Packing the Union: this is a test
Commenter “D. Cohen” describes a problem:
One big lack in the constitution is a statement about how small a state can be…
Suppose political party A controls a state and both houses of Congress. It can then, constitutionally, have its state request to be split up into, say, 10,000 mini-states. Congress, also being controlled by party A, approves. Each state must be given two senators and at least one member of the House. As long as each mini-state has at least 3 people inside it — two to be state senators and one to be a member of the House — the constitution as currently written has no objection. The number of electoral votes each mini-state has is at least three — two for the senators and one for the member of the House of Reps.
Local politicians would be ecstatic — all those extra state governor and state legislative positions to be filled. In that sense it could turn out to be a very popular move!
Doing the math: That’s 20,000 additional votes for party A in the Senate; at least 10,000 additional votes for party A in the House; and at least 30,000 additional votes in the Electoral College. The first party to do this maneuver gets to control all three branches of the government indefinitely because, now that they always control Congress, they will not approve any similar split-up of states controlled by another party.
I would be happy to be set straight about why this would not work — but isn’t it basically what the Democrats are trying to do now with turning DC and Puerto Rico into states? Really, it looks like they are being pikers settling for just two extra states when they could have so many more.
First let me say that I know of no constitutional impediment to that scheme. Unfortunately. But why hasn’t it been tried before? I think the main reason is that the far left has never been in charge of this country before. Previously, although politics has been hard-fought and often dirty, with shady machinations of one sort of other, there has never been an all out totalitarian group in charge before.
That’s what we have now – or close to it. We’ll see just how close as time goes on.
However, Puerto Rico has been a bona fide territory for a long time and I don’t think the idea of admitting it as a state is on an especially shaky level, nor does it resemble – except in political goals – the idea of admitting DC, a very different entity, as a state. Some of the constitutional impediments to making the District a state can be found in this 1993 article, from which you can see that Democrats have contemplated this move before.
Whether SCOTUS would be able or willing to bar the move is unknown, but one thing we do know is that the Democrats in Congress are very serious about this, having passed a bill this past June making DC (or most of it) a state, although the bill died in the GOP-held Congress. Rest assured that it would have a much better chance in the present Congress, and of course Biden would sign it with a flourish. And once a state is admitted it cannot be banished. I believe that the current Democrats are deadly serious about it, although I doubt that all that many people who voted for them last November were even aware of that fact.
D. Cohen mentions at the end of that comment that “it looks like [the Democrats] are being pikers settling for just two extra states.” My response is: what makes you think they plan to stop there?
I mean that quite seriously. Ideas once unthinkable are often first floated in op-eds and/or law review articles, to test the waters and in order to nudge that Overton Window a bit more open. In that regard, please note this article that appeared in the Harvard Law Review last January. It was published as an unsigned “note,” which means that it was the work of students.
It is titled “Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation,” and I suggest you read it or at least part of it. Here is a small excerpt:
To create a system where every vote counts equally, the Constitution must be amended. To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states. These states — which could be added with a simple congressional majority — would add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments: (1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally; (2) an expansion of the House so that all citizens are represented in equal-sized districts; (3) a replacement of the Electoral College with a popular vote; and (4) a modification of the Constitution’s amendment process that would ensure future amendments are ratified by states representing most Americans.
Radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live. The people should not tolerate a system that is manifestly unfair; they should instead fight fire with fire, and use the unfair provisions of the Constitution to create a better system.
If you look at the history of modern tyrannies, many of them have seized absolute and long-term power through democratic means. So it’s not a new idea. One of those examples is Nazi Germany (please see this on the Enabling Act), but there are many others. Something can be legal while still being very very very bad.
The idea recommended in that law review article is obviously a tyrannical one: if you can’t get your way in the usual manner, use a legal trick to ram your way down the throats of America whether the majority of Americans like it or not – and better still, label it “democracy.” The Founders understood that democracy is very dangerous and almost inevitably leads to tyranny if unchecked, and although they tried to put enough checks and balances in the Constitution to protect us from our worst impulses, and they gave us a republican rather than democratic form of government (and it’s a republic that the authors of that “note” wish to do away with), the Founders knew they could not protect us forever.
