Nothing Is Enough

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Clarissa

October 17, 2018

I hate seeing the articles which point out that fewer people live in flyover states than in places like California and Co, so these states shouldn’t have as many Congress representatives as they do now.

I live in the most abandoned state in the country. More people leave Illinois than any other state. And I’m thinking, God, these folks have accumulated all of the economic, technological, and ideological power. They have won every culture war. They have done everything to make our states unlivable. And it’s still not enough. They still feel slighted. Now they want to take away one last thing that won’t even out the score in conditions of the erosion of the nation-state, which is their number one cause.

Nothing is enough for them. They won’t rest until they drag everybody into their loony-tunes fluid paradise.

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14 responses to “Nothing Is Enough”

Good Enough Professor

October 17, 2018

Illinois is seeing some of the steepest population declines in the country, but it remains in the top ten of most populous states. If I’m thinking of the same maps you’re referencing, Illinois isn’t one of the states targeted because (a) big population and (b) two Democratic senators. Congressional representation is already allocated by population, so it’s the Senate that’s at issue in these maps, since every state gets two Senators regardless of how many people live in it, which gives your average citizen of Wyoming a louder voice in the senate than you and me and our entire neighborhoods put together. If electing Republican senators in Idaho, North Dakota, and Montana could solve the opioid crises of the Rust Belt and Appalachia, they would be solved by now.

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Z

October 17, 2018

Culture war? I’m losing. We have major erosion of bill of rights, major opening to ecological destruction, all this demonization of various Others, and from here it looks as though a majority likes it.

About the Senate and the House. House membership is calculated by population. But, they have managed to gerrymander the districts and close a lot of polling places.

Senate: the theory is 2 senators per state, because this is a federation and the states are semi-independent, so each one should have the same number of senators. HOWEVER: that was done not to protect the voices of low population states as much as to protect those of SLAVE states. Also so that certain decisions can be made by the elite Senate and not the rabble of the House (think England, house of Lords and of Commons). So on balance, the Senate may not really exist to protect and promote the voices of the underrepresented and the few.

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Dreidel

October 17, 2018

What a shame that Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. aren’t going to be given statehood anytime soon! Then the Democrats would have four more senators permanently in their party.

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1. Z
  
  October 17, 2018
  
  Which, I assume, is why they are left underrepresented.
  
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Demotrash

October 18, 2018

Wait until you hear all the people whining about how the Senate is unfair because “small rural states like Wyoming get the same number of senators as California.” Funnily enough Rhode Island, Vermont, and Texas are never mentioned in these conversations.

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1. Good Enough Professor
  
  October 18, 2018
  
  It’s not about land mass. Rhode Island has nearly twice the population of Wyoming and less population than Washington, DC, which get no representation in either house of Congress.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    October 18, 2018
    
    California and DC already have an outsized importance in our lives. I don’t think they need any more. If California has its way, I’ll be writing diversity statements even when applying for jobs in Wyoming or Nebraska. Which I’m not doing because there aren’t any. But still.
    
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    1. Z
      
      October 18, 2018
      
      The people actually from and actually living in Washington DC have NO representation. Saying they have outsized importance in our lives is ridiculous, ignorant and a–h—ish — they’re not even visible.
      
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      1. Shakti
        
        October 18, 2018
        
        Washington, D.C is actually majority black Granted that’s declining because of the skyrocketing cost of living in the city proper.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        October 18, 2018
        
        I just read an article about this yesterday, actually. The black residents might still work in DC but they all moved out to Baltimore suburbs because it’s so damn expensive.
        
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        Shakti
        
        October 18, 2018
        
        Oh, there are a ton of commuters. My cousin and her husband pay quite a bit of money to live in a Virginia suburb and within walking distance of a commuter train stop and they’re both well off. My second cousins’ families live in the suburbs as well and driving into the city is a nightmare.
        
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        Z
        
        October 19, 2018
        
        The rapidity of the decline is amazing
        
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2. Clarissa
  
  October 18, 2018
  
  Something tells me that they wouldn’t have an issue if voting in these states favored them. 🙂
  
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anon

October 18, 2018

As a Californian, I’m cool with proportional representation in the house and equal representation in the senate. Other revisions I’d like to see are, roughly in order of decreasing importance: campaign finance reform, better rules on gerrymandering, term limits for supreme court justices (despite how much I love RBG), removal of the electoral college (popular vote for president is okay if the senate is kept as-is), and a cap on the number of terms senators and representative can serve (career politicians are bad).

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