The United States of America: Born Illegitimate

Making the District of Columbia a state would be "an act of historical vandalism as grotesque as those committed by Jacobin mobs roaming our streets,”
--Senator Tom Cotton, R-OK

Born a bastard.
That was Mad Dog's original title for this post but he knew that would provoke a Twitter storm of distracting proportions, should the post ever see the light of day.

Cotton picking 

But if slavery is the original sin of this country, then our Unite States Senate is the original swindle. 

For Thomas Jefferson and the Southern gentry who formulated the plan for our national government the idea of land being something more than space, but something magical, a right, an inheritance, a source of wealth and power, a creature to be possessed and controlled, a giver of status--this idea of land was a given.

One thinks of that scene from "Gone With the Wind" where Scarlett O'Hara stands on a hill overlooking the cotton fields and pastures of Tara with her father who cries, "The land is the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for,  worth dying for because it's the only thing that lasts!"

Of course, this line came from a fierce advocate of the Ku Klux Klan, a vehement white supremacist, Margaret Mitchell. 

Vote by Population 2016

But the idea that our country is not simply the people who live here, who may possess unalienable rights--rights which are not transferable, not to be denied or taken away--but who do not necessarily possess land--the idea that our nation is not people but the land itself, its rivers, lakes, mountains, gold deposits, the oil beneath its firmament.

And so, when Jefferson and company struck a deal to allow for land to be represented in the US Senate, they were striking a deal for land owners to hold power that mere citizens did not.

It was this swindle which got written into the Constitution.

And this is how it played out:

"In 1889, Republicans knew they were in political trouble. Americans had turned against their conviction that the government must protect big business at all costs, and that any kind of regulation or protection for workers amounted to socialism. In 1884, for the first time since the Civil War, voters had elected a Democrat to the White House. Grover Cleveland promised to use the government to protect ordinary Americans, and to stop congressmen from catering to wealthy industrialists.

To regain control of the government, in 1888, Republicans pulled out all the stops. They developed a new system of campaign financing, hitting up rich businessmen for contributions, and got employers to warn workers that if they didn’t vote for the Republican candidate they would be fired. Nonetheless, Republican Benjamin Harrison lost the election by about 100,000 votes.

But he won in the Electoral College.

Republicans immediately set out to make sure no Democrat could ever win the White House again. They rushed South Dakota into the Union in 1889, along with North Dakota, Montana, and Washington—all Republican regions-- to pack the Senate and the Electoral College. The next year, they rushed in Wyoming and Idaho, too, boasting that they would dominate government for the foreseeable future."

--Heather Cox Richardson, historian

So South Dakota has the same number of United States Senators as California.

Power in these United States

California has has many citizens as the 18 least populous states combined and it has two US Senators.  So, from #31 Iowa to #50 Wyoming, all those states combined have fewer people than California. 

We could, of course, combine Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico into one state. And we would be looking at a state which shares a lot in terms of geography, water rights and needs, economy.  We could divide California, Texas, Florida and New York into two states each and then we would have some political entities which share common problems.

But we never will, of course, because there are too many people who have needs right now, whose jobs and incomes depend on maintaining the current system. Sort of like Jefferson and slavery: He knew it was wrong, but he was dependent on it for his comfort and income. He wasn't going to allow something called "fairness" wreck a good thing.