The States have two problems:
The first is that we are over two hundred years into this country and have the most mobile people on Earth. The lines that were drawn up at the beginning are now pretty much meaningless in most cases. It would be like preserving the power of the individual satraps that went into India or the fiefdoms of warlords that went into China, except that
even that shit is more relevant today, because the United States gelled three
times longer ago than those countries did.
The second is that the United States is simply too powerful as a whole to be able to afford veto powers to tiny regional minorities. Even if "Montanans" were a distinct people that could reliably tell themselves from Idahoans, Wyomingians, or even Canadians from the Prairies,
which they fucking aren't, the harsh reality is that 2% of the upper house of parliament of the most powerful empire to ever exist is actually more power than half a million people can control. The last time this subject came up, we went through the campaign finances of a senator from Wyoming and found that he was not only pulling down seven figures, but that his top donors
were all from out of state.
Let's look at
Montana. Well, he again is sitting on more than two million dollars, let's look at his top five donors:
- Aetna Inc - Health Insurance company based in Connecticut
Express Scripts - Health Insurance Company based in Missouri
Akin, Gump et al - A lobbying money laundering service for the tech and communications industries
KKR & Co - A financial shellgame company based in New York
Schering-Plough Corp - a pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey (a subsidiary of Merck)
OK? First of all, I think it is obvious that the honorable senator from Montana is basically in the pocket of big pharma. Secondly, basically all of his money is coming from out of state. Indeed, a lot of that is coming from out of the
country, considering that Akin, Gump et al are laundering money from sources like "Samsung USA", which isn't really a US company at all, and Merck is like 50% German.
But does he represent Montana? Why would he? He is pulling down seven figures a year from a shadowy cabal of out-of-state healthcare and technology interests, what can the people of Montana offer him to compete with that? The harsh reality is that a senate vote from Montana is worth more than all of the Montanans put together, and the market has priced it accordingly.
Regional representation of the kind the founders imagined the senate would provide is simply not possible for a country as powerful as the United States of America.
-Username17