In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states | Hacker News Reader

In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states

washingtonpost.com

34 pointsss200361 comments

The House and the Senate will be weighted to two largely different Americas.

So, in some sense, the system works?

The whole point of having two different federal bodies based on different criteria is to try to ensure that minority populations or different demographic details of different states don't leave any population utterly without representation and a voice. The intent is that they will be forced to hash out their differences rather than just straight up letting one group run rough shod over everyone else completely unchecked.

The only entities that are guaranteed representation are states. It's not obvious that statehood maps to any other demographic attribute over time.

It made sense the ensure states felt they had some guaranteed level of representation in order to get the states to agree to enter, or remain in, the union. But now that it's established precedent that states cannot leave the Union (at least without Congress) it's not clear to me that it's important to guarantee individual states anything.

I'm trying to comply with HN guidelines and not be snarky here, but, to my ears, that sounds an awful lot like "Now that the states are the bitches of the federal government, they don't need a voice at all." And that doesn't remotely sound like a democratic system to me. It sounds pretty tyrannical.

what's democratic about states being guaranteed representation? democracy is about people having a say, not abstract entities

Funny, the comment I was replying to asserts that only states get representation in the US, not people.

Technically, the US is not a true democracy. Our state's speak for us and our state's represent us. This is how a presidential candidate can get less than a majority vote and still be president.

There is a term for it -- maybe republic -- but I'm not that awake and can't quite put my finger on it.

Indirectly federated republic.

But, why? This transfers power to the less populous states and away from the more populous states. What's the point in doing so?

The current system creates incentives for states to split in two. What's the point of that? Why is it correct that Rhode Island and Connecticut are two states, and California is one state? It strikes me as an accident of history the number of states we have. It makes sense if states have a real choice about being in the union (as otherwise the small states wouldn't go for it) but without that, what do the big states get out of it?

Knowing the history and the current makeup of the south outside of large metropolitan areas like Atlanta, “states rights” should frighten anyone who is any type of minority.

Well, I don't know what you mean. Perhaps you could explain your reasoning a bit?

"States' rights" is used as a dogwhistle in the United States for supporting legally protected racial, sexual, and religious discrimination.

[edit] In many political circles. In the antebellum era of US history it was used to excuse and defend slavery, and later, Jim Crow laws and segregation. There is a legitimate need for states to protect their rights, but that's not how the phrase has been used historically.

It's also the reason California can pass a net neutrality law. Two sides to every coin.

I'm pretty sure "subjugation of the population through chattel slavery or Jim Crow" and "net neutrality" are on different coins. That can't be your calculation in deciding whether or not to side with the "state's rights" camp.

I am in favor of concentrating power in the hands of the people and have a bias towards local over regional or national. But I won't ignore the reality that many who have pushed for "state's rights" as a term were specifically fighting for the rights of states to oppress minorities. This is why I prefer to express my politics through phrases like "power to the people" and not "power to the states" - when states are undemocratic, they should have no rights.

Jim Crow laws, laws against “miscegenation” (interracial marriage), anti-sodomy laws that make non heterosexual sex between consenting adults illegal. All of those are examples of laws that were just struck down by the federal government within the last 50-60 years.

The nice thing about states rights is that there were actually states to fight it. Think if slavery had been sanctioned on a federal level?

It was sanctioned at the federal level for nearly 100 years.

It was never ever sanctioned. It just wasn't not sanctioned.

This is just a tiny nit - but slavery was actually sanctioned at the federal level through the Fugitive Slave Law. This was one of the events that led to the Civil War - since the northern states suddenly had to enforce southern slave laws. Northern states who did not oppose slavery (as long as it was below the mason dixon line) and could coexist with the south suddenly opposed slavery since they were being forced to enforce southern laws.

> It was never ever sanctioned.

Yeah, it's not like (for instance) the Constitution expressly forbade Congress (despite it's otherwise general power over international trade) from limiting the slave trade until 1808 except by imposing an import duty capped at $10/head.

