US states are not merely administrative divisions (like provinces in other nations) but are literal independently-governed states. Would you also propose re-drawing the borders of every EU nation every 30 years to reflect population movement?
This misunderstanding (provinces vs states) leads to much misunderstanding of the US federal system in general, the electoral college, role of the federal government, etc.
Yeah, I'm not sure how people would handle having half of their guns made illegal, having to learn new traffic laws, having you taxes completely change to the point where your state income taxes can go from 0% to 15%, your house becomes illegal because of different building regulations, public schools become charter schools, marijuana suddenly becomes illegal and you're a marijuana farmer, and this happens every 10 years or so. It would be chaos and require a fundamentally different kind of government organization.
Those would solely be rural problems, and we have a long tradition of support the urbanite and crush the ruralite whenever possible, so it would be politically consistent to do exactly that.
Eh, rural areas actually receive more in federal funding than they pay in taxes while paying less in taxes anyway due to decreased costs of living. Additionally, the US heavily subsidizes farming and funds infrastructure development for rural areas that are not available to more populated states and areas, such as gas, electric, and internet services. Economically speaking, rural areas also disproportionately benefit from projects like interstate highways, public water infrastructure, and bridges. Additionally, rural areas also consume, by far, the most in entitlement resources. And finally, rural areas are disproportionately represented in government, to the point that someone in a city like New York gets nearly half the amount of votes as someone in Montana, and also greatly suffering in the Senate which is not awarded on the basis of population. To sum up, rural areas pay no net taxes, receive economically beneficial subsidies and policies, and are given more political rights than people who live in urban areas. The idea that they're being screwed in a nation where they're the ones with all the control is absurd.
I think the key observation is this: everything you say is true, and yet many rural areas still have terrible economies.
It's hard to square that circle -- that rural areas are heavily subsidized but yet still economically depressed and under-served. Hence, comments like the one from VLM above.
Of course, it all boils down to economic fundamentals: cities and metro areas create a network effect that's difficult or impossible to compete with, no matter how well subsidized rural areas are.
The fact that rural areas suffer in spite of their greater representation and massive economic subsidies is a difficult pill for a person from a rural area to swallow. A "they are screwing us" mentality is a much more compelling narrative.
Then could it be that the subsidies are the only thing making rural life livable for many people? In other words, without the subsidy, the economy would be so depressed that people would move to cities.
They voted in an administration who wants to take away all of the subsidies for their poor population.
But they also voted in an administration who wants to massively subsidize their way of life at the expense of the rest of the tax base. Trump's basic economic plan is to use the carrot of access to America's rich suburban and urban markets as a mechanism for increasing domestic manufacturing (largely benefiting rural areas). So suburban and urban residents will be subsidizing artificial marketplaces that inflate the prices they themselves pay for goods.
His major governmental program will be a transportation infrastructure overhaul that will very likely disproportionately be paid for by suburban/rural areas and benefit rural areas.
And more importantly, those rural voters consistently vote for state governments that rob the tax bases of suburban and urban areas to pay for infrastructure that rural areas can't pay for on their own. Particularly for education and transportation infrastructure.
Basically, rural communities in the US are leeches who use their disproportionate access to political power in order to subsidize their unsustainable way of life on the dime of suburban and urban tax payers. And then have the audacity to claim the opposite.
Food comes from land worked worked using tractors designed and built by engineers in cities, in many cases harvesting crops geo-engineered by biologists and chemists in cities. And to the extent that one or more of these conditions isn't true, those are often premium products made possible by demand stemming from choosey consumers mostly living in... cities.
Also, as JoeAltmaier observed, very few people employed in rural areas are actually employed in agriculture. Furthermore, many of the subsidies that are provided to rural areas have nothing to do with -- and aren't necessary for -- agriculture.
Regarding water, rural areas contribute equally to water quality problems and in many cases make highly unsustainable use of water resources -- see California for example. Also, urban areas are often near plentiful fresh water sources anyways (see: Chicago).
The fantasy of farming as a self-sufficient profession disconnected from larger economic networks and holding a privileged place among society's disparate roles is one of the most insufferable aspects of rural culture imo.
I'd be happy to give up agricultural lands in the US in exchange for much less political obstruction and substantial tax cuts. Those new countries would still have to sell their agricultural products on the market, and the nearest urbanized areas would still be some of their largest customers.
Seems like a win-win, right? But, there are significant reasons why the rural areas would never accept that deal. They're addicted to the imbalance of power and urban subsidies.
Agriculture is a strategic asset. What if you were at war and you had no place to buy food? What if a natural disaster in another country will decrease the quantity of produced food - no country will sell you food if they risk hunger. Agriculture has to be sustained even if the cost of crops is higher than on international market. The production capacity has to be larger than actual internal needs. etc.
Are the subsidies over-rated? We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely); we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody); there are some agricultural supports (insurance programs?) but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming. What else?
First, I don't think so. Second, an over-rated subsidy is still a subsidy. So even if they are over-rated, that's still no proof of VLM's statement -- it's more just looking the gift horse in the mouth.
