Shot in the Dark

Minoritarian

What’s the next front in the specious war on “white supremacy?”

We’ll come back to that.

Redundant And Extraneous: Something I’ve always wondered about; why does Minnesota have a Senate, but the Senate just replicates each pair of House districts?

It give you all the disadvantages of a purely majoritarian unicameral legislature, which an added layer of bureaucracy which doesn’t actually protect the population from the tyranny of the majority.

I’ve often thought it’d be best to make the legislature more analogous to the US Senate, including the focus on blunting the power of the pure majority – either 2-3 Senators per Congressional district, or one per County.

And I’m not the only one.

Adversarial: The move to give Minnesota a minoritarian, deliberative Senate has finally gotten a mention out there:

That would shift power to lower-population counties, and make the Minnesota Legislature more like the U.S. Congress, with the House membership based on population proportionality and the Senate membership elected one per county, no matter how many people live in that county.

“The real problem is the representation in Minnesota,” [propoenent Allen] Lysdahl told the Becker County Board during the open forum period on Tuesday, June 4. ”It’s either very concentrated in some areas or very diluted in others.” The existing system is “pure majority rule,” he added. “It’s not conducive to good government — majority rule is like a lynch mob

It would help the legislature bridge the tribal divides that currently slop most legislation into our current, useless three-person junta. And it’d help prevent the orgy of one-sided spending caused by the Metro area’s stranglehold on the Legislature.

Smug Alert: So you know the DFL is going to hate it.

That’s right – the party that gave us ranked choice voting, ballot harvesting and season-long early voting windows, and has spent this state into decline and oblivion, is complaining about “rigged elections”.

Suffice to say, I support it. It will, of course, take a GOP trifecta, and a decisive one at that, to make it happen.

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Mitch Berg

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5 responses to “Minoritarian”

  1. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    Unfortunately, 1 County 1 Senator currently is against SCOTUS Precedent. The erroneous judicial reasoning is that it violates the principle of 1 Person, 1 Vote.

  2. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    SSC, is the US Senate “grandfathered in”? Or how is it different?

  3. JamesPh Avatar
    JamesPh

    I assume that the US Senate passes constitutional muster because it is expressly provided for in the constitution.

  4. Sailorcurt Avatar
    Sailorcurt

    I’d never heard of the SCOTUS ruling finding that state Senates must be apportioned by population. I just looked it up: Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

    I didn’t read through the entire opinion, just the summary of the holdings, and part of the reasoning for the holding that both houses of a bicameral legislature must be apportioned based on population.

    “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.

    Plainly false. The US Senate, as originally devised, was appointed by the legislature of each state. The point was that the House of Representatives represents the people; the Senate represents the state governments.

    Over the years the state governments voluntarily changed their laws so that the senators were pretty uniformly elected by the people of the state, and eventually this was codified in the Constitution by amendment, but clearly, the original plan was for the Senators to be appointed (or elected) by the state governments and were to represent the interests of those governments.

    There is nothing in the Constitution preventing the states from mirroring this original plan. In fact, there’s nothing in the Constitution granting the federal government authority over state government electoral policies and procedures at all except for guaranteeing a Republican form of government and prohibiting the states from discriminating due to sex, race, religion, age, etc etc etc.

    That part of the ruling was based on a false premise and should be revisited…which brings me to my second point:

    The passage of the 17th Amendment was the second biggest Constitutional mistake (after prohibition) made. It diluted the States’ powers to influence and affect the federal government.

    The entire point of the Senate was to represent the interests of each state on an equal footing to prevent the smaller states from being discounted and ignored. The intent was, as I mentioned before, the House of Representatives represented the population of each state proportionally. The Senate represented the duly elected government of each state on an equal footing.

    When the 17th Amendment went into effect, we broke our government system and have been paying the price for that ever since through the ever expanding powers of an unchecked federal government.

    I don’t see how a State Senate elected directly by the people of the senatorial district apportioned by population, would be any different. In order for it to really have an impact, the state senate should be patterned after the original intent of the US Bicameral legislature and represent each of the county governments of the state on an equal footing regardless of population.

    That would be especially groundbreaking in states like Illinois or Missouri where there is a single very large city in a single county that pretty much runs roughshod over the rest of the state. Such equal county representation in the state government would make such a situation virtually impossible and would give voice to the many people who live in less populous areas who are currently voiceless in the State government.

  5. SmithStCrx Avatar
    SmithStCrx

    Yep, another horrible Warren Court Decision. Earl Warren might not have been Chief Justice for the absolute worst SCOTUS Decisions in history, but the Warren Court remains one of the worst periods of SCOTUS history from a legal ideological perspective. Even when the Court got things correct, they generally did so for the wrong reasons.

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