Or like the Congress passed, and the federal executive enforced, and the federal courts applied laws protecting slaveholders rights over wayward property even if it strayed into free states.

Except, well...

> Think if slavery had been sanctioned on a federal level?

Slavery was sanctioned at the federal level, protected by elements of the Constitution and defended by federal statute, up until after the Civil War.

Ever hear of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dredd Scott decision,and the 3/5 compromise, among many other things?

Democracy means rule by the people, not rule by the states. How is giving states power in any way democratic?

It's not. Democracy has problems though. The Bill Of Rights is undemocratic. It says that there are some things you can't do even if you can get 50% +1 of the population to agree to it. Federalism is undemocratic when the States interact with the Federal government but the upside is that it's harder a majority to run roughshod over the minority.

Democracy is rule by the people. That is not the same as majority rule. Consensus-based decision making (including wiser approaches like consensus-minus-1) requires supermajorities to make decisions, but that does not make them undemocratic...

Likewise the amended constitution limits the ability of the Congress to pass certain laws, without amending the constitution first.

This discussion of federalism, while interesting, probably ought to be accompanied by a discussion of A) what many people believe are the horrible effects of this and B) in the words of Paul Simon to "measure what we've lost." What we have lost is THE public Internet. The Internet on which companies who started from Y-combinators exist was a public Internet. It could be argued that it still is. There are at least 2 or 3 good arguments first the federal executive branch can't actually "destroy" the public Internet as a matter of policy, but that it ought to require an act of Congress. ARPANet came from an Act of Congress itself.

Which may mean that all these acts to "give it away" to ISPs can be legally challenged.

From the states point of view, ISPs operate on several public easements. These probably give state and local governments the authority to regulate.

And that made sense when the Senate was the representation of the states' desires and most states chose their Senators at the state legislature level. The system as set up so that that the people chose their Representatives directly, and the states chose their Senators at a state level. Now, thanks to the 17th Amendment, Senators AND Representatives are chosen by popular vote. So the initial reasoning behind splitting the two house of Congress is basically moot.

Realistically, if we went back to allowing state legislatures to choose their Senators, Republicans would have an essentially permanent 60-70+ seat veto- and filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Although you may have a valid criticism of the change in mechanism, I would not agree that the change makes it outright moot. The Senate still allows each state the same number of votes as any other state for that body. The House allots a varying number of representatives based on population. This was done intentionally so that larger/more populous states can't simply ignore smaller states. It preserves the voice of smaller states to some degree. It was intended to balance concerns and make sure that neither a demographic majority nor a demographic minority was at the mercy of the other.

I agree with you that the Senate is not moot, as far as the need for giving individual states a voice. It's power has shifted, though, from making sure that more populous states could not ride roughshod over less populous, to the opposite of that. Less populous states can now ignore more populous states (in the Senate at least) because the Senate is more directly representing the people than it is the state. In essence, 100k people in a midwestern state have the same voting power as 1mil people in a coastal state. Additionally, Senators now have to worry about campaigning directly to the people instead of the legislatures, which makes them more subject to the whims of the people rather than their expected job of representing the states. The Senate is now just another House of Representatives, except an individual Senator has extremely outsized voting power compared to the number of people who elected them.

It should be noted that this effects the House as well as the Senate.

Federalism is ingrained in the US Constitution. The degree to which power has flowed to DC is something that's happened despite the Constitution not because of it. There's a line in the Constitution that says everything that's not explicitly granted to the Federal government is in the hands of the State governments. Think about that.

Can anyone name anything that a State government can do that the Federal government can't? I'm not saying things that it doesn't do but things that it cannot do.

As long as that's the case having an undemocratic Senate - and that's what it is - is trouble. It will in the long run end up weakening the Senate as an institution. To the degree the US system is a federated one you can make an argument for the Senate but as things become more centralized the arguments for the Executive and the House - indeed for changing the House into a genuinely proportionally elected body become more and more plausible.

