This is actually very relevant to your point. You think regional and identify politics are run amok now, you should have seen the mid 19th century and the expansion of the U.S. West. The sophisticates in the southern portion of the Dakota Territory were damned if they were gonna hitch their wagon to those uncircumcised Philistines in the north.
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I wonder what the practical result of Knoxyâs proposal would be. The number of representatives would increase to somewhere around 550, and obviously the great majority would be from urban, reasonably densely populated areas. So at first glance it seems like this would be a huge win for sanity, never mind how gerrymandered the pigfucker states are.
Of course, you still have the senate to contend with. DC statehood would help, I THINK PR statehood would, too, but Iâm not familiar with any polling on that matter. I think mainly voters need to start cleaning house in the senate and I propose we start with Allred.
Anyway, Knoxy, sounds good, make it happen.
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The GOP loves to tout the red/blue map, because it shows so much red. They seem to think that empty land votes.
So someone fixed it, and colored in the map only where people live. The impression it leaves is vastly different.
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This sounds like a good idea for increasing the peopleâs voice â until you do the thought experiment on how well the House would work with 9 or 10 thousand members.
This year, it passed 27 laws. One of which was authorizing a commemorative coin and two were renaming medical centers.
Actually, it was a matter of convenience. Split it all up based on lat/long and it will sort itself out. The original decision was made in the 1850âs to ensure a growing majority of non-slave states.
Yeah, I think the Wyoming Rule does an admirable job of sensibly expanding the peopleâs house. I also tinkered with a proposal to expand to 1776 reps. One could perhaps squintingly see their way to a house-expansion initiative wrapping itself in the flag just enough to beat back the knee jerk âNot more politicians!â crowd, but I donât know. It takes quite a squint.
Part of the justification of the 1930s law that capped the size of the House at 430 was architectural: theyâd need a bigger building. But today they can all just log in to Zoom, as we saw during the pandemic. This realizes Gingrichâs dream of spending as little time in DC as possible, but itâs not like those people are rooming together and making friends anymore anyway.
I agree. And it preserves the originally intended equity of âpersonal interestâ. It dilutes one of the original protections against a tyranny of the majority â the two-senator rule â but the divide today is much more urban/rural than geographical, so that may be fine. There are also very strong arguments in The Federalist Papers for having a âFederal Cityâ that is not its own member State (of the Federal Govt), so I would be wary of unintended consequences if DC were to be elevated to statehood status. Of course, the anti-federalists were adamantly opposed to the Federal City â presciently preficting the Beltway bandit class in the 1780s.
Still more red than blue. There is how the electoral college mapped out in 2016. Should be even more red in 2024.
Not in the Dakotas. The territory wasnât formed until 1861, and wasnât split until after the Civil War. The two regions took on very different social and economical personalities and werenât admitted as states until 1889, long after the free/slave state debate.
Howâd it map in 2020?
You really want another whingeing conspiracy post about stollen elections?
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You seem to know a lot about the Dakotas. More than, say, everyone else in the country.
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We would need a cemetery map for that.
Perhaps as much as the average person outside the Dakotas anyway. The history of the West has always been something that interested me. Itâs true that the Civil War was as much, or more, about the West as it was about North vs South. It was in the West that the question of slavery finally came to a head and had to be answered once and for all.
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The territory was split during the push for statehood. It came to a head when what would be North Dakota moved the capital to Bismarck, and the wilder southerners objected.
We stayed in Bismark during a drive from Montana to Minnesota earlier this year. Weâre checking in at the hotel, and the guy asks us if weâd like vouchers for the lounge. He could tell from our questioning looks that we were unsure, and he said âItâs North Dakota. We drink and we gamble. Itâs what we do.â And thatâs the sophisticated half of the pair.
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The plan was put in place by Congress b the mid-1850s.
Funny, the southerners claim it was the northerners who were wild and uncivilized.
AgainâŚthe Dakota Territory didnât even exist until 1861 and they werenât split until well after the Civil War. The split had nothing to do with free vs slave states. Every state was a free state by 1889, split or not.