The bottom line is that, if the Democrats are that far gone down the path of “ends justifies the means” tyranny, and if they are in control, then this sort of thing will happen. And if this particular thing (“packing the Union” though the creation of multiple tiny states) doesn’t happen, something else will happen (or many things) to solidify their control. The law and SCOTUS can protect us, but only to a point. The ultimate protection is the integrity and wisdom of our public servants and of the American people themselves. I wouldn’t bet much on the first. It remains to be seen about the second.
In January 2020, it would have been an act of lunacy to suggest that the U.S. would, within one year, be engulfed in officially-promulgated madness, barely clinging to any defense of or protections for freedom of speech, as well as staring into the abyss of full totalitarian control by Big Tech, Big Media, Big Business, and all the institutions of the state. Now, it is clear that never before has the truth of the conservative argument that “progressives” are the party of “by any means necessary” and “the ends justify the means” been more frighteningly undeniable.
I could see Puerto Rico — if they want it. After all, we have Hawaii which is much farther offshore than PR. If DC wants representation, what should be done is the same as what was done to the other half of the original DC in the nineteenth century. The portion west of the Potomac was returned to Virginia. The areas north and east of the Potomac should simply be returned to Maryland.
Partitioning a state would require that state’s consent. You’d have to scrounge to find a time and a place where there was much interest in that.
Puerto Rico is not an appropriate addition to the union for the following reasons:
1. There’s a constituency for the idea on the island, but also one for the current arrangement. There’s no consensus nor any supermajority either way.
2. It is a part of Latin America that has a contractual relationship with the United States. It is not, culturally, part of the United States. It is much less affluent than the mainland (the per capita income is about 60% lower) and it suffers from a severely dysfunctional labor market (consequent to bad federal policy). It would benefit economically from a velvet divorce from the United States.
3. Hawaii by contrast is a society that was forged under mainland rule. It is loyal, almost entirely Anglophone, and affluent (with a per capita income within 10% of that of the mainland).
4. There’s no proper justification for statehood for DC. It’s a fragment of a metropolitan area, currently accounting for 15% of the whole. We should be reducing jurisdictional fragmentation around the Capital, not freezing it in amber. If they’re actually concerned about representation in Congress for the area, they can retrocede it to Maryland (if Maryland is willing to take it). James Jackson Kilpatrick argued 40 years ago that Maryland has a prior claim to the territory if it is not allocated to the function of federal district, and that it cannot be properly admitted as a state without Maryland’s consent.
5. They only want this to stack the Senate. One thing states could do that might be salutary would be to reconstitute themselves as confederations, in effect establishing multiple state governments with different components of the state leading separate lives. The state as a whole would be a ceremonial unit for purposes of data collection and congressional representation, but for scarcely any other purpose. Possible candidates for reconstitution as a confederation would be California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri.
6. Another thing that might be salutary would be to conclude interstate compacts which would establish standing partnerships between whole states and between state fragments to provide select services jointly. Ideally, DC gets formally retroceded, Virginia and Maryland are reconstituted as confederations (with the capital region in each separated from the rest of the state), and a partnership is formed between the capital regions of each. The capital, the quintessential Virginia, and the quintessential Maryland could each go their own way on domestic policy. However, congressional representation would be arrayed as if you had two states.
I am 100% in sync with #4 giving the non Federal Mall to Maryland. The carrot for Maryland would be one added representative.
Puerto Rico as a state is a fevered wet dream. The last time Puerto Rico voted to stay a commonwealth vs. becoming a state, when they found out they would pay Federal Income Tax they said Ay Caramba! and voted to remain status quo. No way it happens this time unless the Democrats say you will do this and rig the ballot.
And Guam, how can you admit a state that might tip over and fall into the ocean as Georgia Representative Hank Johnson feared?
The more extreme the measures imposed, the more extreme will be the resulting reaction.
