Brilliant review by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker of Robert Dahl’s new book, “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?”:
Even if it were true that the condition of being a citizen of a state with a small population entails such grievous disadvantages that, to correct for them, the very votes of such citizens must be assigned a greater weight than the votes of other Americans, how much is enough? Are the special needs of people who live in small states — people who can, after all, escape their condition by moving somewhere else — greater than the special needs of people who are short, or people who are disabled, or (more to the point of American history) people who are black? Here’s a little thought experiment, inspired by Dahl’s reflections. Imagine, if you can, that African-Americans were represented “fairly” in the Senate. They would then have twelve senators instead of, at present, zero, since black folk make up twelve per cent of the population. Now imagine that the descendants of slaves were afforded the compensatory treatment to which the Constitution entitles the residents of small states. Suppose, in other words, that African-Americans had as many senators to represent them as the Constitution allots to the twelve per cent of Americans who live in the least populous states. There would be forty-four black senators. How’s that for affirmative action?
I had always considered it obvious that the way to deal with the European Union’s constitutional problems of different sized states was a bicameral legislature, but this has caused me to reconsider. Of course, I certainly don’t expect the US Senate to allocate seats differently in my lifetime (though I could imagine California splitting into 3 states to get 4 more Senators), so I’m much more focused on much more essential (and, interestingly, all non-partisan) issues of political infrastructure:
- We need to bring voting machine technology into the 21st century so that the person you think you voted for actually gets your vote (more on this soon).
- Move redistricting out of legislatures and into independent state agencies to eliminate gerrymandering and create some actual competitiveness in Congressional elections (as Arizona has done).
- Pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the possibility of faithless electors (i.e., make the electoral college a purely statistical function of causing votes to be taken by the state and representing the number of representatives rather than by percentage of people). And no, I’m not happy with how much more the Presidential vote of a Wyoming citizen will count then mine, but it’s better than the current situation, in which as random political hack chosen as an elector might throw the whole election.