> We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely)
This isn't true everywhere.
> we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody)
Perhaps for the interstate system you could make this case. I'm not sure. Certainly there are cases where the interstate system inconvenience cities for the benefit of an extremely tiny but politically powerful rural district. The same happens with state highways.
But at the state level, rural roads are heavily subsidized. State highways are typically extremely important to rural areas, and those are mostly funded by urban and suburban tax bases.
> but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming
But farming is still very important to local economies in rural areas, even if it's no longer a major employer. Also, "some" is a bit of an understatement -- half a trillion in federal funds over half a decade. And that's just the main farm bill -- excluding other federal and state assistance programs.
> What else?
* Schools for sure. Most states heavily subsidize rural schools in their funding formulas. States and the federal gov't also subsidize rural schools through programs that are not even accounted for by these funding formulas -- e.g. tuition waivers and sometimes even salaries for teachers that teach in rural schools.
* Federal and state entitlement programs -- this one isn't even close to debatable.
* Political representation. Again, not even close to debatable. I consider this independently of all of the other indirect economic benefits that stem from the representation for a lot of reasons. To give one, the conservative social agenda disproportionately targets and complicates the lives of the non-white non-christians concentrated within cities.
Half a trillion over half a decade is 100 billion per year.
I make no claim to the accuracy of the original statistic, but if that is the case and the federal budget is 3.7 trillion [0] that is 2.7 percent of the budget.
I'm not being disingenuous -- the 2014 farm bill has a 5 year life time -- there'll be another big debate when it comes up for renewal in 2018.
The way that I described it is the same way that everyone on both sides of the isle describes it, because it's honest and accurate -- the bill has a five year life time and changes every five years. So if you want to talk about the cost of the farm bill, you talk about the total cost over five years.
> That works out to less than 100 million a year. To three significant digits that is 0% of the budget.
I think you missed some zeros.
(As an aside, Google has a cool feature where it will do math using words so that you don't screw up w/ the number of zeros: https://www.google.com/search?q=half+a+trillion+divided+by+f... -- I find this super helpful b/c I always drop or add zeros when there are so many)
We can argue back and forth about whether it amounts to a subsidy or something else. But if you just look at aggregate cash flows the largest flows from Washington out to rural areas are social security and government paid for medical care (medicare, medicaid, va, ppaca subsidies). The largest flows from the rural areas to Washington are the individual income tax and payroll taxes.
If those are significantly out of line with each other, then the net offset is going to swamp relatively piddly flows like the Connect America Fund or the Rural Utilities Service.
1) I don't think it just so happens that there are more old people in rural areas. It has to do with the respective characteristics of rural and non-rural areas rather than some historical accident.
2) I think even if you excluded those over 65 you would still find net flows as I've described them because rural areas have too many poor people and not enough rich people.
The larger point is that if you look at the United States as a country where we are all in this together, then it makes no difference if the people getting social security disproportionately live in Wyoming and the people making max social security contributions are disproportionately in NY. Individuals might be net contributors or recipients but if the relevant group is Americans than it all sums to zero. Most of the time that's the attitude most Americans adopt. But then when it comes time to try to justify the continued existence of the Senate and the Electoral College all of a sudden it's 1789 again and the States are independent sovereigns that merely turned over a handful of responsibilities to the Federal government. All of a sudden we aren't all Americans after all but instead Wyomingites that want to know why they should be ruled by New Yorkers and Californians.
> I think the key observation is this: everything you say is true, and yet many rural areas still have terrible economies.
Well yes, because the actual physical capital (machines, skilled labor, etc) is concentrated in cities. Increasingly so, in fact, as the economy has become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies.
> Well yes, because the actual physical capital (machines, skilled labor, etc) is concentrated in cities
Yes -- particularly with respect to skilled labor.
And that's largely a good thing for the working class. The alternative is local monopolies on the labor market. Highly skilled workers flock to areas where employers must compete with one another for a very good reason...
> Increasingly so, in fact, as the economy has become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies...
The urban population in the United States sky-rocketed over exactly the same period of time that Lynn and Longman romanticize.
Although I agree with a lot of their concrete policy proposals, I don't think that those policies would do anything to geographically decentralize economic activity.
>Although I agree with a lot of their concrete policy proposals, I don't think that those policies would do anything to geographically decentralize economic activity.
There's a difference between urban and megalopolis urban. Lots of jobs used to be in smaller, regional cities that had several employers available.
Yet there's more to life than mere balance of transfer payments and related economic policy.
How does your average Boston Clinton voting university academic look at, socially and culturally, someone like a Iowa Trump voting corn farmer? This is rhetorical, I know its with a level of disdain and hate and superiority complex like hasn't been seen since Jim Crow laws were a thing.
And note before discussion subject escape velocity was reached, the sub topic was we can't gerrymander rural people into crazy new rules every time the map is redrawn because that would be unfair to them and there is no higher social caste in the USA than the highly respected rural hillbilly so obviously that's a non starter. Back to that topic, I'm surprised there's any opposition at all to some kind of gerrymandering of state borders.