Well to reprise the Jimmy Carter theme, there is the State of Malaise, and the general State of Malcontent that will soon be widespread. Who will represent those states of the union?
Yeah, I don’t say I support PR statehood, and it doesn’t appear there’s a strong consensus for it on the island. But of all the other proposals it is the most logical. It’s not about Puerto Rico, though; it’s about Democrat power.
They can do all that yes. For who would stop them?
But as I intimated in another thread, why play these Glass Bead Games about Constitutional Exegesis and Finagling?
They don’t need to do any of this. All they need to do is amnesty the 30M illegals and open the borders to more. Game Over.
Do people love to fixate on the esoterica because it’s kind of a clinging to a safe world view? Quibbling about little black marks on parchment when they’re coming for you with a Great Brown Horde? Is it too horrifying? Or are you all too afraid to look inside yourselves and face this thing you know is coming?
The tl; dr version is that there is a level of chicanery that you cannot get people to accept with having overwhelming force at your disposal–and if you have that you can do much less extreme chicanery than what is proposed here.
1. Creating a zillion states would take a very long time and be disruptive for the inhabitants of the zillion states.
2. While it’s technically legal, doing it would provoke a crisis of legitimacy. Millions of people across the nation would refuse to accept it and refuse to obey the orders of such a government, including millions in the military. There other other examples of things technically legal that have never been done for analogous reasons:
Roosevelt’s court packing scheme
A president unilaterally starting a nuclear war
3. The only way that this could ever be pulled off is that such a large supermajority across the nation was for it that you would not even need to do it. They could just write a new Constitution if they had much power.
DC was deliberately set up to prevent the government employees having a strong say in the government.
A “State of DC” would have TWO senators from just one CITY, and of course most of the citizens of that particular city have their hands in the cookie Jar.
I HATE this stupid DC and PR statehood red herring. DC CANNOT become a state as it is specifically designated as a federal zone in the Constitution. PR has held statehood referenda multiple times and it has never passed. There are 3 factions in PR — the independence group, the statehood group, and the status quo group. They all have 25-35% support and so can never win. I feel like it is constantly brought up just to create controversy. Could we just stop now?
Frederick:
That’s why I wrote, “And if this particular thing (“packing the Union” though the creation of multiple tiny states) doesn’t happen, something else will happen (or many things) to solidify their control. ” It doesn’t have to be this extreme.
Also, by “this sort of thing,” I didn’t necessarily mean the same number of new states recommended in the article. A lot fewer of them would do quite nicely to establish continual control by Democrats.
I also don’t necessarily agree with you that there are enough Americans who would be offended by it that defiance would be successful. A lot of present-day Americans would be on board – after all, it’s “legal” – and a lot more would be intimidated by the crackdowns that would accompany it. It wouldn’t be happening in a vacuum.
Big Red and Delilah:
They attempt to get around that problem by shrinking the district of DC proper to a very small territory, just the government buildings part without all the residential areas. That has actually been done once before, successfully, and so it seems constitutional.
Then it’s the rest of DC that becomes a state or states. That process would be more difficult to challenge constitutionally. The people suggesting this are not stupid, and a bill was already passed in the House supporting doing this. Here is the relevant portion of the bill; you can read the entire thing there, too.
I agree that Puerto Rico wouldn’t necessarily vote to become a state. But they wouldn’t necessarily vote against it. There seems to be significant support there lately for statehood.
About that Trump poster we were “betting” on —
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2021/01/Miss-me-2.png?w=1160&ssl=1
The 127 Districts becoming states notion, from HLR.
I’ll take a look. But does no one see the obvious fact that this sets the Populist Era on its ear, when the 17 Amendment (I think) got passed, taking selection of Senators away from the Legislatures and making the public select them.
The idea was then that in certain Western states, Big Mineral companies could buy the Legislatures and thereby the US Senate.
Now, the morons at Harvard Law want to bring back that era through the back door.
What do I mean?
