CALIFORNIA SENATORS UPDATE

But, look, when conservative lawyers first argued that the Affordable Care Act violated the Commerce Clause, that seemed unthinkable, too.

This seems like a showstopper, and some scholars say it’s “unthinkable” that the one-state, two-senators rule can ever be changed. There’s even a provision in the Constitution that says this rule cannot be amended.” Indeed, Article V, in describing the amendment process, stipulates that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” The obvious reply is, “This is impossible! The Constitution plainly says that each state gets two senators. population but are still entitled to one senator each. The total is more than 100 because 10 of the smallest states have much less than 0.5/100 of the U.S. In the new allocation, the total number of senators would be 110. This apportionment shows how out of whack the current Senate has become. Using 2017 census estimates as a proxy for the official one coming in 2020, the Rule of One Hundred yields the following outcome: 26 states get only one senator (having about 1/100 of the population or less), 12 states stay at two, eight states gain one or two, and the four biggest states gain more than two: California gets 12 total, Texas gets nine, and Florida and New York get six each.

CALIFORNIA SENATORS UPDATE

Update the apportionment every decade according to the official census. Next, allocate senators to each state according to their share of the total 2/100 equals two senators, 3/100 equals three, etc. population, then divide by 100, since that’s the size of the current, more deliberative upper chamber. Let’s allocate one seat to each state automatically to preserve federalism, but apportion the rest based on population. There’s a better, more elegant, constitutional way out. The retired congressman John Dingell asserted here in The Atlantic that the Senate should simply be abolished. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School has suggested a national referendum to reform the Senate. Burt Neuborne of NYU has argued in The Wall Street Journalthat the best way forward is to break up large states into smaller ones. Pundits, professors, and policy makers have advanced various solutions. Today the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of population, is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California, and the disparities among the states are only increasing. In 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, “Sometime in the next century the United States is going to have to address the question of apportionment in the Senate.” Perhaps that time has come.

California senators