You are drawing a parallel between (a) legalized discrimination and violence against people based on color of their skin, and (b) not caring enough to give even larger handouts to people who claim to be fiercely proud of their independence.
A lot of the infrastructure in rural areas benefits cities, anyways. Having a good freeway between Chicago and Indianapolis helps those cities much more than the random cornfields the freeway happens to go through.
> Inner cities consistently have higher poverty rates than rural or suburban areas.
Citation needed. Urban areas consistently have more millionaires than rural areas.
As to poverty rates, in the US, they are definitely higher in rural areas. For a citation, from the abstract of [1]:
> Although a larger portion of the poor population resides in urban areas, poverty rates are higher and more persistent in rural areas, and research suggests poverty rates increase as rural areas become increasingly remote.
Basically, urban areas have more poor people, but really they have more of all classes of people. If you go to Figure 1, you'll even see that the rate of poverty in category 0 (most urban) is lower than the rate of poverty in all rural categories (4-9)[1].
Besides it being a bad idea anyway, nothing you describe is a) backed up by fact or b) necessarily ethical, if true.
Were the United States government to add a second sub-national set of borders for enumerated purposes such as infrastructure planning, etc., I expect a Constitutional amendment.
> Were the United States government to add a second sub-national set of borders for enumerated purposes such as infrastructure planning, etc., I expect a Constitutional amendment.
> we have a long tradition of support the urbanite and crush the ruralite whenever possible
er, what? the opposite is true. at the federal level we generally give more consideration to sub-urban and rural needs, which i agree with, because cities are social and economic bubbles.
In what sense do you mean this? Taken as a comparative statement, I find it a pretty dubious assertion.
Suburbs are sort of the ultimate bubble. They suffer from all of the typical things that make cities economic bubbles (a few major employers, geographic clustering based on income, ...), without any of the social or (typically but not always) racial diversity that's common in many cities. Oblig PG link is the one about schooling: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
The social bubble of rural areas is rather extreme -- white Christians are massively over-represented compared to the rest of the country and certainly compared to the rest of the world.
The economic bubble of rural areas tends to be far worse than the economic bubble of cities, IMO. Cities can certainly be economic bubbles, but at least those bubbles are typically made up of multiple fairly large sectors. Rural areas tend to have between one and three non-service industries -- farming, maybe some natural resource extraction, once in a while a small hospital, and in very rare cases a major white collar employer in a single sector. The echo chamber is real.
If we think in terms of politics, I never have a hard time finding conservatives talking politics in a bar in a city, but I've never once found a group of (US-style) liberals have a political conversation in a country bar. Cities might be as dark blue as the countryside is dark red, but the sheer size of cities means there are still far more conservatives in a given city than a typical rural area of similar size.
Basically, my impression is that cities are only bubbles in-so-far as they contain representation of almost every cross-section of society -- including the cross-sections that dominate rural areas! Calling that a bubble when compared to suburban and rural areas bubbles seems... dishonest.
Why would you believe that it would happen more frequently than it does now? All of those things would still be controlled by the residents, via government. The people it would affect the most would be those on the outskirts. But, those people are already affected by changing demographics via increasing population and urban expansion.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Congress was a confederation of sovereign states. When that failed, the sovereign states ceded their sovereignty to form a new Federal government with a constitution that supersedes state law. There was a war fought over this.
> Federal n. formed by a compact between political units that surrender their individual sovereignty to a central authority but retain limited residuary powers of government
A quibble: the Constitution says nothing about states not being able to exit. In fact, the 9th and 10th amendments say that powers not delegated to the Fed are reserved for the people and states...strongly suggesting that states _DO_ have a right of exit.
So let's not say "the right of states to BREAK their contract" and instead say "the right of states to EXIT their contract".
Federal statues also supersede state law, under the supremacy clause of the constitution.
That said, the states are still considered sovereign and residents of the several states live under a dual sovereignty of their state and the US government. Sometimes this leads to unpleasant consequences, such as being charged for the same crime in both state and federal courts because the Double Jeopardy clause of the constitution is considered to only prevent double prosecution under the same sovereignty.
Not well. The Feds have chosen not to enforce the laws in the states which have legalized marijuana. In fact a lot of marijuana laws have suffered from selective enforcement. Whether that continues with the incoming administration is a huge question.
I was listening to the Freakanomica podcast last week and it was discussing the power of the president and one commenter said that one of the presidents "real" powers is selecting which laws to enforce (via their Attorney General) there could be some huge battles coming up. Ironically if the Feds choose to enforce the federal laws in states which have legalized marijuana it would be contrary to the emphasis on states rights eschewed by most conservatives.
You opened a can of worms for me. As a non-native (but very comfortable) English speaker I wasn't quite sure about the pronunciation of "eschew" because I can't remember to have ever used it, or when I last heard it.
Native English speakers are in the same boat a lot of the time. My reading vocabulary is a strict superset of the words I know how to pronounce, and I suspect the same is true for everyone who speaks a language with a non-regular writing system.
The short version is that the federal government has the power to pass laws, but under federalism, the states are not obligated to help the federal government enforce those laws.