I mean, what’s to prevent a club of billionaires from owning these DC District neighbourhoods outright and through owning them and selecting ”voters” as clubby residents, to control their Senate votes and thus the Senate!
Of course they will. Some 60 billionaires supported Hillary. (Only a few, Trump.)
And for those without the Silicon Valley monopolies, this is their (or an other) means to the same Oligarchic end.
As I say, did no one at Harvard Law think through the obvious outcome of this stupid scheme?
Big Red notes “DC was deliberately set up to prevent the government employees having a strong say in the government.”
Yes, and high on a second term Trump agenda was making public sector unions illegal, or at least de facto useless, by changing federal law.
But what does any of this matter?
Big Tech/Big State interests control the voting outcome, anyway. Voting doesn’t matter any more.
I was over at Patrick Byrne’s thoughts at DeepCapture.com, and see that he agrees the Georgia Senate race was fixed like it was before.
VOTING DOESN’T MATTER ANY MORE, nationally.
Why bother imagining that any of this matters to real opposition anymore?
Frederick
Re: “3. The only way that this could ever be pulled off is that such a large supermajority across the nation was for it that you would not even need to do it. They could just write a new Constitution if they had much power.”
I refer you to Zaphod’s points; ” All they need to do is amnesty the 30M illegals and open the borders to more. Game Over.” and “Big Tech/Big State interests control the voting outcome, anyway. Voting doesn’t matter any more.”
Someone demonstrate otherwise or concede to the 800lb Gorilla in the room; it is now at the national level a fully rigged voting game, a case of “heads we win, tails you lose”. Is there any doubt that the left has to be intent upon implementing that vote rigging across as many States as possible? Dominion is already in 28 States. Georgia anyone?
Delilah,
Re:”DC CANNOT become a state as it is specifically designated as a federal zone in the Constitution.”
So what? A democrat Congress can pass it, Xiden signs it and SCOTUS rejects any legal challenges as lacking “standing”…
Re: “PR has held statehood referenda multiple times and it has never passed.”
If not already installed, how long till Dominion is brought to there too? Then, Puerto Rican voters ‘will’ pass it.
Perhaps even honestly, after democrats offer P.R. voters too sweet a deal to let go. Maybe free monthly checks to lift up Puerto Ricans to ‘equality’ to the U.S. average income…
There are 3 factions in PR — the independence group, the statehood group, and the status quo group. They all have 25-35% support and so can never win.
The sovereigntists comprise about 7% of Puerto Rico’s electorate. There’s another slice in the ‘not sure / don’t care / don’t bug me’ category. I think the advocates of the current system and advocates of statehood are about equal in number among the rest. It’s too bad, as the optimal situation might be similar to that of Cuba and Panama during the period running from 1904 to 1934: sovereign, but with some functions performed by the U.S. per treaty. The circular migration between the island and the mainland and ill-tailored federal legislation have generated problems for the island for 50 years.
And Guam, how can you admit a state that might tip over and fall into the ocean as Georgia Representative Hank Johnson feared?
There are about 160,000 people on Guam, and a majority live in one continuous tapestry of tract development. Be rather like giving statehood to Broome County, NY. A plurality on the island are Chamorro, though it’s a polyglot like a lot of polynesian islands.
They attempt to get around that problem by shrinking the district of DC proper to a very small territory, just the government buildings part without all the residential areas. That has actually been done once before, successfully, and so it seems constitutional.
James Jackson Kilpatrick pointed out the problem with this in his column on the subject. If there is any resident population in the ‘federal enclave’, DC’s electoral votes abide and are cast by those few people. The only way to extinguish those three electoral votes is complete retrocession. Retrocession was JJK’s solution. It needs Maryland’s consent, however.
I was over at Patrick Byrne’s thoughts at DeepCapture.com, and see that he agrees the Georgia Senate race was fixed like it was before.
VOTING DOESN’T MATTER ANY MORE, nationally.
Feel the Byrne
When did voting ever matter? Gold US flags? When did US flags become gold? Why are there 17 US flags behind T red’s farewell speech?
