Pack the Union: Admit New States to Amend Constitution for Equal Representation

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

The Harvard Law Review has an excellent new article, which essentially proposes creating a bunch of new states, temporarily, for the purpose of passing constitutional amendments to reform American democracy to make it - well... an actually democratic system in which each voter is actually equal - by getting rid of (or fundamentally reforming to remove the un-equal aspects) the un-equal parts of the U.S. system which are inherited from the 18th century. In particular, this includes the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate.

I am particularly pleased to see this article, because I brought up the same essential idea in discussions on Atlas back around the time of the Kavanaugh hearings. The fundamental problems with the un-democratic and un-representative nature of the U.S. Government can be fixed by simply adding a bunch of temporary micro-states, which each will have 2 Senators - "Pack the Union!" - and then using these new states to pass amendments that will form a more perfect union.


Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation

The 600,000 residents of Wyoming and the 40,000,000 residents of California should not be represented by the same number of senators. Nor should some citizens get to vote for President, while others do not. Any rationalization of the status quo must adopt the famous Orwellian farce: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

These observations are not new, and they were noted well before the Constitution was ratified. During the Constitutional Convention, delegates from small states refused to accept a system of representation by population. Likewise today, the faction that benefits from the unfair allocation of power has no interest in changing it. Article V of the Constitution requires supermajorities to amend the Constitution, so pragmatists have been reduced to advocating meager solutions: perhaps Congress could admit Washington, D.C., as a state; maybe Puerto Rico too, if we’re really feeling ambitious.

While a step in the right direction, these proposals are inadequate. 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.

I really like that last part. There will be some people who say that we should not do this because it is unfair, and is not how the Constitutional amendment system is supposed to work. But we should nevertheless do this. The retort to that is just as the article says: "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." This proposal is certainly not more radical than having the votes of people in Wyoming count roughly 68 times more than the votes of a person in California, which is currently the case in the U.S. Senate. And actually, currently the votes of people in Wyoming count for infinitely as much as people in Washington D.C. both in the House and the Senate.

This status quo is fundamentally untenable and unsustainable, and it is only going to keep getting worse as America becomes more urbanized and less and less rural (especially after Texas eventually flips Democratic in the foreseeable future).

So it is good to see this idea (and others like it) starting coming up more often - I expect it to increasingly enter the mainstream/overton window over the coming years.



Note - the article is fairly long and has 3 parts. It is worth reading. The last part addresses a lot of the counterarguments that some posters might want to make:

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I identifies the issue of unequal representation in the federal government. Part II explains the proposal to admit new states and pass new amendments. Part III addresses legal, historical, and political counterarguments.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Again this is one part of the constitution that just cannot be amended and breaking up states to create microstates is also unconstitutional

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union#Text

WV was the lone exception due to the fact that VA had seceded from the union so this didnt apply.

State can still voluntarily split. The portion of the constitution you quote only says it cannot be done without consent of the legislatures of any existing state they are split from, and without the consent of Congress: "without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress."

So, for example, you could create 500 micro-states consisting of single houses in San Francisco, as long as the U.S. Congress (by simple majority vote which is all that is required to admit states) and the California legislature both agreed to it. And that would result in 1000 new (temporary) Senators to pass amendments.

However, even if you for some reason reject that, this rebuttal is irrelevant for this particular proposal, because it does not split up any existing states in any way, because it admits 127 new states from Washington DC, and DC is not a state currently.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

LMAO this is not some fantasy novel

Correct. The Harvard Law Review is not a fantasy novel. It is a Law Review.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

he literally said he thinks 500 microstates should be created lol

That is not a counter-argument.

If you think that it is wrong for there to be small micro-states that have more Senators per capita than other states do, why is it not also wrong for Wyoming to have 68 times more Senators per capita than California does?

Especially given that the micro-states need only exist for long enough to pass the amendments fixing the problem with Wyoming having 68 times more representation (and other related problems like the electoral college).

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Except lol that is the only part of the constitution that just cannot be amended unless every single state wants it to be amended.

That is not really a constraint. If nothing else, you can always pass an amendment that says "The Senate shall have no powers whatsoever," pass other amendments to turn it into effectively a House of Lords equivalent, etc.

In that case, you could keep the bit about each state having 2 Senators, but it would be totally irrelevant since the Senators would do nothing whatsoever.