That's how sanctuary cities and the like are born -- by states simply refusing to assist the federal government in their endeavors.
State marijuana legalization is a slightly different animal. On the one hand, they're exercising their anti-commandeering power (by refusing to arrest marijuana users). On the other hand, they're directly defying the supremacy clause by passing laws contrary to the federal laws, which is a step beyond anti-commandeering.
It hasn't been tested in court, but a likely argument would be one based on Marbury v Madison, in which the relevant portion is that congress may not pass an unconstitutional law. American jurisprudence tells us that an unconstitutional law need not be enforced by any court, officer or person, as an unconstitutional law is not a law at all. The states, if challenged, could assert that a federal ban on marijuana is unconstitutional on its face as it flies in the face of both the 9th and 10th amendments (and possibly the 5th, with maybe a sprinkling of the 14th, depending).
Of course, that hasn't happened, and this is all conjecture, and it's a crapshoot as to whether or not it would work, but it's not impossible that the federal government hasn't exerted too much top down pressure on early marijuana states because they wouldn't want to chance the precedent of losing.
>The states, if challenged, could assert that a federal ban on marijuana is unconstitutional on its face as it flies in the face of both the 9th and 10th amendments (and possibly the 5th, with maybe a sprinkling of the 14th, depending).
This part sounds critical, but I don't quite follow. If you're willing to expand on that, I'd love to hear about it.
I'll try to put this as straightforwardly as possible, but it's a meandering topic at best. The gist of what I'm referring to is found here[1], so you should probably stop and read that first. Past that, the relevant things are two main doctrines, the first is the 9th[2] and 10th[3] amendments collectively, and the other is "enumerated powers[4]".
So, the general principle is that 1) Congress doesn't have the power to do anything that they are not expressly authorized to do by the constitution, or that is not obviously implied by an enumerated power (for example, if I expressly enumerated you the power to apportion the jelly beans, it would be implied that you could count the jelly beans, audit the jelly beans, etc.) Because congress is not expressly enumerated any power to make marijuana illegal, the states (if challenged) could assert that they have neither an enumerated or implied power to do so, and the laws that they made to illegalize marijuana consumption were not constitutional to begin with. Under the interstate commerce clause[5], they may have the ability to 'regulate' the sale and/or distribution of marijuana, but banning it for private consumption may be a bridge too far considering...
The Ninth Amendment, which states "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," combined with the Tenth Amendment, which states "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," means that the powers of the federal government should not be used to take powers away from the citizenry, and that any powers not delegated to the federal government (expressly or implied) are reserved to the states or the people. It is this last clause that allows states to decline orders by the federal government where are not obviously granted those powers to the federal government by the constitution.
Put simply, the general position is that the federal government has supremacy on matters that the constitution says it should, but should defer to the people or the states on powers the constitution doesn't mention. Because the federal government doesn't have the power to ban marijuana, then the states could argue that, and assert their own soveriegnty on its regulation. Because the states would be granting more rights to the people than the federal government in this scenario, and because the burden of enforcing it would be exclusive to the individual states, they would have a pretty good claim on grounds of federalism.
DOJ is not widely enforcing federal drug laws against citizens complying with state laws - at the direction of the current administration - but they could do so in the future.
States legalizing marijuana are simply removing separate state criminal prohibitions on marijuana and deciding not to spend resources helping the Feds enforce their prohibition.
It is still illegal under federal law, though the current administration is presently not prioritizing enforcement of federal law regarding marijuana when the offense is within the scope permitted under state law.
There's a BIG problem with banking, as in: pot businesses can't open a bank account for the business, as the you hit Federal laws about distributing funds for Federally illegal business practices (selling drugs that are illegal to sell under Federal law), making pot shops basically cash only.
Technically, you can be arrested and charged with federal possession of a schedule one drug if you have any amount of marijuana in any state, including those states which have made it legal under state law. That's potentially a year in the federal pen.
State legalization of marijuana just means you can't be prosecuted under state law.
Texas is actually a lot more liberal than you might think and mostly does not care about it's history. It's even moving to the center consider Mitt Romney actually had a much wider margin in Texas than Trump.
Anyway, North and South Dakota where split simply to add 2 senators at the time. DC is not a state for the opposite reason. Face it, states are completely arbitrary lines on a map.
There is even a poorly drawn line approximately on the 37 degrees north was codified without reference to where the actual 37 degrees north actually was.
> ...Mitt Romney actually had a much wider margin in Texas than Trump.
Texans absolutely care about Texas history. You regularly hear the 'we have an independent power grid' and jokes about secession come up in conversation, etc. There are many possible reasons why Mitt Romney would have had a wider margin in Texas than Trump. It's premature to jump to the conclusion that it's turning 'purple or something'.
That being said, Texas is a bigger and more diverse place than popular culture respects. The center of Houston, Dallas, Austin, and similar zip codes are definitely 'blue' country.
And that would even make sense if it only included the part with the White House, the Capitol, the Mall and stuff. But it turns out to also include a city where a half million disenfranchised people live.
