A Modest Proposal

Earlier this month, I was complaining that the 49 Senators who voted for hearing testimony during the Impeachment Trial actually represent 19 million more people than the 51 Senators who voted against testimony.  

By design, the Senate is supposed to equally represent the 50 American states, but not necessarily the American populace.  That's the House's job.  As you undoubtedly know, in the Senate, two Senators are assigned for each of the 50 states with the intention of democratically representing the will of the states (but not necessarily the people).

But the Founding Fathers couldn't have possibly foreseen the way the country would grow over the next two centuries.  Sure, the original 13 colonies did not all have equal populations, but there's no way the Founding Fathers could have anticipated a state like California, with a population of nearly 40 million people and representing almost 12% of the population.  Meanwhile and on the other hand, Wyoming at 579,000 people represents only 0.17% of the population.  Yet they're equally represented in the Senate.

Artist and urban planner Neil Freeman came up with the map above, which redraws the 50 states into territories of equal population.  In other words, each of the fictitious states above contains 2% of the American population, or about 6.5 million people each.  In this alignment, the vote of the Senate would more accurately represent the will of the people.

Freeman used a lot of wit in coming up with the state names and I appreciate his liberal use of native names for the land.  New York, L.A., Chicago and Atlanta would all be their own states going by their city names, but Boston would have to incorporate much of eastern New England to make up 6.5 million people and gets called "Casco."  Probably my favorite name is "Throgs Neck" for southwest Connecticut and the lowermost part of upstate New York.  I'm not sure of the etymology of the name "Firelands" for the Toledo/Cleveland area; I wonder if it's a reference to the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in the 60s.  Also, kudos for naming Alabama and adjacent parts of the deep south for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Best part - no separate North and South Dakota!

This of course will never happen and I'm not seriously proposing that it does.  But it is a good thought experiment that illustrates how profoundly undemocratic the U.S  Senate has become.