This would change the way the Senate worked significantly, but that sort of change is nothing new at all in U.S. Constitutional History (the Senate was originally not elected). Likewise other bits of the Constitution have been changed so that they don't do anything directly any more really - for example, the Electoral College members don't really make independent decisions as to who to elect (they just vote for whoever won the vote in their states).

In practice, you could do all sorts of other things as an alternative to that, just depending on the details of the new system you wanted to set up.

If you really wanted to, you could also simply pass a constitutional amendment that directly contradicts the prohibition on a State's senators being removed without the state consenting to it individually, and get rid of it through a 2 step process. First, pass an amendment that says "you can pass an amendment that cancels out that other part." And then you pass a second amendment that does actually cancel out that part.

The list of possibilities that all the creative lawyers out there could come up with is endless.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Again just cause what your claiming can happen doenst make it any less fantasy .

So your response is simply no argument whatsoever, much less any substantive argument.

This is a sadly typical from far too many Republicans on Atlas.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Terrible idea. Republicans could just do the same in the future.

We should, however, admit Puerto Rico, DC, and Guam as states, regardless of what the political consequences may be. (Remember that PR has a Republican representing them in Congress right now, so this isn't some hyperpartisan conspiracy.)

We should break San Francisco up and have each individual condominium declare itself a state.  Then the Democrats can hold the Senate forever.

This idea suffers from the same problem that packing the Supreme Court does; There is nothing preventing the Republicans from pursuing a similar strategy.

All three of you are misunderstanding the idea. The idea is not to add these states permanently (which would indeed be undemocratic, unfair, and just as tyrannical as the current system). The idea is to add these states temporarily solely for the purpose of passing constitutional amendments to ensure the right of all voters to equal representation under the law is respected. Once these amendments were passed, they would either render the new mini-states irrelevant, or else the new states could all simply be merged back together into one state (or more likely, merged back into the Federal District of DC).

Once the amendments were passed, adding new states would serve no purpose, since nobody would get any more (or less) representation simply by virtue of living in any particular "state" entity.

Additionally, the logistics of managing these new mini-states in regards to the formation of constitutions, legal codes, state governments, law enforcement and electoral proceedings show that this plan is absurd.

This is irrelevant, because the states need exist only for a few days.

Day 1 - New states are amitted.
Day 2 - Special elections are held to elect representatives and Senators from the new states.
Day 3 - Results are certified.
Day 4 - Constitutional amendments are passed. The amendments either are written explicitly to render these new states irrelevant, or then Congress passes legislation merging the new states back into Washington D.C.

For administrative reasons, though, I do think rather than making entire neighborhoods be the new states, it is better to have single houses/apartments be the temporary states with pre-selected and pre-screened "Senators in waiting" in each of the houses, who then elect themselves, certify the results quickly, and get straight to passing the amendments and there wouldn't be issues with crimes/picking up the trash/administrative issues like that for the few days that were needed to pass the amendments. With that, this could probably be done with a day (it would just need to be carefully planned beforehand so that everyone was on the same page).

This plan is insane, not only would you risk large scale disruption of the livelihoods of many American citizens regardless of race, class and political orientation, but the stability of American society and its territorial integrity, and all for some dubious notion of "mass democracy", a principle which you would go about violating far more severely than the Electoral College or the Senate does with your goal being to provide the Democrats with a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress and a Big Blue Wall in the electoral college when Democratic support in 2016 amongst the national electorate was a slight plurality.

Again, you are misunderstanding. The idea is not to give Democrats a permanent majority, which would be tyrannical for the same reasons that the current system is tyrannical (namely it is un-equal representation and there is no substantive basis for some voters having more voting power than others simply because they live in one artificial entity called a "state" and other voters live in another different artificial entity called a "state" (or a territory). The idea is instead for all voters to count equally.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Probably cause it doesn't deserve a substantive response.  We get it.  You want to create more small states under Article IV

First of all, insofar as voters in small states having more representation than voters in large states is a "protection," it is not a protection of "agrarian states." It is a protection for small states. Small states may be either agrarian or urban. A small state consisting of a small neighborhood or even of a single housing unit is a small state just as much as a small state consisting of a bunch of agrarian farms or even a single farm. Indeed, the article points out that the population of DC neighborhoods are (substantially) larger than the population of Nevada was when Nevada was admitted as a state.

There is just as much basis for "protecting" DC neighborhoods or individual DC housing units by giving them extra representation as there is for giving the same to "agrarian states" - i.e. none.