(I think DC statehood does sound like a complicated mess, and the best solution -- if politically feasible -- would be to shrink it. You'd have the populous city of Washington, MD, and a tiny federal District of Columbia, coexisting like Rome and the Vatican. The problem is that Maryland doesn't want it.)
I think Maryland's simply gonna have to take one for the team. But yeah, I do dig the idea of redefining DC to be far smaller, ideally with zero citizens.
Not really. I'm sure the riots in front the Capitol in Philadelphia led to thoughts of needing control for safety reasons (Pennsylvania didn't intervene).
Originally DC residents would vote in Virginia or Maryland Congressional elections depending on where the territory was taken from (note: all DC land that came from VA has been returned to VA).
I think the idea originally is few would live in DC; it was tiny for a long, long time. But that's no longer true, hence why we gave DC the right to vote for President. Congress would be trickier given the balance of power, but none of the original motivating factors apply.
> Texas is actually a lot more liberal than you might think and mostly does not care about it's history. It's even moving to the center consider Mitt Romney actually had a much wider margin in Texas than Trump.
You are certainly not from Texas. Stop trying to believe it is leaning center and will someday be democrat/liberal. Texans are the most prideful about their state and are proud of their rich history unlike other top states like California and New York.
That's just one of several very blue parts of a overall Red state. Even with heavy gerrymandering and only 1 close race Texas still sent Dem. 11 vs. Rep. 25 to the House.
They ceded a specific and enumerated list of powers, reserving all others to the states.
Here is a small sample that shows some thoughts of the primary drafter of the Constitution(reference is Federalist Papers 45):
Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty, or even more, officers of different descriptions, and many of them persons of character and weight, whose influence would lie on the side of the State. The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.
I chose taxation as a topic only because Madison gave concrete numbers. Here:
* Using the number of tax collectors as a rough metric, the federal government was planned to be about 30-40 times smaller than all individual states combined. I don't know the 2016 figures.
* He affirms that the federal government "[...]will be exercised principally on external objects", which would seem to oppose redrawing state lines for the convenience of local matters(such as city boundaries). Though, if all states in question consented to having their borders redrawn, it does seem like the federal government should still at least approve.
So I'm not sure I buy this argument that the Federal government was designed at the outset to be this all-consuming entity that can stomp all over states however it pleases, though there certainly has been a recent trend that way. Hopefully the upcoming Supreme Court appointments can reverse this trend.
Given the topic, this sentence is also worth reading:
If the new Constitution be examined with accuracy and candor, it will be found that the change which it proposes consists much less in the addition of NEW POWERS to the Union, than in the invigoration of its ORIGINAL POWERS.
I think that's the exact opposite of what's written.
"Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty...whose influence would lie on the side of the State."
I guess you're right -- the "districts" in question are subsets of States, so he's saying something like "for every one federal official in Phoenix, there would be at least 30-40 Arizona officials".
At a very high level, yes I do believe that borders should be continuously redrawn based on population movement. But it doesn't need to happen in a fully central planning sort of way, it could be more fluid.
For example, towns on borders could elect which side of the border they are on. And neighborhoods could elect which town they are in.
If borders were more fluid, I think you'd see things like stronger divisions between urban and rural areas, which is a good thing. Illinois is an urban state by population with a massive rural subset. It doesn't make sense to me that two populations with such vastly different needs would be under the same state laws.
I like this idea, but I'd also like to point out that in some (many) cases, the outcome may be the opposite of that envisioned. For example, a large part of Southern Connecticut is mainly a bedroom community for New York City; based on the typical commute, you'd think it should join the state of New York, but I can guarantee you people in Southern Connecticut are perfectly happy paying less in state taxes. Conversely, if they could choose to secede from the New York State, Westchester County would join Connecticut in a second, although again, it's a bedroom community for NYC.
Fluid borders provides better competition between jurisdictions. A community would have no reason to join a higher taxrate jurisdiction unless they were getting value out of it (e.g. better schools, trains, police, etc.). That's a good thing.
Though I fully acknowledge that I'm ignoring significant issues. e.g. what if NYC drops billions on a new trainline, and then some neighborhoods benefiting from the train line switch away from NYC. Are they still obligated to pay to maintain the train line?
Why would it be a bad idea to redraw borders to reflect population movements, shared values, and similar things?
Consider Brexit. It's going to cause someone to be very unhappy - either the rural hinterlands who don't want to be part of Europe, or the Londoners/Scotsmen who do. Why not let them both get what they want?
(Obviously the benefits from boundaries that reflect shared values need to be weighed against the cost of the transition. I'm only suggesting it's far from clear that this is a bad idea.)
The creation of Maine from Massachusetts shows that there is a way to redraw the borders of a state already admitted to the union. It may not be an efficient or repeatable process, but evidently it can happen regardless of how many times you say "states, not provinces!".
Wartime is a long-accepted way of changing what a government has sovereignty over. This is still a bad example to show that US states are mere administrative decisions permitted to exist because the feds feel nice today.
That doesn't have to stop them. Europe's borders are also constantly redrawn, even in the 21th century. Next to the usual independence movements and annexations there's also a number of land swaps that happen due to referendums or in order to produce more sanely shaped borders.
