Larry Sabato calls for a new Constitutional Convention in a recent column in the Los Angeles Times. The column is a confusing litany of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and nonsensical arguments. He starts out his column complaining that current proposals for tackling health care or Iraq are merely incremental fixes, and goes on to propose “radical changes” such as slightly increasing the number of electors in the Electoral College. Personally, I think that an incremental fix to health care might just benefit more people.
Unlike Sabato’s suggestions, there are useful changes we could make to the Constitution. We could revoke the legal status of corporations as persons. We could add an explicit right to privacy. We could protect habeas corpus even in times of war or insurrection, make all elections direct and protect the right to vote, create a right to basic health care or education, eliminate asset forfeiture laws, and much more. The framework by which we structure our society is worth careful consideration by an informed body politic. But before we consider either incremental or radical changes, it might be prudent to try enforcing the Constitution and laws we already have.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Forming a more perfect union
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3 comments:
One of Sabato’s proposals is to give bigger states more Senators. Sabato argues that the Senate is unprecedentedly lopsided, pointing out that California and Wyoming have the same number of Senators despite CA having 70 times more people than WY. It’s fun to check the facts, since the LA Times apparently can’t be bothered to. When the Constitution was amended in 1913 to provide for direct election of 2 Senators per state, New York had 62 times more people than Wyoming. When that amendment was developed, the most recent census of 1900 showed that New York had more than 171 times the population of Nevada and 78 times the population of Wyoming. A numerical disparity like today’s is not new.
Sabato also complains that 17% of the population elects a majority of Senators today. In 1800, 23% of the population was represented by half the Senators. The idea of small states having Senate representation unproportional to their size was exactly the point of the Connecticut Compromise, and the numerical result that Sabato finds so horrifying was exactly in line with what the Founding Fathers contemplated.
I'm not going to bother reading the column, but I'm surprised by how often some newspaper's op-ed page has a call for constitutional amendment on mostly stupid topics. Is there some sort of contrarian CW that pushes this idea?
If we are concerned about the Senate, there is a perfectly good and reasonable solution that does not require changing the constitution: change the state borders. California could very happily be three states, New York could be at least two, and Texas any number of states, without doing as much damage as a ConstConv would do. Of course, the states aren't going to divide, but then we aren't going to have a ConstConv, either.
I grew up in a state that was over-represented, and is probably now under-represented. I actually saw the working purpose of the set-up. Without the Senate, California would have taken all the water, and Arizona would never have developed to the point of risking under-representation. Now, all that development may well have been an error, but not because of anti-democratic decision-making.
Thanks,
-V.
I think the usual push for a Constitutional amendment is based on either a deep misunderstanding of the role of the Constitution or some false notion that the Constitution enforces itself, but the amendment is at least trying to address a particular issue. Sabato wants to tinker as a distraction from all actual issues.
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