We are not a union of "states," America is a union of the American people. Insofar as giving small states extra representation ever made sense, it made some degree of sense in the 18th century because the US was much more like the European Union is now, as compared to being the modern nation-state that we currently are. During the Revolutionary War and early in America's history, people thought of themselves more in terms of being citizens tied to their "states" than being "Americans."

This lasted approximately to the time of the civil war, when, for example, Robert E. Lee joined the confederacy because he identified more with his state of Virginia than with the nation of the United States.

But that America - that America in which you could make at least a plausible argument that "state" was an element of identity for people, which needed special protection like a protected class - died on the battlefields of Appomattox, and ever since then it has been fading into irrelevance.

to undermine the more important protections for agrarian states under article I in the same manner that both parties gerrymander electoral districts for the purpose of benefiting your party, or elected officials make themselves dictator for life so they can never be checked.  States that want to preserve an agrarian life-style will be ruled by states that encourage illegal immigrants and urbanized environments, which was addressed in the Constitution when the founders already gave you more representatives.  You want all the benefits of packing your state with as many people as possible, but none of the disadvantages of overpopulating your state like it's china or India.  Now everyone has to suffer due to your lack of state resources like China suffers by importing food produced in Africa and the US.  Nothing is far-fetched.

This is not a persuasive argument, because one could make same argument in support of extra power for urban mini-states. I am not saying that urban mini-states should exist on a permanent basis (only to pass the amendments), but if they did exist, you could just as easily say that these states just "want to preserve an urban life-style" and the people in those states should be more equal than the people in other states so that they can do that as you could say that rural states just "want to preserve an agrarian life-style."

As a side note, the idea that small states having extra power has anything to do with agrarianism any more is absurd - the great majority of people even in states like Nebraska are not farmers. This has not been the case for about 100 years.

You're no different than most other Democrats on Atlas that ignore Constitutional Amendments, restrictions and protections when it's inconvenient.

You are the one ignoring the Constitution. The Constitution can be amended and it allows for the admittance of new states, which is precisely what is being proposed.

The only thing that is being ignored is the principle that everyone should have equal representation under the law. There is no reason for some voters to be more equal to others.

The only reason you oppose this is because you like living with a system that is unfair and gives 68 times more representation to people in Wyoming than people in California, solely because it benefits you personally. You would rather live in a fake "democracy" in which the minority rules over the majority (tyranny of the minority!!!), rather than a principled democratic system in which the majority rules (but which can have checks and balances against the tyranny of the majority). The reality is that you have 0 principled reasons for defending the status quo, you stand only in defense of your own self-interest, which is not a persuasive argument to anyone who has different self-interest. Why should the majority be permanently oppressed by the self-interest of the minority and by the rule of the minority? This is the very antithesis of the principles of democracy.

Eventually your tyranny will be overthrown, one way or the other.

You justify destroying the rights of states to govern their own citizens according to the powers that are granted to them by the Constitution, and take away the power to defend their rights. Actually, any civil right could also be rescinded at the whim of the party in charge.

Incorrect. All citizens would have the power to defend their rights and would have the same exact power to defend their rights as all other citizens. The constitution would still exist (with the bill of rights etc unchanged) under this proposal, and you would still have the same right to vote as everyone else. The only difference is that your vote wouldn't count for more than the votes of other people. You would not be more equal than other voters, but only equally equal to your fellow citizens.

I don't care that you have good intentions.  It won't turn out that way, especially when you consider the fact that more corporations will have an ability to spread money to more Senators in these small, Democrat-leaning states.  It's more likely that our country turns into Russia.  

I do care, though, that you don't have good intentions. Your only intentions are to preserve rule of the minority, simply because you are part of that minority.

If nothing is done, it is more likely that America eventually descends further towards rule by the executive, slouches towards dictatorship, and eventually if things are allowed to get that far, to civil war/revolution of some sort. Americans are steadily losing trust in government, and will continue to lose more and more trust as long as the government is not responsive to what they (consistently) vote for - or in the case of Americans who are totally disenfranchised in places like DC and Puerto Rico, what they would like to vote for, but can't because they live under a tyranny.

Permanent rule of the minority is not a sustainable condition, and the majority will eventually assert itself to end it.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

The WMATA is already messed up trying to deal with having to beg three different governments for building and funding and etc. Make it 129, see how long before the Metro just gives up completely. When you're changing state borders two dozen times just taking the Red Line from Bethesda to downtown DC.

