In another diary I talked about the idea of physically breaking up the US Government so that it is not all centered in Washington, DC. For completely different reasons, another idea that is worth thinking about is whether we should break up the most heavily populated US states. Several people here have noted that Congressional districts for Representatives now cover far more than the original 30,000 people that the Constitution set down as a maximum size, and the disparities in the population size of districts (despite periodic redrawing) translates to certain voters being underrepresented compared to others, in terms of the dilution of their votes.
But an even more flagrant case of vote dilution exists in the US Senate, where the population inequalities of the original 13 states have ballooned to a point where states like California and Texas should probably be thinking about secession (or the threat of it) to get back some of the clout that their population numbers warrant.
I looked at states with populations of over 6 million people. I came up with this number after trying a couple of others because with a cut-off of 6 million there are 16 states that contain roughly two thirds of the US population but only have one third of US Senate seats. Collectively the citizens of these states end up with what is in effect less than half a voice in the affairs of the nation at the Senatorial level.
Making Congressional districts for US House of Representatives members smaller seems like a fine idea from the standpoint of giving each voter a stronger voice in the selection of his or her Representative and increasing the likelihood that she or he might even be able to talk to the Representative in person without having to travel a long distance. It would also present big money corporate interests with a need to target more Representatives in order to subvert the influence of ordinary citizens, hopefully increasing the chance that fewer Representatives proportionately could be successfully targeted. With each Representative now covering over 20 times the number of citizens as envisioned by the authors of the Constitution, it seems like a conservative first step might be quadrupling the size of the House and reducing district size by the same factor.
In the case of the 16 most heavily populated states, the idea would be to break up each of the states into 2 or more new states based on some combination of population and geographical considerations. The goal would be to improve the current situation rather than try to get to strict equality of representation among the new states and the old ones on the first try. The only hard restrictions I would put on the division would be that no new state could be smaller than the smallest existing state, population-wise, and no new states should end up in pieces geographically, each should have a physically contiguous area.
The 16 states could be conservatively divided up as follows:
- Arizona (pop. 6 million) - 2 states
- California (pop. 36 million) - 4 states
- Florida (pop. 18 million) - 3 states
- Georgia (pop. 9 million) - 2 states
- Illinois (pop. 12 million) - 2 states
- Indiana (pop. 6 million) - 2 states
- Massachusetts (pop. 6 million) - 2 states
- Michigan (pop. 10 million) - 2 states
- New Jersey (pop. 8 million) - 2 states
- New York (pop. 19 million) - 3 states
- North Carolina (pop. 9 million) - 2 states
- Ohio (pop. 11 million) - 2 states
- Pennsylvania (pop. 12 million) - 2 states
- Tennessee (pop. 6 million) - 2 states
- Texas (pop. 23 million) - 3 states
- Virginia (pop. 7 million) - 2 states
The net gain would be 21 states or 42 new Senate seats, which would again significantly increase the amount of targeting that big moneyed interests would need to do and would hopefully force Senators from these states to be more responsive to the needs of their voters. (For instance, it's hard to see how Dianne Feinstein would be able to continue voting the way she has and fit into any of the new Californias without drawing a crowd of primary challengers on a chronic basis.)
There are limits to the efficacy of voting when one's vote is diluted in too large a pool, and the United States has long since gone past the point where most citizens feel like their votes actually matter. Bringing Senators closer to the people who elect them would increase their exposure to the voters and make it more difficult for bribery and legislation-buying by special interests to go unnoticed and unreported. Creating new, smaller states is one way to do this. In conjunction with increasing the size of the House of Representatives, this would bring elected officials down closer to the voter on all levels: Senate, House and state government itself, all of which would help to make democratic governance more realizable.