I guess the key is that the initiative has to come from the individual states. If it was dictated from the federal level it indeed wouldn't work
>US states are not merely administrative divisions (like provinces in other nations) but are literal independently-governed states
i think that's kind of exaggerating the situation a bit. They maybe have a bit more control over their own affairs than most country's provinces do, but the degree of autonomy a province has varies quite a bit from country to country. there's nothing that fundamentally make a state different to a province besides the name, and comparing a US state with an EU member nation is just silly.
The difference is where the "sovereign" source of power is.
In most countries, even with highly autonomous provinces, the central government can simply pass a law to change their status at will.
In the U.S., it cannot. The U.S. federal government only has the right to legislate in a small, whitelisted set of areas and does not have the right to change anything about the States' status or individual State laws beyond that.
That's exactly the same as Canada: the provinces and their authority are defined in the constitution, and it requires a constitutional amendment (which requires agreement of 2/3 of the provinces) to change what the provinces have authority over.
There is one big difference between US and Canada in that regard.
In Canada, the constitution enumerates the powers that the provinces have, and that the federal government cannot encroach on. However, any power that is not enumerated, belongs to the federal government.
In US, it is the other way around - the constitution enumerates the powers that the federal government has, and everything that is not on the list is up to the states. And the constitution even has a specific clause (10th Amendment) that reinforces that arrangement.
In US, the list is also growing in practice, via creative reinterpretation of existing text of the constitution.
For example, the constitution says that the federal government has the right to regulate "interstate commerce". Originally, this was actually supposed to allow the feds to prevent the states from impeding commerce with other states (e.g. enacting tariffs on out-of-state goods etc). Over time, it became used instead by the feds to prevent or regulate the trafficking of some goods between states (e.g. the National Firearms Act did it for guns in 1930s).
Then, finally, the meaning of "interstate commerce" was reinterpreted to mean any activity that can have a causal relationship on interstate commerce. The decision that sealed this was in a case of a farmer growing wheat for personal consumption (to feed farm animals), in defiance of the federal law that limited production of wheat. The farmer argued that, since the wheat didn't leave his farm, it was not commerce at all; and most certainly wasn't interstate commerce. The Supreme Court ruled that it was, because growing wheat for himself meant that he wasn't buying it on the market, thereby affecting prices, and that this effect crossed state lines - and that therefore Congress was in its right to enact a federal law prohibiting the farmer from doing that.
Since then, this interpretation has been broadly used to regulate a lot of things - obviously, under this interpretation, pretty much anything is "interstate commerce". The most obvious example is the federal drug prohibiting private possession and consumption of drugs.
There's one thing to keep in mind about the original Wickard decision: it was made in an era where the courts were still mostly practicing the doctrine of "judicial deference".
What this means is that when there's a case where the courts have to rule on constitutionality of some law, they err on the side of ruling it constitutional, if there's any way to twist the wording such that it would allow the law - even if the legislators didn't think of that originally. The idea is that the laws enacted by duly elected legislators represent the will of the majority, which is sacrosanct in a true democracy, while the courts are not elected.
Thus, the balance has to be in favor of the elected institution, and the courts have a duty to try to "save" any law by coming up with creative interpretations of the limiting clauses of the constitution. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Justice of the Progressive Era (when that concept was at its peak), summed it up as, "a law should be called good if it reflects the will of the dominant forces of the community, even if it will take us to hell".
That doctrine has been on the decline since the Civil Rights era, where SCOTUS was striking down state laws left and right as unconstitutional. But it still surfaces occasionally - e.g. in the recent decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and specifically its provision that requires people without insurance to pay a fine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Indepen...). The court said that the fine is a kind of tax, even though the text of the law uses the term "penalty" consistently, and the legislators that originally wrote the bill explicitly stated that it's not a tax back when it was under discussion (and its opponents insisted that it was a tax, ironically)
So that doctrine kinda explains why they were willing to come up with such an obviously contorted interpretation. What's more interesting is why it stayed with us for so long...
Other than that, you aren't missing anything. A significant chunk of federal laws since that decision was based in part or in whole on that interpretation. There is exactly one court case where that power was found insufficient:
"The government's principal argument was that the possession of a firearm in an educational environment would most likely lead to a violent crime, which in turn would affect the general economic condition in two ways. First, because violent crime causes harm and creates expense, it raises insurance costs, which are spread throughout the economy; and second, by limiting the willingness to travel in the area perceived to be unsafe. The government also argued that the presence of firearms within a school would be seen as dangerous, resulting in students' being scared and disturbed; this would, in turn, inhibit learning; and this, in turn, would lead to a weaker national economy since education is clearly a crucial element of the nation's financial health."
SCOTUS ruled that it was a connection that is too remote. But even then, the ruling was 5-4 - in other words, 4 judges believed that the rationale above is sufficient to accommodate the Commerce Clause!
