Federal taxes paid by California’s residents and businesses subsidize the budgets of the states who have made retaliatory gerrymandering efforts necessary. Spending money on Prop 50 is rational because California is on the verge of a durable situation of taxation without representation.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
Because they’re rich.
In the US, the rich always win anyway. Full stop.
If you believe otherwise, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve probably not been paying attention.
Under the current administration, as under all administrations, it’s the poor and middle class states that have the problem.
Well, now that taker states have figured out how to hack the system and bleed giver states while doing things such as neutering the EPA without facing electoral consequences, attitudes seem to be changing amongst people who previously were all right with subsidizing taker states on humanitarian grounds.
This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
You have it backwards. It was mostly the smaller, Northern states like Delaware that were opposed to proportional representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.
And that is part of the reason why the 10th amendment left many/most the functions the feds are currently performing to the states, and barred the feds from performing them.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
The differences in population weren’t that massive in the early years, though.
The voting population difference was massive. The entire reason for the 3/5ths compromise was because the slave states would have almost no house representation.
Still not that massive in relative terms
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_and_pre-Fed...
Virginia would had still been the most populous or at least second most populous state if only white people were counted.
Also there were plenty of small states in the Northeast with very small populations.
Adding up the 1780 numbers on that page, the numbers appear to be almost identical. But there's a catch: those numbers include enslaved people. who numbered at least 500,000 (see [1]).
* Free states: 1,390,067
* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302
> Still not that massive in relative terms
I don't know why you persist in saying this.
[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
Persist in what? My original was that population sizes between states were relatively more even back then than now.
1780 is probably not the best year, though. e.g. New York was still a slave state. Of course the gap only grew bigger over time
With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.
The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
How robust would the reapportioned seats be against extreme political gerrymanders? It seems like packing and cracking would still work.
Not all of us! I favor secession.