EDIT: And the state legislative maps! You'll have apartment buildings with multiple state house districts. If you're giving a 3,000 person neighborhood statehood with a state legislature that's, say, 100 people, that's 30 people a legislator. The people in the Political Geography board will love drawing them, sure, but think about what that actually would look like!

Was just talking to Bacon King about this. My thoughts:

You're going to have "states" with a population of 3,000ish with a 100 person state legislator. Literal floors of apartment buildings will have their own legislator. Add to that that these states need their own Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Comptroller, Secretary of Agriculture (hey, there's a green belt between the two sides of the highway! Things grow there), etc. A State Supreme Court. Auditors, regulators, DMV, lower courts...

Every single person in every one of these neighborhoods will get a government job. And why the hell would you agree to go back to being a lawyer or whatever after being Governor of Farragut Square? All these statelets are going to just say "no, we're staying as states." And when Congress tries to undo them, they'll say "no junction." And then when Congress says "Well, we'll Amend the Constitution," they'll say "Hey, we're now two thirds majority of the Senate by ourselves. Stick your amendment up your ass."

Once you create these things, you have to get used to the idea of Washington as a balkanized hellhole.

If your objection is actually these little practical details, there are all sorts of ways to avoid all these sorts of problems.

As ought to be clear, the idea is not for these states to be permanent; they are supposed to exist only temporarily as legal entities solely for the purpose of passing amendments.

So, the question was raised, "but what if they don't want to voluntarily give up their statehood and be merged, or what if they in some other way don't want to cooperate with the plan?"

Well, first of all, there is no reason why a "statelet" needs to consist of entire neighborhood and cannot consist of only a single housing unit, and prior to deciding which housing units those should be, you pre-screen the people and only create states. At the very most, a state only needs 6 "citizens" - 2 to be Senators, 1 to be Congressperson, 1 to be a State Legislator (single member unicameral legislature), and 1 to be a State Supreme Court justice. Or you could have some people hold multiple "offices" (do you really need more than 1 person?). So although I am not sure if you even need that many (6) committed people per state to fill all necessary "offices," it ought not to be that hard to find 6 people for however many housing_unit-states are needed (I haven't done the math, but you can probably get by with less than 127).

You could also, as a condition for creating the state, have some carrots and sticks to ensure that the people in those statelets would be strongly incentivized to support their states abolition, once the purpose of the states had been fulfilled.

However, more straightforwardly, you could simply pass the entire process of state creation/dissolution/merger in a single piece of omnibus legislation, to ensure that no issue with some states not wanting to be merged can arise. Just have the legislation say "These states are admitted into the union. However, 7 days after this legislation becomes law, the states will be merged into single state of Columbia. By agreeing to these conditions for admission into the Union, these states are also simultaneously agreeing to their dissolution and merger 7 days later."

Or, you could probably even take it even further, and have the states consent within the legislation that admits them to the Union that their Senators/Representative votes will be cast in favor of the desired amendments. And now let me anticipate the objection --- you say that violates the right of Senators to cast their votes how they want? Well, remember, the Senate makes its own rules. The Senate rules can simply be set to allow Senators/Congresspeople's votes to be committed as a condition of entry of their states into the Union.

You could also have the Senators/Congresspeople consent to this at the time of admission of their states. Moreover, keep in mind, the Senators and Congresspeople could easily all be determined in advance of admission of new states into the Union. DC and Puerto Rico both have Shadow Senators/Shadow Representatives, and the historical practice for states joining the Union was that they elected Shadow Senators prior to joining. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_congressperson

So you would know exactly who the Senators/Congresspeople will be at the time the states are admitted.


If you did that, it could all be done (as far as I can see) in 1 single omnibus bill, passed in a single day/single vote. Have the single Omnibus Bill go through the following steps:

1) Admit all the new States.
2) 7 days after the passage of this bill, the States are automatically merged/dissolved by the same legislation (just imagine Tom Cruise getting the briefing message "this state will self-destruct in 7 days"). I guess 7 days may be too long though if it is all in 1 single 1-step bill. In principle it could be 1 second afterwards, I guess.
3) The votes of all Shadow Senators/Representatives of the States are pledged in the legislation to the passage of the amendments.
4) The Amendments are listed within the same omnibus bill, so that as soon as the Omnibus Bill is passed, the Amendments are enacted.
5) The States give their consent to ratification of the Amendments within the same omnibus bill (as a condition of their joining the Union).