The problem with getting rid of this ruling is political. Since there's so much federal legislation that is only possible because of it, pretty much every political force (other than perhaps libertarians) has a stake in the game. For the liberals, if Filburn goes away, then so do important parts of the federal Civil Rights Acts (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenbach_v._McClung), which prohibit discrimination of customers and employees on the basis of race, gender, religion etc. For many conservatives, overturning Filburn is undesirable because it would gut most federal drug laws (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich).
This is an incredible reply to what I now think is an embarrassing oversimplification of the issue. Thanks for taking the time to explain the nuances of this - so it's not necessarily an absurd twisting of the law to scold/punish an individual, but a well-meaning (perhaps flawed?) interpretation to protect the integrity of the constitution. I had no idea it was so complex.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that it's absurd, and your concise summary above was fairly accurate :). It's just that some absurdities actually do have meaningful justifications that are not merely post factum apologetics.
But they're still bad justifications! This whole "judicial deference" thing runs counter to the fundamental reason why written constitutions even exist in the first place, IMO. So I wouldn't call it protecting the integrity of the constitution - quite the opposite, in fact, I think it leads to an inevitable conclusion that constitution is just something unnecessary that gets in the way of things.
States and provinces are both unitary states. Lower level divisions of those are creations of the state. County and city governments only exist because the state says they can.
The degree of sovereignty that US states is much more significant than any of the examples that you have listed. So yes, it is actually somewhat special.
You should learn more about a topic before posting.
It's very much like the EU: Each state is independent, and there is an overall governing body - the federal government, which for the most part can't tell states what to do, it can only give or withhold money to induce them.
There are specific rules about what the Federal government can and can't tell a state.
One difference that does exist is military, where EU states can have a military (as far I know), but US states can not.
> One difference that does exist is military, where EU states can have a military (as far I know), but US states can not.
Not so. US states cannot have a standing army without consent of Congress. The Congress has given such consent in the form of the Militia Act a century ago, which enabled the states to create the National Guard and the State Defense Forces / State Guard.
And while NG can be federalized (i.e. put under the federal chain of command, with the president as commander as chief), SDF are not - their chain of command terminates with the governor, and they cannot be used outside of state boundaries.
Most people in US know about the National Guard, but not about SDF. It's largely because the latter is rather small and obscure, and mostly used as a sort of civil defense agency with a military chain of command (many states don't even arm their units). But it's an interesting system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force
Note that the original Articles of Confederation included an explicit provision for State militias, that got replaced by the awkwardly worded 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights
EU states are nation states, US states are not. The EU is not a nation, the US are.
EU states have much more sovereignty than US states written inside laws, but more importantly, through support of their people. This is why there is a Euro crisis and why Brexit happened: The unification of Europe is a beautiful idea and I personally hope it will recover, but while subsets of it were considered as one nation at some point (Austria, Germany etc.) the EU as a whole simply never was and never will be.
The EU, despite its name, is essentially a humongous cooperation deal between countries. It has many of the trappings of a nation, but that's an illusion. EU countries are sovereign (consent is required in any alteration of the membership rules and they can leave at will) but US states are not. That's the theory. In practice, the differences are even bigger: There's no EU patent system, for example.
When France goes to war it does so independently of the rest of the EU. And Britain has no obligation to help Sweden if Sweden is invaded. If that's not a hard line between nation-state and not, then I don't know what is.
The one big difference between an EU member nation and a state is that EU member nations can leave. A US state cannot secede, and so is ultimately under the control of the federal government.
> One difference that does exist is military, where EU states can have a military (as far I know), but US states can not
Even that is a little shaky, as historically there were organized state militias, which eventually evolved into the National Guard. Even now, the National Guard formations for each state are under the direct control of that state, rather than directly subordinated to the federal government.
If you admit uncertainty over whether EU states can have a military or not (yes obviously EU states can and do have their own military forces), perhaps you shouldn't lecture people on learning more before posting?
Does any other country let their subdivision raise armies that are not under the control of the main/federal government? The poorly named national guard in each state in the us is exactly that.
In fact, the little rock five were escorted by federal troops facing off against state controlled troops.
That's not correct. The National Guards are authorized by Congress and the president has the ultimate authority. Eisenhower was able to override AK gov in this case.
The feds can take over the National Guard, but they cannot take over the State Guard / State Defense Force, if a state chooses to have such a thing.
The latter also require Congress authorization, in a sense that the state is not allowed to create them without Congress "consenting" (e.g. via legislation):
"No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay."
But the Congress only has the power to grant or withhold such authorization; control still remains with the state. And, of course, the states can still have their militias - so long as the state does not explicitly organize them, it's not "keeping troops".
I wouldn't muck with the east coast states much. The borders might be off by a little here and there, but not by much.
However most of the western states were last carved up in 1850s. I don't think we need to redraw them every 30 years, but maybe every 150? Considering the last time we adjusted California's bounds the transcontinental railroad wasn't built yet.
Not sure I agree: NYC would highly benefit from improved tri-state metro area coordination. Plans like extending the 7 train to NJ's Secaucus Junction would be much easier to pass.
> Would you also propose re-drawing the borders of every EU nation every 30 years to reflect population movement?
Yes.