My guesses offhand would be marriage licenses, birth and death certificates. States register real estate and collect property taxes, and you need a state to allow you to incorporate a business.

You can do all these things in D.C., however so they are not the exclusive rights of states.

I understand why one would think that the federal government does these things, but the District of Columbia and other analogs to state governments do generally serve these purposes. There are things like a "Consular Report of Birth Abroad" in some cases for children of military service members. I guess it depends on the spirit of the question and definition of what constitutes "anything that a State government can do that the Federal government can't".

Generally speaking, I get the impression that most people dramatically underestimate the role of state and local government authorities in their daily lives.

Clearly the federal government asserts a fair amount of control over marriage - See DOMA or Obergefell but beyond that, do you think congress couldn't pass a law creating a national marriage license? Or say a minimum marriage age?

I wouldn't argue that the Federal government doesn't delegate a lot of things to the States - see Medicaid - but that's not the same thing as the States doing something only because they can do it.

We really need to step back and take a hard look at what the federal government is constitutionally allowed to stick their fingers in and what they do. One way or another, that discrepancy ought to get ironed out

I've never understood why the number of congressmen per state wasn't purely based on population. Why does land get voting rights?

It's not about land as I understand it but about securing equal representation in the Senate between the republic's constituent states. The House reflects the population, the Senate secures the rights of the smaller states in the face of overwhelming population elsewhere.

Compromise. When the Constitution was drawn up, there was already a large disagreement about this. The North was more densely populated than the South. It would have meant that North would have dictated all the policies.

The South had an agricultural industry that was reliant (at least they believed it was reliant) on the horrid practice of slavery.

The Civil War settled the issue of slavery, and probably was the best time to try and rebalance the Senate. So now we’re stuck, and why would any of these less populated states give up power?

Looking back, from a systems perspective (not necessarily the view taken at the time), the Senate was created to represent the structure of government. They were supposed to be the old party hacks from each state that were sent to DC to help architect and fix the architecture of the federal government. Their interest was in the system, in the political structure and operation of the government, not making the folks back home happy with their votes. They were more like judges. Our own little homegrown aristocracy.

Looked at it that way, it makes sense that each state should have an equal number of representatives. After all, the federal system was supposedly created and maintained by the states. But after the Civil War flipped that around, and the 17th amendment called for the direct election of senators, they were really mis-configured for the job. As many people point out, now they're just direct representatives of the people, only with a mission created from the old ways of doing things. So why are they elected like this again?

As you say, we're stuck with it now. The only way to answer the criticism of giving states equal senators is to use an argument that is no longer valid. [Insert long discussion here about how nobody wanted a democracy in the U.S. It was never a goal and it was feared by the founders]

> Insert long discussion here about how nobody wanted a democracy in the U.S. It was never a goal and it was feared by the founders

I wouldn’t say exactly they didn’t want it... but they definitely feared it. The presidency was also not directly elected, and now we’re dealing with that and the idiocy of the electoral college.

At least that one seems more feasible to fix, as the states themselves can decide how to allocate their electoral members.

I do wonder if the equal protections clause could be a mechanism to force a rebalancing of the constitutional senate allocation. I’m no lawyer, but it seems they they could be in conflict with each other.

...it is. The House of Representatives seats are based purely upon population which is determined by a census every 10 years. The Senate is redundant because of the 17th Amendment but its original purpose was to represent the individual State governments separately from the populace.

Originally the State governments directly chose their Senators. So you had a house for the States and a house for the People. The 17th Amendment brought about the situation we have today.

The argument I've heard is that politicians wouldn't bother campaigning or making improvements to any of the states with low population. It's political welfare.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_(politics) for some discussion of this issue.

