Quote:
Originally Posted by stg58fal
Excuse me? Everyone gets two Senators, and pretty much anyone who goes to the District of Corruption from CA is liberal. How can they be UNDERrepresented? By looking at how the people of the PRK vote, on the county maps of the last few elections, they are probably OVERrepresented in that they control everything about that state. A couple of counties ruin the entire rest of the state and send clowns to CONgress that do even more damage.
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I'm going to ask you to look beyond your obvious disgust with liberals and use the brain power you've committed to other issues to see the mechanics at work. You're confusing federal and state representation. I ask your indulgence while I address the math, not the emotion of politics.
As you know, each state gets two Senators regardless of population. This means that in the Senate approximately 300,000 voters from Wyoming or Vermont have the same political power as about 12.5 million Texans or 18.5 million Californians. This makes everybody in those big state underrepresented. The Founding Fathers intended this so that big states would not run roughshod over the little ones. However, when the Founding Fathers created the bicameral system, the most populous state was about 12 times as populous as the least populous state. Now the most populous state is more than 50 times as populous as the least populous state. We've reached a point at which the small states wield a grossly disproportionate amount of power through the Senate.
Here's another idea to consider: the current arrangement cheats millions of conservative Californians out of representation in the Senate. There are more conservative voters in California than there are voters in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and Idaho. The conservative voters in these states have 10 senators to represent them. The conservative voters in California--again, numbering more than the voters in 5 states I named--get 0 senators to represent them. One philosophy says, "Oh well, they're living in the wrong place, I guess." Another philosophy says that lack of representation for millions of voters has to be addressed with decisive action. In this case, I think decisive action is called for.