Just like there’s currently a discussion about redrawing the borders of the states within Germany – which are also independent legal entities, many having existed for many centuries.
Not just nominal! The Constitution ensures the sovereignty of the states by restricting the federal government to a limited set of enumerated powers (among them: foreign policy, national defense, regulation of interstate commerce) with all other powers retained by the states (10th Amendment).
> a limited set of enumerated powers (among them: foreign policy, national defense, regulation of interstate commerce)
Unfortunately, the modern interpretation of "interstate commerce" is roughly "any other powers they might care to have". The Tenth Amendment has essentially been superseded by the Commerce Clause since the New Deal.
A significant subset of people in the US insist the federal government has overstepped its powers, using "interstate commerce" to inappropriately expand federal authority. With the forthcoming change of federal government, in the years ahead it's likely there will be some paring back of federal overreach. Whether that's a good or bad development remains to be determined.
US states were intended to be semi-autonomous regions which reflected cultural distinctions of residents inhabiting the original colonies. The different "flavors" of American culture have more or less persisted, even in today's mobile population there are still nuances that make the cultures of states unique.
Because the American states have a tradition of autonomy that dates back far before the Revolution. That is why American states are states with their own citizens (think drivers licenses) and not simply administrative regions as they would be in other large and diverse countries like China and Russia.
I don't know about the Russian system, but the Chinese system is much closer to individuals being citizens of different regions than the U.S. system. Residency in the U.S. is simple to change and unrestricted, and most effects are immediate (though some in-state tuition requirements can take longer).
In contrast, in China it is difficult for rural workers to change their Hukou, and as such they are often stuck with major disadvantages even after they move. A rural worker in Shanghai might live as a second class citizen there for years, because they're not considered to be officially Shanghainese. This isn't the case in the U.S.
But is the registration system in China managed separately by different provinces because they want to control and/or prevent migration, or by the national government because it wants to control migration?
If it's the latter, it's not a sign of federalism - quite the opposite, in fact.
Russian system is more complicated than that - the "federal subjects", as the regions are known, are not merely administrative, but have some actual powers. They may have regional laws (although criminal law belongs on the federal level), may collect taxes, set their own system of local government (how the regional parliament looks etc).
They can also have other languages designated as official on their territory, in addition to Russian, and implement an educational system that teaches those languages. They have their own constitutions, enforced by regional constitutional courts.
One particularly curious case is that of Tatarstan. It nearly declared independence in 1990 (some argue that it actually did - it made a "declaration of sovereignty": http://1997-2011.tatarstan.ru/english/00002028.html). In 1992, it adopted its own constitution on a referendum, which also described it as a "sovereign state".
Then, intense negotiations with the Russian federal government followed, which resulted in an 1994 agreement (https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http://fao...) with an unwieldy title of "On Delimitation of Jurisdictional Subjects and Mutual Delegation of Powers between Bodies of Public Authority of the Russian Federation and Bodies of Public Authority of the Republic of Tatarstan". The constitution of Tatarstan was then amended with a curious definition of the federal arrangement as follows:
"The Republic of Tatarstan is a democratic constitutional State associated with the Russian Federation"
i.e. not a "member of" - although according to the federal constitution, it is a federal subject, same as any other. It also has some other special guarantees - for example, its borders cannot be changed without its consent. And the whole arrangement can only be amended by mutual agreement.
Of course, given the present state of affairs in Russia, it is unclear to what extent any of these theoretical political powers that federal subjects may enjoy are actually realized.
You're conflating two different terms. As was pointed out in another comment, your understanding was more or less true under the Articles of Confederation but stopped being the case with the ratification of the Constitution. The American word 'state' is a relic.
Not exactly. I've had loads of conversations with people from other countries who were amazed at the degree of independence of the States.
It's not really typical for administrative subdivisions of a country to have their own criminal law, be allowed to sentence you to death or put you in prison, issue their own identity documents, raise militias, etc.
The only two other federal countries I can think of off the top of my head that has different criminal law in different subdivisions are Australia and Mexico.
In Canada, criminal law is unified on the federal level. So far as I know, this is also the case in Germany and Switzerland.
Ah, good point. Although the case with UK is a bit unusual, in that all those powers are still devolved from the British Parliament (and so it could rescind them with a simple majority vote in theory... though that would surely trigger a constitutional crisis now) - so technically it's not federalism.
In contrast, most federations designate who has the power to enact criminal law in their respective constitutions.
Yes, the federal system reserves more rights for American states than are enjoyed by, say, French régions. They're still a far cry short of sovereign states.
You and I are talking about different things. My closing sentence could have been more explicit, e.g.:
> The American usage of the word 'state' to refer to the constituent members of its federal system is a relic of a time when they were effectively sovereign states.
> US states are not merely administrative divisions (like provinces in other nations) but are literal independently-governed states. Would you also propose re-drawing the borders of every EU nation every 30 years to reflect population movement?
Sure, as we know from history, state boundaries (and the existence of states) has never changed in all of recorded human history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq0KNfS_M44
This misunderstanding (provinces vs states) leads to much misunderstanding of the US federal system in general, the electoral college, role of the federal government, etc.