Here’s One Problem Americans Can Easily Fix

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

Kevin McCarthy, the 55th and current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a notorious deficit hawk, represents a California district. This may surprise outsiders who associate California politics with progressivism, even downright hippie-dip utopianism. But California’s 20th Congressional District, covering most of the Central Valley, is gerrymandered to ensure conservative outcomes. It’s not only California’s most rigorously Republican district, it’s among the most conservative in America.

This matters because voters in McCarthy’s district might as well not vote for Senator or President. Because these offices are determined by statewide vote, in a state with a population approaching forty million, large population bases can distort electoral outcomes. And of course, there’s no larger population base in America than Los Angeles, a Democratic stronghold. Joe Biden won California by nearly thirty points in 2020, and California’s Senatorial delegation has been unbrokenly Democratic since 1993.

Every few years, national news media, driven by bureaus headquartered mostly in Manhattan and Los Angeles, repeat the perennial whine about how America’s Senate, and the Electoral College because of it, are innately unfair. And they’re not wrong. The system, unchanged since 1788 and specifically immune from amendment under the Constitution, provides strong protections for sparsely populated rural states, in a nation where the economy is increasingly dense, centralized, and urban.

California, with nearly forty million people, has the same Senate numbers as Wyoming, with under 600,000. Superficially, this seems unfair. But as I’ve written before, the Senate is the only place in American politics where large urban states have to meet small rural states as equals. The Framers of the Constitution intended this deliberately. But they couldn’t have anticipated how that intent would unfold.

In America’s first decennial census, in 1790, New York, the nation’s most populous city, had a population of approximately 33,000. That’s smaller than the Nebraska town where I now live, a town so fiddling that most Americans haven’t heard of it. The megalopolises which have emerged around Manhattan and Los Angeles are only possible because of steel-frame building technology and internal combustion engines, which Washington and Hamilton might’ve dismissed as science fiction.

Besides the infrastructure, the economic concentration driving demographic concentration is entirely new. The Great Migration, that brought millions of Southern rural African Americans into Northern cities for industrial jobs, surrendered to the technology boom that created millions of jobs (but far fewer houses) in California’s Silicon Valley. Today’s wildly unequal population distribution simply wasn’t conceivable when fifty-five White men in powdered wigs and knee breeches convened in Philadelphia.

But although the Constitution forbids amending the Senate, there’s another redress, one which doesn’t involve changing the Constitution in today’s hostile political atmosphere. Article IV, Section 3, makes dividing existing states a matter of state legislation. If Californians feel they’re underrepresented in the Senate, California could subdivide into four equally populous states, and all four would still be among the ten most populous in America.

America’s existing states are beholden to state lines written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although four states were admitted in the 20th century—Oklahoma, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii—all four are circumscribed by existing state and national boundaries, and the natural boundaries created by shorelines. California’s state lines were drawn in 1853. 180 years later, they have no relationship with the existing population distribution.

Inland districts, like Kevin McCarthy’s 20th Congressional District, are militantly reactionary, in part, because they believe state and federal governments ignore their local needs, favoring coastal cities. Again, they’re not wrong. As Sarah Smarsh writes, the federal government boosted America’s rural inland after the Civil War. But since World War I, it has largely dropped rural concerns, favoring cities until the 1960s, then actively subsidizing America’s suburbs into the present.

Disaggregating existing large states won’t solve every problem. To cite just one, the State of Jefferson movement, active in Northern California and southern Oregon, is dominated by a weird streak of cowboy libertarianism. That region could elect Senators with strange, Lauren Boebert-like beliefs which would need reined in. Considering that small states have already elected loose cannons like Tommy Tuberville and Mike Crapo, power devolution isn’t a magic panacea.

But then, large states elected Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, so… yeah. A republic will always elect legislators as wacky as the voters electing them. If we can eliminate the unfairness caused by tenaciously holding onto state lines drawn in the covered wagon era, maybe we can begin the process of weeding weirdos from the congressional garden. No guarantees, but maybe.