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Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

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Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#71

Post by belltaco »

knubie wrote: post #63
dane-pgp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other party doesn't want people having representation at all. For the record, the popular vote percentages for the Democrats in the past 3 senate elections were: 53.0%, 58.2%, and 47.0%. That averages 52.7%, so gaining an extra two senate seats would still mean the Democrats were under-represented. (I know that the purpose of the senate is not to represent each citizen equally, I just thought it was worth poi…

Most of the people living in DC work for the federal government either directly or indirectly. That represents a huge conflict of interest, and was the reason DC was created in the first place. No one lived in DC before it was created, so the people that have put down roots there did so knowing they wouldn't have representation in the federal government.

Not true, most of the federal workers living in the VA and MD suburbs.

>Only about 1 in 6 of the 1.87 million civilian full-time federal employees live in the Washington, D.C. metro area, which includes Northern VA

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#72

Post by Turing_Machine »

jnwatson wrote: post #3

Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution: “The legislature, in cooperation with the properly constituted authority of any adjoining state, is empowered to change, alter, and redefine the state boundaries, such change, alteration and redefinition to become effective only upon approval of the Congress of the United States.” Essentially they’d need approval from WV, MD, and an act of Congress. Highly unlikely. This issu…

I don't know that I'd say highly unlikely. That kind of thing has happened several times. Unusual, yes, but not wildly so.

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#73

Post by belltaco »

dbcurtis wrote: post #54
dane-pgp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other party doesn't want people having representation at all. For the record, the popular vote percentages for the Democrats in the past 3 senate elections were: 53.0%, 58.2%, and 47.0%. That averages 52.7%, so gaining an extra two senate seats would still mean the Democrats were under-represented. (I know that the purpose of the senate is not to represent each citizen equally, I just thought it was worth poi…

The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests. To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.

>The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests.

Isn't DC a low population region? Then why does one party not want them to be represented at all?

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#74

Post by pmyteh »

dbcurtis wrote: post #54
dane-pgp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other party doesn't want people having representation at all. For the record, the popular vote percentages for the Democrats in the past 3 senate elections were: 53.0%, 58.2%, and 47.0%. That averages 52.7%, so gaining an extra two senate seats would still mean the Democrats were under-represented. (I know that the purpose of the senate is not to represent each citizen equally, I just thought it was worth poi…

The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests. To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.

I mean, it isn't? If DC voted Republican then they'd be totally in favour of making it a state. It's not a secret that is the reason why DC statehood has no traction in Congress. You can make a case for retrocession, but the other arguments are understood by everyone to be a fig leaf.

The same was true in the past: Alaska and Hawaii were admitted essentially as a two-for-one deal because Alaska was reliably Republican and Hawaii reliably Democrat. If both had been one or the other they might have had to wait a long time. And the arguments would have been facially plausible (but not real) here too: the importance of territorial contiguity, the low population of Alaska, the difficulties of establishing effective transportation links, whatever.

The number of people who are for (small-d) democratic advances regardless of whether they benefit their own party is (in my view depressingly) low.

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#75

Post by rplst8 »

pmyteh wrote: post #31
rscoots wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By these arguments nearly every sizable city in the country should be its own state. >DC doesn't want to be part of Maryland (they like being independent and feel that Maryland's concerns are not theirs) and Maryland doesn't want DC (they feel it would move the centre of gravity of the state even further towards the DC suburbs, making it worse for the further-flung parts of the state).

I mean, maybe? Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin are Länder (the German equivalent of states). You could certainly make an argument for, say, NYC being its own state; it'd be bigger than Delaware. But a lot of these things are historical accidents: West Virginia only exists because of the Civil War, California would certainly not be one state if founded now, while DC isn't a state at all. And given that the boundaries of t…

Isn't Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin's "statehood" because of their former membership in the Hanseatic League?

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#76

Post by Imnimo »

nickff wrote: post #43
taylorfinley wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population of California: 39,656,838* Population of North + South Dakota: 1,645,198* Persons per senator in California: 19,828,419 Persons per senator in the Dakotas: 411,300 Getting highly-overrepresented people to give up their overrepresentation is a hard ask. *latest US Census figures

It's not over-representation, as the senate was never supposed to represent citizens, it was supposed to represent the states. At the time of the declaration of independence, there were some states much larger than others; Virginia had a population of ~747k, and Delaware was at ~59k.

Okay, but the division of the Dakota Territory into two states was done, at least in part, to game the system and secure more seats for the 1870s Republican party. It's not just a matter of "well, there turned out to be two states, and so they just happen to get two sets of representatives and senators" - the causal arrow points in the other direction.

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#77

Post by rplst8 »

belltaco wrote: post #73
dbcurtis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests. To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.

>The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests. Isn't DC a low population region? Then why does one party not want them to be represented at all?

DC has about 700,000 residents and a population density on par with Chicago.

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#78

Post by detaro »

rplst8 wrote: post #75
pmyteh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, maybe? Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin are Länder (the German equivalent of states). You could certainly make an argument for, say, NYC being its own state; it'd be bigger than Delaware. But a lot of these things are historical accidents: West Virginia only exists because of the Civil War, California would certainly not be one state if founded now, while DC isn't a state at all. And given that the boundaries of t…

Isn't Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin's "statehood" because of their former membership in the Hanseatic League?

Berlin is a state because (esp West-)Berlin kind of had to be one in the restructuring after WW2.

Bremen and Hamburg both were Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire. More importantly, they were among the very few Free Cities that retained this status until and past the end of the HRE (1806). Being in the Hanseatic League helped establish their importance, but the League wasn't actually a major concern at that time anymore, and hadn't been for over a century, but they certainly played to that history (and e.g. added "Hansestadt" to their names, long after)

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#79

Post by rplst8 »

fnimick wrote: post #45
ssully wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty common in a lot of blue states. It's been a thing in Illinois for years, and it's been getting louder for the last year and a half. The gist is the rural area's feel underrepresented compared to the metropolitan area's. So in Illinois case, the rural area's feel like the state puts more focus on Chicago.

Why shouldn't the state put more focus on Chicago? The rural areas are a net drain on state finances and are kept afloat by the "liberal hellhole" that they hate.

I don't know... maybe because the rural areas grow their food?

Furthermore, I'm not sure your conjecture is even correct. Subsistence farming supported people for centuries before our megalopolises existed.

Re: Western Maryland asks West Virginia to 'consider adding us' to their state

#80

Post by clarents »

jnwatson wrote: post #3

Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution: “The legislature, in cooperation with the properly constituted authority of any adjoining state, is empowered to change, alter, and redefine the state boundaries, such change, alteration and redefinition to become effective only upon approval of the Congress of the United States.” Essentially they’d need approval from WV, MD, and an act of Congress. Highly unlikely. This issu…

Given the geometries of modern gerrymandered borders, maybe it's not so bad to rely on borders drawn a long time ago.
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