This just in: I am a citizen of the United States. I am a citizen of California. Which do you think is more important to me? (Hint, it’s not California)

If you jump into your local Way-Back machine and watch our forefathers constructing our Constitution, you will see a lot of effort went into protecting “states rights”. In my view this was because the smaller, less populous states, wanted to have an equal say in government.

The solution was the senate.

As we know, the Legislative branch of our government has 2 bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The number of people that represent each state in the House is based of population. If you have a state with a lot of people, your state has more representatives. The Senate representation has nothing to do with population and everything to do with land. If your land is a state, it gets 2 representatives. If its not a state, it gets zero.

What this means is that California, with a population of around 40 million has 2 senators, each representing about 20 million people. West Virginia also has 2 senators however, the state is basically empty so each senator represents about 900,000 people. The thing is, the 2 California senators have exactly the same amount of power in the senate as the 2 senators from West Virginia.

Not exactly democratic. So why not change this? Because if you do, the Republican Party will no longer be able to rule from its minority position.

You see, 50% of the Senate is currently representing about 56% of the population that live in Democrat states. The other 50% of the Senate is representing about 44% of the population that live in Red states. The Democrats vastly outnumber the Republicans but the Senate allows them to act like they represent half of the American public.

In short, if you are from a Blue, Democrat state, your voting power in the senate is less than 1 vote per person. If you are from a Red, Republican state, your voting power in the senate is more than 1 vote per person.

The result…we often see minority rule.

Combine this with Gerrymandering and the Electoral College and you will find weird, undemocratic things like only 1 Republican President in the last 30 years received the majority of votes from the American public.

This is why the relatively few Wackos in our country are making policy for the rest of us.

Which is why we can’t have nice things.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim