No, it wouldn't.

California and New York, even voting as a 100% block, don't represent a national majority. Heck, they aren't even the two largest states (#2 is Texas.)

It wouldn't be states representing a relatively small fraction of the population dictating control of the Senate while be overly powerful in choosing the President—but they'd still control the Senate, and hereby have a veto on federal law. So why would they secede?

> You would definitely see a mass succession.

(1) you mean secession, and

(2) if the low-population, mostly low-GDP states secede and thereby sacrifice their disproportionate control over be rest of the country, that they otherwise retain as long as the Senate exists with or without also having extra Presidential vote weighting (the small, high-GDP states have largely signed on to the national popular vote, so aren't likely to secede over it), whose loss is that?

I never know quite how to respond to this, because (as an outsider) the US electoral system has been designed in a way that is misrepresentative but for very clear reasons.

Part of the 'pitch' for the smaller states to join the union was that they would retain some power, mostly via the electoral college and senate (yes, they still get over-represented in the house, but less so). If the pitch was "you get nothing and we can bulldoze your state" Wyoming would have just said "no thanks, we'll stick to ourselves/join another union". If you think of states as entities worth protecting, assigning senators per state is quite reasonable.

Fast forward two hundred years and we have a different view of states, care more for the individuals inside them, and it indeed seems unfair that Wyoming and California both get 2 senators. What's the fix?

Er, even split into 6 states with two senators, California would be underrepresented compared to many other states.

Plus, the one thing that the Constitution expressly prohibits doing even by Constitutional amendment is changing the distribution of Senators to something where states would not have equal representation. (You can take away all the power of the Senate by Constitutional amendment, but you can't stop it from representing the states equally.)

It might be worth considering some kind of population density clause for when the number of constituents to representatives reaches a ridiculous value.

>You should instead get the congress to move over to a parliamentary system where all percentages of votes are counted instead of a plurality takes all.

This kind of a fix isn't pragmatic and will have a bigger disruption than breaking up one state. It's not like the geography is going to change because the lines are redrawn.

>And then you will not be breaking up my home state with these outsider ideas.

Have you considered whether other residents of the state share your view? Maybe the larger metropolitan areas are alright keeping around the sparser rural areas, but not the inverse?

It requires both State action and federal legislation. But the State action is clearly a required step.

> The only state that can split itself up is Texas, which was part of the agreement to bring the Republic of Texas into the union.

As your own link notes, that agreement specifically cited that it could only be done subject to the requirements of the Constitution, which would seem to mean that Texas can do it exactly as much as any other state can -- that is, with action of the State legislature and the federal Congress.

You know, this makes sense on the surface, but when you start to think about the details, the trickiness of the situation becomes apparent.

Ok, so we are going to allow seccession. Well, how big a group does it have to be to be allowed to secede? Can I secede as an individual, and make my house an independent nation? A neighborhood? A city? A county? A US State? Each level is going to have its own problems.

Ok, lets imagine we agree on the minimum size we will allow to secede. Let's say we are in the USA, and we decide a state can secede.

Does it require a simple majority? 2/3rds vote? 3/4ths? We have a constitution for a reason, to protect the minority from the majority. We have decided the majority can't do certain things (like establish a state religion, or ban the practice of minority religions), but do we allow a secession vote to be an end-run around that idea? Could a majority just vote to secede and create a new nation that doesn't have the protections for minority viewpoints?

How do we even do the vote? Do we vote as individuals, or do our state representatives make the decision?

Ok, suppose we set decide an individual votes, and you need 2/3rds to vote to secede. Well, who gets to vote? Let's imagine it is Texas voting to leave; does Joe, the guy who moved from California 3 weeks ago get to vote in the secession? What about the guy who moved there 3 years ago, but lives a quarter of the time in South Dakota? What about people who own houses in Texas but live somewhere else?

I think a big part of this comes down to the fact that once you are a single nation, there is no longer a clear definition of who would have standing to secede. I don't need to request permission to move to a different state in the United States, I just do it. The entity that can make the decision to break apart is only the entire country; if Texas wants to secede, it would have to be as a decision the entire country makes together, since that is the unit of sovereignty that exists.

There's no provision forbidding secession either, so they technically very much can. All that's not forbidden is allowed.

That's an interesting point. If five new states are created, do they have to petition the United States to become part of the Union?

>> Assign twelve senators to what is now California.

The other states will likely object to this, as it will be a reduction in their own voting power in the Senate. Aside from the "joining the Union" part though, I don't think they have any say in it.

Which is exactly what someone from a large state focusing only on their parochial interests would say. IIRC, the Senate being a place where all states are equal was a pretty important compromise when the Constitution was written.

Why has every one abandoned the idea of federalism? The whole point was that you could have your way and I could have mine; we only had to agree on the bare minimum tasks which absolutely had to be handled at the federal level.

If California wants socialized medicine and Texas does not, fine. Why can't they do it on the state level? I see no reason. This has the double benefit of allowing experimenting with different solutions before committing on a national scale.

This shouldn't be a "red state/blue state" issue. The only reason why it would be is if you are hellbent on ramming your positions down the throats of those with whom you disagree. What so many forget is that when the other side gets power, it will do the same to you. The Democrats, for instance, spent years centralizing federal authority in President Obama so he could abuse it and are now surprised when President Trump abuses it too. Maybe if we just invested less power in the executive, both sides would be happier.

The Article IV Sec. 4 guarantee cannot be interpret as even coherent if a state can secede; once a state is admitted to the union, he federal government is irrevocably obligated to preserve it as a subject and republican government; if a state government could escape this oversight by secession, the guarantee would be empty.

Further, there is ample historical evidence that the idea of reserving the right to secede when ratifying was raised by New York, and rejected because it was understood that it would be viewed by the Congress as an inconsistent condition attached to ratification and thereby nullify the ratificstion.

The Supreme Court has also ruled on the issue, in Texas v. White. So your concept of a right to secession is inconsistent with the text, historical evidence of intent and case law of the Constitution.

Alternatively, since secession would obviate the requirements Constitutionally binding on the State, it could only be done through Amendment, and, because it would remove it's equal representation in the Senate, not even by that means.

No. States actually have rights, not just individuals. There's a difference between a federation and a unitary state, and federation was considered a good idea. (Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)

> Laws are made by human beings, not land.

Nobody ever said that laws were made by land. But laws are made by states, not just by individuals.

> It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.

Only if you hold the mistaken idea that senators represent people rather than states. They don't, and they shouldn't.

Oh we must, must we? Why's that?

It's not an assumption, but rather an assertion, based on the observed outcomes of this system in action, and the strife it has caused (literally a civil war, and gridlock in the modern era).

The assumption here is that representing states themselves is in any way a desirable goal. Just because the founders did it, does not mean that it was a good idea. Being able to observe outcomes and change your course of action when the results are not good is the mature thing to do. We do not need fetishism of the actions of people who are 200 years in the grave, the founders themselves advised against such a thing and gave mechanisms for the constitution to be changed. Unfortunately these have atrophied along with the rest of the american federal system.

States have lots of other ways to express their will: they have unitary power within their territory, they have the ability to lobby congress and the people, and they can sue if they believe their powers have been unfairly abrogated. The senate as an institution representing states directly has been dead for over a century. It is now an institution representing the people in those states already - but a very undemocratic and unfair one.

> The solution is not to remove the Senate/House combination that balances the will of people and the will of States, but for larger states to break up into smaller ones.

Which is a tacit admission that you think equality of states is a necessary and worthwhile goal to make the Senate work properly. You just disagree about how to fix the current problems with the Senate.

Sure, dividing states up to a more equal population is one way to make it work. Probably not really possible when New York City alone has the population of what, 15 or so states combined? Do you suggest fracturing the city into 15 states? That would be incredibly awful to administer.

Very simply, the Senate is just a failed design and cannot be reasonably fixed without inflicting even more cumbersome forms of government just to try and preserve it for the sake of preserving it. It needs to just be eliminated.

Not that there is any plausible means to reach any of these goals of course, Congress would not approve of states dividing themselves up since that would disadvantage Republicans. Politicians will never vote to remove their own structural advantages even when it is the democratic thing to do.

I have little doubt they would, and in doing so start a war. After all, it's happened before, and many people are plainly agitating for it now.

It's the "my enhanced privilege or your destruction, choose one" argument, which is a clear demonstration of one way the system codifies structural inequality and is transparently anti democratic. In a similar way, corporate lobbying distorts democratic representation, and by all appearances, they overlap quite a bit, differentiated only by the industry sector and which Senator they support.

This is off-topic, but I don't think that the number of people who genuinely want to do what you describe is effectively none. I suspect that you're actually referring to people who want the government of the United States and the governments of the several states to actually obey the federal and state constitutions. They (and — full disclosure — I) would argue that things for which there's no constitutional provision (e.g. drug prohibition) simply shouldn't exist, or amendments should be passed to permit them.

Removing national government representation would be more antithetical to democracy than anything that's going on now. A better solution, in my opinion, would probably be new state redistricting. Voters are apathetic because they feel their votes don't count due to overwhelming concentrations of opposing viewpoints, which probably should be split off into their own states (Bay Area, New York City, so on).

Where did I argue for that? I'm arguing for the state one lives in having no impact on how much one's vote for president counts. I never said that the US should eliminate federalism and run everything directly out of DC.

> Under a popular vote we might as well disband congress.

I don't follow your logic here. Based on my reasoning, it would make sense to either make Senate representation proportional to population, or to disband the Senate altogether, but some representative legislative body obviously has to remain. The House of Representatives is just such a body.

I'm curious, what is the Constitutional argument against proportional representation within states? A complete proportional representation system that spans the states is obviously unconstitutional, but I'm not sure that a proportional representation system within states is. Can you expand on this?