I think that is all that would be needed, technically, though maybe I am missing some step or other.



So I don't think the real objection to this is practicalities of being able to string together a (contrived) process to do it. Those practicalities could all be dealt with, and if there is any minor point technically wrong with what I am saying, I am sure that some creative lawyers could figure it out given some time.



The real objection is that it doesn't "look right," or that it is a "power grab," or some objection of this kind.



So what, if anything, is the answer to that objection? I would say the answer is this.

Ultimately, what is it that determines the legitimacy of a system of government? IMO those involved with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in fact had it right - the consent of the governed.

While this whole process of creating temporary states/passing amendments certainly appears to be quite consistent with the letter of the law/process for Constitutional amendments, it is not hard to see how one would think that it violates the spirit of the law/process for Constitutional amendments (don't forget, however, that systematic minority rule also violates the spirit of the law/Constitution, and certainly the principles of representative democracy that are supposed to be embedded in the Constitution).

That is true, and it is clear that this would be an extraordinary exercise of legal power, similar in many ways (as the article mentions) to the creation of the Constitution itself in the first place, and also to the technically questionable ways that the civil war amendments (13th-14th-15th) were enacted.


So what would be the conditions required to undertake this sort of extraordinary exercise of legal power, and under what conditions could we reasonably say that it was legitimate? I would agree that this is very much on-point:

Might fix what the constitution says, but people still have to believe in it and be willing to uphold the system and follow the law for it to work. That begins to fail when you take for granted that government doesn't just "work." It requires the faith of the governed. I would expect partisan violence from such tactics, and widespread disapproval across the board.

That is exactly correct - the crucial thing with the Rule of Law is not just that the words say the right things, but that people are willing to go along with the system and abide by it. In other words, you need the consent of the governed - or at least the consent of a critical mass of the governed. If you don't clearly have that, you will have a strong negative reaction (at least from some), likely including partisan violence/widespread disapproval, etc. Clearly nobody wants that.

For this reason, I would very much agree that this new temporary states/amendment plan (or anything at all like it) is not something that could be enacted today. Instead, this is merely a proposal, and is something that support would need to be built up for over time, obviously with extensive discussion and consideration of possible alternatives. It is something that one would need to start a long-term campaign for, to build up public support.

To a considerable degree, this is an issue with having a written constitution which is more difficult to change (amend) than can really viably be the case. Compare the USA to the UK, for example, which can suddenly start doing new things such as holding national referendums, which previously did not exist in the UK Constitutional Order. Suppose that we wanted to have a national referendum about something in the USA. Currently, there is no Constitutional mechanism for that (at least not for binding referendums). Things can only become laws by both houses of Congress passing them and the President signing them. In theory, we could change that if we wanted by passing a Constitutional Amendment, but in practice that is not viable because the requirements were just put at an unreasonably high level by people 250 years ago who had no idea what would happen in what was, to them, the distant future.

And in particular, it is not viable to pass Constitutional Amendments that, due to flawed design, make it possible for a minority to outright rule (not just to check and balance the majority to avoid tyranny of the majority, but for the minority to actually rule in place of the majority), because the minority will block any such change out of self-interest, despite lack of any legitimacy for doing so in terms of democratic principles.

But back to the topic of referendums. How could you establish sufficient consent of the governed for a plan such as this to be viable without sparking a huge violent backlash? One way might be to do it in part via a national popular referendum. Have Congress pass a law setting up a "non-binding" "advisory" referendum, which Congress nonetheless pledges it will adhere to, with the question of whether the electoral college should be abolished and the President should instead be elected by "whoever gets the most vote wins," and whether the US Senate/House should be altered and/or abolished in whichever particular way is settled on so that all voters will actually have equal representation. And if the referendum passes, then Congress has pledged to trigger this plan of admitting new temporary states so that the referendum results can be implemented within the letter of the Constitutional law.

To be sure that it has sufficient legitimacy and sufficient support/consent of the governed, IMO the threshold for any such referendum to be considered as passing ought to be set higher than 50%. Maybe something like 55%, or perhaps even as high as 60% or so, to be sure it has sufficient backing to be legitimate, and to be sure that if it passes it didn't just pass in a fluke.

While winning a national referendum vote to abolish the electoral college and do the same for the un-equal representation in the Senate/House with a 55% or 60% majority would be not be easy, it would be a hell of a lot easier than achieving the regular requirements for a constitutional amendment. And a 55% majority would be enough, I think, to ensure legitimacy in terms of the "consent of the governed," though maybe you can say it should really be more like 60%.

