This is a followup to Let’s Do This: For Once Something Is Actually About States’ Rights.
Either abolish the Senate or change the Constitution to make us a real federation.
Let’s get really non-controversial: the only reason the Senate exists is to empower a shrinking minority of voters by weighting their votes above the majority’s.
Oh, wait: that’s only non-controversial if the “minority” isn’t mainly made up of “rural” people.
280 thousand vs. 18.6 million
That’s how many people are represented by the Senators from Wyoming and California, respectively. The rounding error in California’s number is bigger than Wyoming’s entire population.
That is, frankly, obscene if the United States is supposed to be “one nation”.
Whereas it’s fine if we’re a federation of sovereign states.
So which is it?
At the moment, as my earlier post discussed, our government structure is very much not that of a federation of soverign states: if the federal legislature can pass laws overriding the state Constitutions, then those states are not sovereign, only the national government is.
This is not OK.
It puts us in a situation where a very small minority (remember: the 280k in Wyoming is weighted the same as the 18.6m in California) has effective control over the federal government, and is able to override even the Constitutions of the states.
You have to go up to the 15th most populous state to get to one where each Senator represents over 1 million people, and California’s Senators represent more than 18 times even that.
That is profoundly anti-democratic.
The Senate needs to be aboilished.
Or, ya know, we need to change the heirarchy of laws to put the state Constitutions above federal law.
Frankly, I’d prefer that but I’m OK either way.
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