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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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