One can imagine different ways this sort of thing could be done, but this idea of an advisory referendum (which Congress nonetheless pledges to honor) is an example of the sort of creative thinking that could be employed to figure out the best way to fix things, and to ensure that there was sufficient legitimacy.



Ultimately, the long-dead authors the Constitution have no authority or justification to tie the hands of our generation against our own will ~250 years after the fact with a system that fails to function. They even literally said so themselves!!!! From the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I don't think I could have said it any better myself!

When you are objecting to this plan, you are doing exactly what the Declaration of Independence expects you to do - "mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." You are simply doing what mankind is disposed to do. We are naturally scared of significant change, and would all naturally prefer to try to work things out as best as we can for as long as we can. The natural inclination is to be cautious. That is not necessarily a bad thing - we should want to be careful and deliberate, to be sure, and exactly as it says prudence does "dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

So the question is, when does it become too much? The question is just how long does the "long train of abuses and usurpations" need to be of installing systematic rule-by-the-minority before you come to recognize it as a "design to reduce you to living under Despotism?" How much does it take for it to not be simply a "light and transient cause," but rather a systematic problem that we can't otherwise change?

Does it take 1 President elected with minority support, over another candidate that got more votes? 2 such Presidents? 3? 50? 500? 1 Senate where the "Majority" party represents only 40% of the population? 2 such Senates? 3? 50? 500? Or is 40% too much - does it need to be the Majority party only representing 35% of the population? Surely there is some point at which anyone would recognize the problem. What is the the # where any pretense of Democracy has been sufficiently abandoned for the government to become illegitimate (I mean illegitimate in terms of fundamental democratic principles, not illegitimate in terms of its own internal legal structure)?



In those terms, note that it would actually be legitimate (in terms of the consent of the governed) to simply change the Constitution to abolish the electoral college etc without fulfilling the requirements listed in the Constitution for an amendment, provided that there were sufficient general popular support for doing so (sufficient consent of the governed). This would also be, however, "illegal" in terms of the written text of the Constitution. So it would be legitimate, but illegal.

The advantage of doing this via adding temporary states is that it would be within the letter of the law, whereas the alternative amounts to simply ignoring the text of the Constitution. So it would be legal. And it would also be clearly justified in terms of democratic principles. And if it is done, it ought to be done with sufficient consent of the governed/popular support.




If there are other ideas about what could in theory be done, I would be interested to hear those. But I haven't really seen any ideas other than "tolerate a large and growing bias to minority rule over the majority, it is not so bad!"

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Another perspective to think about is how easily the process could be corrupted or derailed once it has begun.

As mentioned above, this is a concern, and is of course something that should be talked about (these sorts of details ARE important.

However, if you want to overcome theses sorts of problems, you can do so via intelligent planning, and setting up the process in such a way that it would not be vulnerable to being corrupted/derailed in this sort of way.

So what we should really be talking about is not only what are the potential problems, but in what ways a process could be set up that could overcome those potential problems.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

The fact that we're even talking about this is also quite an indictment of how ineffective and unrepresentative of the people government has gotten.

Exactly. It is just like the Declaration of Independence says. The natural thing is to tolerate an ineffectual and illegitimate/unrepresentative system for as long as possible.

"mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

It is only after things have gotten bad for a persistent amount of the time that you start getting more and more radical ideas as to how to fix it.

And the more you let it sit without anyone trying to do anything to address/fix the problems, the more and more radical the potential solutions get, and the more the overton window moves to normalize them, until eventually something has to be done.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

For me, the nickel summary is similar to what Ghost of Ruin said above: Fancy lawyering ain't gonna get us out of our problems. The problem is people with power seizing ever more power, clinging to that power illegitimately, etc. They're not going to look at a clever set of rule changes and say, "Oh, damn, guess I've got to surrender that power now."

It is not actually just people seizing power and clinging to it illegitimately though.

It is the system working as designed (it just the design had some problematic aspects and the designers didn't have 250 years worth of foresight when they were designing it, and also elements of the design have been changed in the interim, such as changing to direct election of Senators, and not-really-using-the-electoral-college-as-it-was-originally-set-up-but-still-having-it-sort-of).

Donald Trump (and George W. Bush before him) were legally (and legitimately, insofar as "legally" means legitimately, which it does to a considerable extent) elected under the system. Likewise the same is true of all the Senators who have been elected, and also of all members of Congress elected from gerrymandered districts.

