I’ve been out of the loop for weeks, enjoying the peace that comes with a lack of daily confrontation, but with the conventions drawing near and election day beckoning am once again feeling the pull of Daily Kos. So just for fun I’m putting in my two cents—today’s thought on the best hope for democracy in America, long term.
I’m a dweller (though not a native) of Long Island, that vast, suburban (and populous) wilderness off the east coast of Manhattan. And I was thinking, there are a lot of people out here. Just today I checked that, by pulling out my 2008 World Almanac. If you leave out Brooklyn and Queens (and judging from how Brooklynites I know feel about LI, they’ll thank me for that), the combined population of Long Island’s two counties was 2,795,377 in 2006.
At ~2.8 million people, doesn’t Long Island deserve to be a state? Doesn’t it deserve 2 US Senators? Seventeen states have smaller (2006) populations than Long Island, and each one has two US Senators weighing in on health care, energy, the WAR, etc. OK, it’s really sixteen, but I’m including DC for the sake of argument and additional democratization potential.
Have a look over the fold:
2006 Population by State*
Wyoming, 515,004
DC, 581,530**
Vermont, 623,908
North Dakota, 635,867
Alaska, 670,053
South Dakota, 781,919
Montana, 944,632
Rhode Island, 1,067,610
Hawaii, 1,285,498
New Hampshire, 1,314,895
Maine, 1,321,574
Idaho, 1,466,465
Nebraska, 1,768,331
West Virginia, 1,818,470
New Mexico, 1,954,599
Nevada, 2,495,529
Utah, 2,550,063
LONG ISLAND (Nassau & Suffolk counties), 2,795,377
Arkansas, 2,810,872
*SOURCE: 2008 World Almanac. Figures are for 2006.
**(OK, DC is not a state, I know, but I leave it in to inspire or annoy, depending on your perspective)
U.S. Senators in Wyoming are responsible (on average) for 257,502 constituents. Each U.S. Senator in NY state (pop 19,306,183) is responsible (on average) for 9,653,092 constituents. Ever try reaching your senator on the phone? Or getting a letter back? Wyomingers have more than 37 times more representation than NYers. Seems a little, er, undemocratic to me.
I know, I know, the founders discussed the problem. They were worried that big states would dominate a system geared to population, or that small states would have outsize control if representation was counted by state. They compromised. But that, I would point out, was when the biggest state was Virginia (a whopping 538,000 in 1780) and the smallest was Delaware (45,400 in 1780)—(sorry, my almanac has no numbers for 1787)--but while the difference is large at 12 to 1, it doesn’t quite have the impact of, say, the 70 to 1 population ratio of California to Wyoming. (I don’t mean to pick on Wyoming, but it is the smallest state.) Anyway, that compromise was more than a little bit about protecting slavery in the south. Isn't it time to reconsider?
Even if we agree that people in big states aren’t getting proper representation in government--you know, the one that acts in our name around the globe--is it constitutionally possible to create a state within a state?
It has been done before: West Virginia was shorn from Virginia during the Civil War, but of course the union army was there. The Constitution says:
Section 3. New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states 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.
[US Constitution, Article IV, Section 3]
Sounds like a pretty difficult prospect, shearing off states from existing states. How would one get the state legislature to agree (Long Island, I might add, is rather wealthy, and NY is facing enormous deficits)? And what would Congress say? Just think of the precedent for California (population 36,457,459 in 2006), not to mention Texas, Florida, Illinois, and other populous states. It might lead to the Wholesale Balkanization of America. Or, then again, it might lead to the arcane concept of "Representation by Population." Sounds dangerous to me.
I’m not wedded to this idea (hence the "two cheers"), but I think it’s worth considering. Truthfully, I think the only hope is for Long Island to become sufficiently obnoxious that everybody involved sees the wisdom of letting a new state--or nation?--form, or, failing that, pushing the entire island out to sea. It's not such a crazy idea, that...