petitions for the Electoral College to \u201csave\u201d us from Trump<\/a>:<\/p>\nShould the total population of each state be the basis for determining how many congressional districts, and electoral votes, each state gets?<\/p>\n
Or should it be the number of voters, or voting-eligible persons?<\/p>\n
In 2016, that\u2019s an issue due to states where there are disproportionately many non-citizens, though the Supreme Court rejected claims of unfairness about current practice \u2013 not because they opined on the fairness of the current practice, but because they read the constitution as requiring the established practice. \u00a0(Or at least it seems to me they did, though I haven\u2019t looked it up; maybe they implicitly opined by refusing to take the case.) \u00a0One could likewise make a claim that in some states there are disproportionately many, and in others disproportionately fewer children, and that this unfairly impacts the voting strength of adult voters in Congress.<\/p>\n
In 1787, the dispute was about the status of slaves.\u00a0 Everyone takes the 3\/5ths compromise as signaling that slaves were considered only 3\/5ths human, though, of course, the dispute was really centered around how many congressional districts, and, thus, how much voting power the slave states should have.\u00a0 And, after all, slave owners never claimed that the Africans they enslaved weren\u2019t human, but that they were not fully mentally competent and thus needed to be under the custody of a white person \u2013 that is, when they cared to rationalize their system in any way other than the notion that people have owned other people for generations, and that it\u2019s just the way life is, in the same way as countries have territorial wars of conquest and take other countries\u2019 land, and it\u2019s just your bad luck to be the victim rather than victor.<\/p>\n
So:\u00a0 imagine you\u2019re a Founding Father, engaged in this debate.\u00a0 You know you can\u2019t eliminate slavery.\u00a0 What general principles do you establish for how districts are established?<\/p>\n
Or \u2013 and this is a bigger leap, should the Founders have agreed from the start on two countries, that is, that the interests of slave and free states were irreconciliable?<\/p>\n
And, heck, if we\u2019re throwing around hypotheticals, should the U.S. have given itself a better name than just \u201cUnited States\u201d?\u00a0 I mean, Canada was a bunch of colonists in different provinces, and they got a proper name for the colony, then country, as a whole. \u00a0Instead, we\u2019ve got the nationality label \u201cAmerican,\u201d and people who whine that this label doesn\u2019t belong to us in the United States, because everyone from North and South America is an \u201cAmerican.\u201d \u00a0(Germans sometimes\u00a0use the term \u201cU.S.-American\u201d and my German is nowhere near good enough to know whether they perceive of this as clumsy or fairly normal-sounding. \u00a0I mean, it\u2019s German, after all, and my favorite German word is \u201chandschuhe\u201d = mitten, which literally translates as \u201chand-shoe\u201d!)<\/p>\n
And, incidentally, if we\u2019re talking about crummy names for nationalities, when did the U.K. become \u201cthe U.K.\u201d \u2013 not in its formal name, but in common usage?\u00a0 Or has it always been such (or is it not even now \u201cthe U.K.\u201d in common usage) and I just never paid much attention until I started working on international topics?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image: \u00a0public domain<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I\u2019m thinking about constitutional subjects, and yet do not want to address the stupidity of petitions for the Electoral College to \u201csave\u201d us from Trump: Should the total population of each state be the basis for determining how many congressional districts, and electoral votes, each state gets? Or should it be the number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":5671,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[451],"class_list":["post-5681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-constitution"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n