The other day I created an organizational chart that shows the five most populous cities in America and the states that it takes to equal that population. The reason I did that was to visually illustrate how out of whack the Senate seems to be for representation of the US compared to population. Looking at the extreme example, NYC has the same population has the nine least populated states in the Union. That means that the people in NYC who share two Senators with all of NY would have 18 Senators if they were instead those people from the nine states.
Now before people start to get after me about the House of Representatives being population-based, let's think about the balance of power here between the House and the Senate. If the federal government is meant to represent all of America, why does the Senate which disproportionally represents the populace, have equal say, if not more, in national matters? The Senate is where a filibuster can occur. The Senate can block and amend any bill the House passes. Why does someone from Wyoming get to be represented by 1/257,502 of a Senator while someone from California is represented by 1/18,228,774 of a Senator? That's over 70 times more representative power for the person from Wyoming compared to California!
The funny thing here is comparing all of this to Canada. In the US, the federal government actually does a lot of things for the nation. In Canada, however, most power is devolved to the provinces. And yet in Canada Parliament is based on population! So the country where the federal government does less has a more balanced representation than in the country where the federal government does more!
Maybe some states could be merged together so that the balance is a little bit more reasonable. Put Wyoming and Montana together. How about merging North and South Dakota? And don't tell me that there is too much of a cultural block; if East and West Germany can become a single country again then some states can merge.
The point of this rant is that the representation at the federal level should not be inverted when the federal government is powerful. If the US was more like Canada and the federal government didn't do that much then fine, I could live more with the imbalance. But that is simply not the case here.
Oh, and if you read some comments in another blog post I did in one of my two blogs this entire post makes me come off slightly as a hypocrite. =) As with all of my ranting blog posts, take what I say with a grain of salt.
7 comments:
yeah, but in Canada senators are appointed.
@paul Right, which is why I mentioned Parliament rather than the Senate in Canada.
did you see that article on how north dakota wants to drop the "north" from its name?
US Sentators used to be appointed by the states. This was changed to direct election in the 20th amendment IIRC. The old tension between the two houses was House members wanting to move power up to the federal and Senators wanting to keep it at the state level (they literally represented the state legislatures).
Once both houses of congress were directly elected the Federal government ballooned in size, natch.
And DC has a larger opulation than Wyoming, and NO Senatorial representation...
"That's one small senator for 18 million Californians, one giant senator for 260 thousand Wyoming ranchers."
Interesting to read this, I don't know if you've checked out the system they use in Germany but they use a specific formula to work out the relative number of votes each representative of the Lander (state) in the Bundesrat (senate) should have, as according to the population of their respective state.
Either way, it beats 100% appointment we have here in the UK! hehe
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