Tangential, but instead of making DC into a new state, why not just absorb it into Maryland? Virginia already absorbed the part of DC rhombus west of the Potomac.
National Democrats would also like two more Senate seats (and both DC and Maryland are predominantly Democratic, DC absurdly so) while national Republicans are happy enough with the status quo, giving DC no voting representation in Congress at all. So there's no strong momentum for movement on any side except DC's (who don't have the power to do anything about it by themselves).
>DC doesn't want to be part of Maryland (they like being independent and feel that Maryland's concerns are not theirs) and Maryland doesn't want DC (they feel it would move the centre of gravity of the state even further towards the DC suburbs, making it worse for the further-flung parts of the state).
Bremen and Hamburg both were Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire. More importantly, they were among the very few Free Cities that retained this status until and past the end of the HRE (1806). Being in the Hanseatic League helped establish their importance, but the League wasn't actually a major concern at that time anymore, and hadn't been for over a century, but they certainly played to that history (and e.g. added "Hansestadt" to their names, long after)
I think that's worth considering. It would get rid of a lot of the left/right gridlock at state levels. Cities would be mostly free to do as they wish without rural areas holding them back and rural areas would be free to do as they wish without cities holding them back. This would also greatly reduce the amount of BS that needs to get done at the federal level because a ton of that stuff is not interstate issues but an end run around the fact that the blue team and the red team can't do what they want at the state level so they try and get the feds to do it to the whole country.
And before anyone says "but money" I would like to remind them that freedom isn't free.
Every metro with population above median or average of existing US states should have the option of forming a new state. Seems to work for Berlin/Bremen/Hamburg in Germany, and various metros in other countries.
For the record, the popular vote percentages for the Democrats in the past 3 senate elections were: 53.0%, 58.2%, and 47.0%. That averages 52.7%, so gaining an extra two senate seats would still mean the Democrats were under-represented.
(I know that the purpose of the senate is not to represent each citizen equally, I just thought it was worth pointing out which parts of the country have the most grounds for complaint).
To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.
Isn't DC a low population region? Then why does one party not want them to be represented at all?
Rhode Island is a small state, it isn’t rural. Hawaii is a small state, above average population density. Small and large on an electoral basis refer to population size.
The same was true in the past: Alaska and Hawaii were admitted essentially as a two-for-one deal because Alaska was reliably Republican and Hawaii reliably Democrat. If both had been one or the other they might have had to wait a long time. And the arguments would have been facially plausible (but not real) here too: the importance of territorial contiguity, the low population of Alaska, the difficulties of establishing effective transportation links, whatever.
The number of people who are for (small-d) democratic advances regardless of whether they benefit their own party is (in my view depressingly) low.
Since then 37 more states have joined, almost all carved out of territory formerly owned by the federal government itself, settled largely by people from other states and immigrants under the direction of said federal government. They were never independently sovereign units yet we all live under the political bargains that were struck to reach an agreement with the original 13.
The system was not designed with this reality in mind, it was a pragmatic decision dressed up with the political theory of the time. If “protecting minority interests” were that important, there are much better systems designs that actually are tailored to fit the political realities of America in 2021.
By ensuring (by overrepresenting the same interests overrepresented in the House by a smaller margin, and in the electoral college by a margin in between that of the two Houses of Congress) that a particular minority will reliably be able to trample the interests of the opposing majority.
If that's the point of the Senate, those states should be sharing 1 congressional seat amongst multiple states to match their population
>Only about 1 in 6 of the 1.87 million civilian full-time federal employees live in the Washington, D.C. metro area, which includes Northern VA