And yet, despite the fact that all the Senators have been elected legally/legitimately, it is nonetheless true that the minority rules (systematically), and the way in which the minority rules is systematically getting to be more and more of a problem, because population deviations across states etc have grown to be far larger than anyone would have dreamed of back in the 18th century, and much else has also changed that nobody anticipated then.

So it is not that people have seized power, or are clinging to it illegitimately. It is that the system is set up so that the minority tends systematically to rule over the majority. And this is then made worse also by cynical and deliberate tactics such as voter suppression and gerrymandering as well.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Yeah, I basically agree. If you can amend the constitution, amend it so that the House takes up the Senate's confirmation abilities for judges and executive appointments, for instance.

You can't amend the Constitution, though, at least not through normal means. Since the Constitution systematically empowers the minority over the majority (given how various things like partisan politics and state populations have evolved over a long period of time), the minority has no incentive to abolish its own power (other than democratic principle - but if you are a minority that keeps getting your way over a majority, democratic principle is not necessarily appealing).

And since the requirements for amendment are so enormously high, the minority that is empowered over the majority can easily block the majority from enacting any such constitutional reform under the normal method.


In practice, we are stuck with an un-amendable constitution which has serious problems, that nobody with power has an incentive to fix. Absent some alternative viable way to fix the problems with it, the situation seems likely to only grow worse with time.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

I think you can probably throw out the entire Constitution in a convention

You can't really get a Constitutional Convention because the requirements to get one are ridiculously high, just as are the requirements to pass an Amendment. It requires 2/3 of states to call for a convention and 3/4 of states to ratify amendments from a convention, which means that 1/4 of the states (representing a far lower percentage of the population than 1/4) could simply block everything (even if a convention could be called in the first place - and since no convention has been called in 250 years, clearly that is not an easy thing to accomplish). Note also that since DC and territories are not "states," they are not involved in a Convention at all under the rules for one specified in the Constitution, and have no representation in it! Which is precisely part of the problem in the first place!!!

Consider the states of Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Utah, and Oklahoma.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population

That is 13 states, which is more than 1/4 of "states," and therefore enough to block any Constitutional amendment. They have a total population of about 25,569,997. But the total population of the USA (including DC/PR and territories that are just as worthy of representation as any other citizens) is about 330,744,054. So you have a system, right there, where states representing only 7.8% of the population can block any Constitutional Amendment!!! An even crazier thing is that even though DC/PR/territories have more than 4 million people, even if you don't count them as part of the relevant total population it still rounds to 7.8%!!!

There are also plenty of other safely Republican states with populations only a bit bigger like Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, etc, so it is pretty easy to summon up that 1/4 of states to block anything. And this is not even counting small states that are Democratic or competitive, like Vermont, Delaware, New Hampshire, etc.

A Constitutional Convention is also (at least I would argue) actually more radical than is needed; the entire structure of the Constitution doesn't necessarily need to be changed, and it is not clear that a Convention could be limited to only addressing the unrepresentativeness of the system and making the system more democratic.

If anything, it may actually be more likely that a Convention at least under the rules listed int he Constitution for one, in which it is all (like the Senate) based on states rather than people, would actually end up making the system less representative than before. Since a small minority of the population has disproportionate voting power and influence under that system, they may use that disproportionate voting power and influence to simply make their voting power and influence even MORE lopsided in favor of themselves than before. At the extreme, all the small states could just gang up on California etc. Why not just pass an amendment saying that California should have no representation at all (just like the people in DC have no representation)? They have the power to do this. Even if they might not go that far, they could pass other amendments to make the system even less representative than it is now.

However, keep in mind that the original Constitutional Convention was not really "legal" under the then-current governing system of the Articles of the Confederation, and they basically just made up their own process as they went along.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Still, this plan is completely insane

By reasonable standards, yes.

However, if states representing only 7.8% of the population (actually less) can block any constitutional amendment and are incentivized to do so, what exactly is a reasonable standard?

What exactly is the alternative plan for reform?

The only alternative plan I have heard is no plan (simply to not have reform).

If in another 100 years the population of California has reached 200 times that of Wyoming, will that not be a problem? If so, what should be done about it?

If not, then you don't want reform. But in that case, the reason why you don't want reform is simply that you don't want it on the merits, not that you don't like the particular procedural plan to achieve reform.