People, States, and Politics
Let’s make crystal-clear the vast differences in population across our big country of 300 million people.
We will get out 300 wooden cubes, each representing about a million people, and lay them out on the floor, where the map of the U.S. is already outlined.
Squatting in the cold Atlantic, we begin near home, stacking six blocks somewhere along the Mass. Turnpike (we have a population of about six million). Turning north, we lay down one block each for New Hampshire and Maine.
We get up, walk around the top of Maine, and sit on Lake Erie. There we fill in Vermont (1), New York (carefully building a tower of 19 blocks), Pennsylvania (12), Ohio (11), and Michigan (10).
Leaning out, we place blocks on Indiana (6) and Illinois (13).
Crawling west to the chilly waters of Lake Superior, we set up Wisconsin and Minnesota (5 each). Stretching, we can just reach North Dakota (1).
So far we’ve used only 91 blocks — still 209 to go! Most Americans live elsewhere.
To get more done faster, we step west across Canada and stand in the powerful surf of the Pacific. It’s a challenge to stack up 36 blocks on California without them toppling over. Amazing how many Californians there are!
Jumping from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, we create of tower of 23 blocks on Texas, take care of Mississippi (3) and Alabama (5), move on to Georgia (10). Relaxing in warm coastal waters, we put 18 blocks on Florida.
We’ve now used almost two-thirds of our blocks and haven’t even needed to set foot on U.S. land.
We stop now for lack of time (and patience), but we’ve built a fairly good model of the population of our country.
It’s clear at a glance that the four states with far greater numbers of people are California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
No wonder they have so much political clout. Whereas Massachusetts has 10 U.S. Representatives, California has a whopping 53, Texas 32, New York 29, and Florida 25.
But our Founding Fathers devised a radical solution to give power to small-population states. The Constitution specifies exactly two senators for each state, regardless of how many people live there.
In Massachusetts, we have as much voting power in the Senate as California, with its far greater population. California currently has two Democratic senators representing 36 million people, while Kennedy and Kerry represent only 6 million.
Though fewer than half a million live in Wyoming, it has two (Republican) senators. A Republican stronghold, Wyoming voted two-to-one for McCain/Palin last month.
When it comes to legislation needed to take action on urgent matters—such as global warming, the economic meltdown, and the health care crisis, to name just three—those
Wyoming voters who were two-to-one against Obama will inevitably play some role (through their senators) in legislation affecting the whole country’s three hundred million people.
U.S. actions profoundly affect the rest of the world, and thus those Wyoming senators — representing only half a million people — have an undue influence over the global population of almost seven thousand million people (that is, seven billion).
I mention Wyoming because it happens to be the smallest state by population. But many other states with fairly small populations—through their pair of senators— play an outsized role in the health of our country and planet.
Take Oklahoma. With a population under 4 million, it would get four blocks.
Two-thirds of Oklahomans voted against Obama last month, and Republican Senator Inhofe easily won reelection with almost 60 percent of the vote. He’s the senator who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” while chairing the Senate environmental committee. Though the committee is now led by a Democrat, Inhofe as the ranking Republican still can have some effect.
The number of Democrats in the Senate will increase in January, but Republicans—when unified—can mount filibusters, delaying action on any bill they wish.
To avoid filibusters, Senate Democrats will of necessity compromise with some Republicans on certain details even at the subcommittee stage. (Democrats with differing priorities have to compromise with each other too.)
It will be interesting to assess Senate votes by state in 2009 and compare them to the views of the American population as a whole.
Fortunately, our new President was elected in many states with good margins. We hope that fact will influence many senators when they vote on legislation that Obama makes top priority.