Why was Blue rejected a government plane? Why are they kicking out NG to garages if they wanted NG as security?
Why did Chris Miller call for NG deployment to DC, isn’t Miller Special Forces and a Trump loyalist?
Why was it reported that Blue skipped “domestic and foreign enemies” in his oath of office?
There may be 25-35k NG, but there are thousands of regular armed forces, with a total number of troops being 65k as quoted by one military spokesman. Maybe he had a Blue Kama moment.
Zaphod on January 23, 2021 at 7:16 pm said:
They can do all that yes. For who would stop them?
*Raises hand* There’s also T Red if you like the red tribe. We still got this, no problem.
Yammer, truly an Army of One, his own National Guard.
Laws are not self-executing, self-obeying, and self-enforcing. I think that’s getting missed.
If we think back to days of the fall of the Berlin wall: all that activity of overthrowing Communist governments was of course illegal, right? What happened was that people were no longer willing to obey those governments and too many of the people tasked with enforcing the will of those governments were no longer willing to do so. Those governments were far more repressive than anything the Democrats are dreaming up for this decade. Even fear was not enough in the end.
Yes, there are legal maneuvers not specifically prohibited by the Constitution that could alter the structure of the government to cement Democrats in power forever, but that could only happen if the vast majority of the population was willing to go along with it.
America cannot be kept free in spite of itself. It’s all and always up to “we, the living” as the man said. What’s on paper is of secondary importance.
If we no longer collectively have that desire for liberty then the legal chicanery is not even needed. Just promulgate executive orders, emergency measures, and make it easier to cheat in elections, as they’ve been doing for my entire lifetime now, and the sheep will go along.
Inane stunts like packing the Senate with DC neighborhoods is far more likely to rouse a latent sense of liberty than what’s been working for them so far.
I agree with Ymarsakar that national elections have become pointless.
There was all sorts of fraud evidence out there, hundreds of sworn affidavits, but no court would give any plaintiff “standing” to pursue a judicial hearing of the evidence that plaintiff held or could obtain by subpoena. SCOTUS even denied “standing” to the state of Texas, the most populous state in the Union, in its attempt to show that its Electoral College votes would be partially negated by vote fraud and thus EC fraud in 5 states, WI and MI among them.
The assertion by Dominion that its systems were “clean” and uncorruptible was never heard in any court, just its claims voiced in the media.
I think we are done as the American Republic. We should name ourselves the United Socialist States of America. USSA; has a nicely reminiscent ring to it, like USSR.
We have become a nation of feminized men, who will chatter and negotiate but never actually engage in combat.
Since elections are pointless and we all are going to die (not that Christianity and Judaism have anything to say about this life and submission to evil) why bother doing anything? Trust in Yammer he’s got it covered (sarc x infinite).
I’ll pass on the Eeyores and Mr QAnon.
Ashli Babbit RIP.
Cicero speaks hated, hateful truth. Unless, someone stands up, unless the masses unite around a Boston Massacre style event. Or anything similar in effect.
Could there be violent pushback to transexuals taking down female sports in the US? It’s tough to imagine, and I expect there will simply be a lot of opt out/cop outs, and this strong vine in school sports shall wither, just to take one anti-science SWJ example that Bidet has instituted.
TJ:
States have already pushed back on the trannies in female sports, Idaho for example. Those aren’t blue states. People in blue states have already taken cases to the courts about trannies corrupting female sports. Lesbians are pushing back against the trannies. Hubris is a man wearing a skirt and makeup IMO.
Any other wisdom or news from Italy? That should have been an embarrassment, following the QAnon fable.
QAnon kills; your credibility and occasionally you entirely. Don’t be a chump.
Ashli Babbit RIP
TJ:
Here you go, something to cogitate (cipher) about:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/25/bidens-trans-agenda-threatens-the-military-science-and-womens-rights-n1409461
Too bad no one has noticed:
“Biden has only been president for five days, and he has already rammed transgenderism down Americans’ throats. Get ready for a long and divisive four years.”