to continue to develop land to leave more than one child with a working farm to sustain them. As for the concept of Western states at the time, see Westsylvania, the Republic of Watauga, or the State of Franklin.
Um, no. The only time I’ve ever heard of people moving to maximize their political power was when libertarians tried and failed to organize such a movement.
When come back, bring cites.
What is so special about all of you that you deserve to be heard more than the residents of Columbus, Ohio or Fort Worth, Texas?
“Small” states aren’t going to try to secede. They know what happened to the South. Clearly it wouldn’t be simple to make the change given that the over represented are biased against equitable representation but it’s not like it would come to civil war.
What does this have to do with the topic at hand? Individuals would still be able to choose representatives. Just that some would be “penalized” by not getting extra representation.
This doesn’t seem clear to me at all. On the contrary, I don’t see how a government of a state could have any legitimate interest independent of the interest of its citizens. Presumably state Attorneys-General challenged “Obamacare” on behalf of their citizens and not in spite of them.
United States Senators legislate for the whole country. The laws they pass don’t just affect certain states but not others. So all Americans have an interest in reducing corruption in selecting Senators from any and all states.
No one here has promoted pure democracy.
There is simply no way any division of power can keep any and all groups from dominating government. Groups vary according to your definition of them. It’s all in how you slice it. For any particular political setup with particular actors you can either define them all as a single group running things or as separate groups running things depending on whether you want to demonstrate group control or not. So your particular definitions of whether or not certain people constitute a group are not worth much. Certainly not enough to base a political system on. Much better, IMO, to give everyone decide for themselves with an equal vote.
Again, who is to say that the viewpoints in Tinytown are more relevant or necessary than those in BigMegaStates? Certainly by traditional measurement cities are much more diverse than low populous states which tend to lean toward White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
The evaluation of whether or not your Luxembourg should join Federated Europe would include factors well beyond the scope of our discussion here. If the hypothetical you did decide you want to be a Federated European and not just a Luxembourger anymore then you should be content with representation equal to that of your fellow citizens. To turn your analogy back around, if you are an American and not just a Wyomingite or Vermontite or whatever then you should be content with the same vote as your fellows.
No. Everyone doesn’t have to be essentially the same as everyone else for equal representation to work. People just need to share one essential bond. They only need to see themselves as a people. You know, like supposedly we do here in America.
It doesn’t work that way. We have a system that works right now and you’re the one proposing we make some serious changes to it. I like having some protection against the more populous states. Is it undemocratic? Yeah, but I hardly see that as a bad thing. How do I benefit from having my state surrender it’s representation in the Senate?
Hm, you’ve convinced me. I guess that is why Scotland, a small, distinct geographical region that has long been dominated in a political union with a much larger geographical region has never, and certainly not recently, made any grumblings about wanting to be a truly separate State.
Oh wait, Scotland and the UK are probably on a collision course with a divorce at some point in the next 50 years.
The very definition of a Federation is a “union of partially self-governing states.” If a Federation is ever to work, the states that make up the Federation will require true power.
My examples in this thread are a vain attempt to try and make people, who are quick to kill an institution that by and large is probably the only reason, or at least the most prominent reason, we have a country today. If you look at the history of revolutions and of disparate states joining together, most of these attempts ultimately fail. The various Republics that made up the USSR have mostly split into their own countries, Poland-Lithuania used to be a power in Europe that was a combination of two distinct kingdoms. Austria-Hungary, was the same. Yugoslavia was a similar union but of many different ethnic groups and even religious groups.
Most of these attempts at creating patchwork federal states have failed. Ours has succeeded, for over 220 years. That is because our framers correctly realized that the moment the sub-national political states that make up a federation feel that they are being bullied or controlled and have no recourse due to their smaller size, they are going to start agitating for an exit from the federation itself.
We can say, “but Connecticut and Rhode Island aren’t going to leave the United States”, and you’d be absolutely correct. But if we’re going to rely on deterministic arguments like that I can just say the Senate ain’t going nowhere and crap on the whole discussion. That’s about the equivalent rhetoric. It doesn’t matter that practically speaking Connecticut and Rhode Island would never leave the country. What does matter is the country would never have existed without the federal structure the framers chose, at least not for 220+ years. You can’t put the cart before the horse, and the reality is because of this strong history of federal powers no State is going to want to give up its power relative to other states, and because of the way our constitution was written the realities of the Senate going anywhere make it highly fictionalized. That isn’t just some quirk of the constitution, that is literally one of the most important design elements.
As for the matter of one person’s voting “meaning more” I will counter with this. Every person living in the United States who is a citizen of this country has the ability to vote for one and only one member of the House of Representatives, whoever happens to be running in their Congressional district. They also have the ability to vote for two different Senators at regular intervals. So there is no single person in the United States who is disadvantaged versus any other single person, all have 2 Senators and one Congressman they can vote on periodically.
The people advocating for the abolition of the Senate are making a lot of pre-suppositions that have gone uncontested. Exactly why, in a Federal Republic, does it matter if the three representatives I vote for (in Virginia) collectively have more constituents than the three representatives someone from Montana votes for?
You don’t benefit: that’s the point. Simply because we do not have the power to ensure more equal representation doesn’t mean that it isn’t the right thing to do.
I agree with Martin Hyde. The Senate is a stabilizing feature of our government. Without it, we would not have a republic. We would, instead, have a democracy which is not a good thing.
“Democracy has been defined as two wolves and a sheep discussing plans for lunch.” – attributed to Franklin but probably somebody later.
There’s nothing wrong with the Senate that elimination of the filibuster wouldn’t cure. If I had to change anything, I’d have the smallest 1/3 of the states get 1 senator, the middle 1/3 have 2, and the largest 1/3 get 3 senators. It would somewhat mitigate the over-representation of states like Alaska and Wyoming. The notion of having a smaller body where it takes 6 years to turn over its membership, 1/3 every two years, is sound. What isn’t sound is allowing the minority to throw sand in the gears of government on a whim.
No, you’re not, you’re from an eastern county of the Province of the Netherlands. Which also includes Brussels and Antwerp.
We have a system that screws the majority of the population.
You don’t see it as a bad thing because it benefits you. And if that means that the majority of the population is treated unfairly for 230+ years, too bad for them.
You would have an excellent counterexample if I had asserted that an equal vote was good enough for populations long under the same government. You’ll note that I did not. The Scots and the English are not the same people. They are not Brits the same way we are Americans. Jews lived amongst the Germans for far longer than 300 years without ever becoming a single people.
Humans are social animals. As such we are inclined to look out for other members of our herd. There is a definite sense of Us vs Them. You can feel reasonably safe within the group so long as you are one of Us. So an equal vote works. Being American is not a function of ancestory. This is why America has so successfully unified different peoples. Because we accept them as Americans. Ideally that is. I would be more respectful of the argument for extra representation if it favored nonprivileged groups. There are plenty in America who don’t see African-Americans as real Americans. Of course, if per state representation in the Senate favored blacks over whites, it would be long gone by now.
Yeah that makes sense. Except that it doesn’t. I could point out why but why bother when Sitnam has already provided a sarcastic post to illustrate the foolishness of this claim?