I don't believe there's any better reason than wanting the small population states to sign the Constitution in the 1780s. And maybe also an attempt to protect the needs of people like farmers from being ignored, since they would live in low population states compared to urban professionals. Not saying it's a good idea.

It was definitely not created to protect the interests of farmers. The vast majority of the population worked in agriculture at that point, so they wouldn't have needed any special protection.

Individual states used to be more sovereign. It's similar to the structure of the European Parliament (where small countries have 10x as many representatives per capita as large countries), or the UN (where otherwise China and India would have 1/3 of the votes).

(I assume you're referring to the Senate and not the House, which does do somewhat population-based apportionment)

The two-assembly structure exists because it was a compromise to not give the densely-populated states all the power in the new Republic. Crucially, this sort of compromise was important because it helped the less-populated states get on board with the whole "federal government" concept without fearing that power over their own affairs would be continually swamped by places like New York. "Land" gets voting rights because those who were in charge of that land (the state legislators) wanted it in order to sign onto the project.

This is why I find the modern media complaints trying to do away with such structures very troubling. It may be more vestigial at this point, but the setup was supposed to emphasize a collection of states rather than mere administrative subdivisions of a faraway government. Frankly, if there would be any change to the state-based system for senators, it should come with a free ability for smaller states to secede as a group; because it would be going back on the deal.

Correct. However one of the key differences is that when the Republic was established, per the Constitution, States' Rights were a primary aspect of legislation. The federal government had very little power and very few laws compared to today. Most laws existed on a state-by-state basis. The USA of the late 1700s was really more like the EU than it is today.

And that's why New Hampshire needed senators. New Hampshire needed to ensure that it could still get the things it needed from the federal government (presumably money in most cases) to make New Hampshire a good place to live. That's why land has voting rights -- New Hampshire (using it as an example for all less-populated rural states) used to be a lot more sovereign.

Now things have changed. New Hampshire isn't just ensuring that it gets the resources it needs. Because most laws in the US are now enacted on a federal level, New Hampshire is deciding implicitly how /other/ states behave. And this is the problem, and is clearly against the intent of the Constitution ("any power not explicitly granted to the federal government will be left to the states").

So, the bicameral legislature as designed made sense. But in its current context, it's fundamentally broken. If we want to return it back to its original intent, then it's time to get back to a period of States' Rights.

“most laws in the US are now enacted on a federal level”

That’s simply not factually true.

Factually false but effectively true? I understand what's trying to be gotten at with the statement but it's not exactly laws per se. It's more a power dynamic but quantifying that is a bit tricky.

The original 13 states plus Vermont and Texas should have that option because it would be going back on the deal with those states when they voluntarily joined the country. The other states should not because they were created by act of Congress out of territory that was already part of the US. There was never any deal made with those states.

Because you don't want the land to take it's water rights and transportation links (among other things) and go home?

Here’s a thought: in a Federal Republic, perhaps most issues that are heavily affected by population imbalances shouldn’t fall under the scope of Federal legislation.

I think the complaint about the Senate having a different makeup than the House begs the question - why even have two houses in Congress? The original Constitution had State governments choose their Senators and the House was the "People's". The 17th Amendment changed that, so now we have the People choosing two different houses of Congress based on two different ways of dividing up the population, which leads to these complaints.

"half of the _US_ population" would be more accurate title.

"half of the _US_ _human_ population" would be an even more accurate title.

I would imply “human” when “states” are mentioned. My issue is I was expecting an article about world’s population (not much interested in US domestical problems).

Time to break up California and Texas into multiple states.

No kidding. And Texas.

Or even better combine some states. Loiusiana, Alabama, and Mississippi could be one state.

How is it that only three of the states are named?

There are diagrams. I guess nobody thought about accessibility.

50%: California, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas

20%: Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Washington

This is why states' rights are important.

America is not a homogeneous nation, nor should we be. Residents of Wyoming should not live in the same environment residents of New York do.

Through diversity comes greatness. The wisdom of the founders is amazing.

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