Though of the first batch of new admittees, Vermont held out unicameral until well into the 1800s.
Also, in the case of many of the “organized territories” that later became a state (not all the 37 went through that stage), at some point in the process there would be created an elected legislative body, but the appointed Territorial Council (or whatever you’d call it in the particular Organizing Act) would hold on to the role of “upper chamber”; it would be replaced by an elected Senate upon gaining greater home rule or maybe not even until statehood itself, but one can see there the presumption of bicamerality as the default from the start.
In the remaining territories, at some point in the 20th century either the Councils were dissolved or stripped of legislative function, or were replaced by a Senate – today Guam and the USVI are unicameral; Puerto Rico, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa are bicameral (in the latter case incorporating the tribal chiefs into the upper chamber).
In the debate a decade ago on whether PR should go unicameral, though the main arguments went around expense and that there was no point in doing bicameral for such a compact and relatively homogeneous polity (which description was often presumed indisputable, I’m not so sure of that), there was also the aspect of historical roots – that the last colonial legislature under Spain and the first under the USA were bicameral because their “upper bodies”, wholly or partly appointed from the imperial capital or elected from a restricted franchise, were there to represent the metropolitan or economic-elite interests, and once you adopted home rule it was just a jobs program for politicians to retain an elected Senate. At that time a vote favored going unicameral by a huge margin, though low turnout, but in the end our Supreme Court ruled the ballot question was unconstitutionally drafted anyway so it had no legal effect, and most major political factions have left that behind as a distraction.
Our Unicameral is supposedly “non-partisan.” The actual makeup is 35 Republicans, 13 Democrats and 1 Independent.
One would assume that, given the anti taxation stance of the GOP that we would benefit from this alignment with low taxes. a little research shows that this is not the case:
According to this article from CNN Money we come in at number 14 of 50 for the highest tax rates.
In a sense, the country that established the Westminster system, the United Kingdom itself, has become somewhat unicameral. Sure, the House of Lords still exists, and it still does parliamentary work - it has committees, debates bills, and takes votes. In that sense, it is of course bicameral. But the powers of the House of Lords are extremely limited nowadays. Over the course of the centuries, the Lords evolved from being the more powerful of the two houses (hence another term occasionally used for it, the “upper house”) via being on equal footing with the Common towards being completely marginalised. This resulted from a combination of unwritten conventions (such as the Salisbury convention: The understanding that the Lords would not veto a bill which the party controlling the majority of the Commons had promised in its election manifesto), power plays (such as occasional threats that the Prime Minister who is fighting an inimical Lords majority would advise the monarch to create a new flood of Peers to ensure that his bill would pass the Lords), and statutory provisions (such as the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 which gave the Commons formal authority to pass bills against the veto of the Lords). It was not a smooth process, and it took centuries, but nowadays the House of Lords holds virtually no constitutional power which it could use against a disagreeing House of Commons. Which does certainly niot stop the Commons from taking House of Lords advice into account. But it’s surely not your traditional understanding of bicameralism, where you need the consent of both houses to adopt legislation.
I didn’t know that. What’s the evolution of the one-man-one-vote-rule? I wonder if it really was supposed to mean (with the US Senate such an obvious variation) what it means now or if an activist Court molded it into what it wanted … at least as far as it could.
Frankly, this has always struck me as a rather stupid ruling. The states created a legislative model that directly copied the one spelled out in the Constitution, and this is somehow unconstitutional? :dubious:
The current state of affairs creates a situation where large swaths of most states are ignored, and only the major population center gets any attention. See: upstate New York, Illinois outside of the Chicago area, Michigan outside of the southeast corner, etc, etc.
The reason for that is that the counties (or whatever sub-state electoral units a state uses for its state senate) are not, in relation to the state, comparable to what a state is in relation to the federal government. A county is merely a subdivision of a state, an administrative entity created by state law which can also be abolished by state law. States could also choose not to subdivide them into any sort of administrative units.
The situation is different for the states with respect to the federal level. The states preexist the federal system (in the case of the original thirteen, both logically and historically; in the case of all states, at least logically), and they make up the federal system. Federal law can neither dissolve individual states nor abolish the rule that the federal system is, as a matter of principle, made up of states.
The Senate at the federal level reflects this. More specifically, it reflects the principle that the United States were set up as a confederation of states, and on the basis of this principle it gives these states equal representation - an issue so important that a state’s equal representation in the Senate cannot be abolished against that state’s will even by constitutional amendment. All these aspects are not present in the case of a state subdividing itself into counties.