There’s a lot of noise these days about the divisions in the US, and some are expressing that it could lead to a civil war, or a breakup with red states going one way and blue states going another. I have thoughts on that—I have expressed them in comments on a couple of other Substacks, and I may eventually post them here.
But what I want to look at in this post is that the divide is not just by states. States themselves are in danger of dividing. For several years, there have been proposals to break California into three to five separate states—it is a large state in land area, and the different regions in the state do not agree on a lot of things. For the most part, the high population of the cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and a few more—has guaranteed they will get their way.
But it isn’t just California. In Oregon, the eastern counties—half the territory of the state or more—have been putting measures on the ballot to look into leaving Oregon and joining Idaho. They have been at odds with the coastal cities for years, and Idaho is culturally more like them. I have seen reports that most of Illinois would love to kick Chicago out of the state.
On the opposite side, during the RFRA controversy in Indiana while Mike Pence was governor, I saw liberals in Indianapolis, the state capital and its largest city, who were howling mad that they couldn’t outvote the rest of the state like Chicago and NYC can. Indiana is a state of small towns and small cities, and Indianapolis is not that big of a city.
But these divisions in our states are the result of a Supreme Court decision that came out in June of 1964. In Reynolds vs. Sims, the Warren Court, in an 8 to 1 decision, overturned practices in state government that had been in place in most states since they entered the US.
Before 1964, most of the states, in their state constitutions, patterned their legislatures after the US Congress. The lower house was made up of representatives elected from districts, divided up by population. The upper house, often called “Senate” would have one member from each county.
By 1964, cities had been growing for years, and political disagreements were getting more common—and the state senators from the rural counties often could outvote the senators from the cities. So the city people were often mad at the rest of the state.
In a couple of previous cases, the Supreme Court had been expressing the idea of “one man, one vote”—meaning that voting districts for Congress had to be of fairly similar population. And some states may not have been doing the best job on maintaining that.
But in the Reynolds case, Chief Justice Earl Warren and his fellow justices essentially over-ruled the constitutions of most of the states. They ruled that states had to apportion the upper houses of their legislatures by population, just like the lower houses. Part of the argument was that when the US adopted its Constitution, the individual states were sovereign entities coming together to form the nation, but the counties were not independent units but integrally part of the states.
Most of the states had to drastically re-organize their governments to deal with this decision. Nebraska simply switched to a one-house legislature. Most did divide their states up into senate districts, ignoring county lines from then on.
The Sixties were part of an era of urban growth. Everywhere, cities and suburbs were expanding. Early in the 20th century, Indianapolis had been a small town—if you went two miles north of the downtown area, you were out in the country. In 1970, the state government allowed Indianapolis to take over most of Marion County. leaving just a few smaller towns separate. On the east coast, some writers were using the term “Boswash”—to express the idea that the whole coast from Boston down to Washington, DC was going to end up one huge urban mass.
So there was a huge change. What is my point? I am afraid that our politicians and our judges are not as smart as they sometimes think they are. Chief Justice Warren and his fellow justices did not really solve the problem they were seeing. They just shifted it to the opposite extreme. Where the cities had been mad at the rural areas, now the rural areas are mad at the cities. It isn’t really better. It has not increased harmony in state governments. And I think it played a part in making our current situation worse. It might have been better to leave the issue to elected officials in state legislatures and Congress to resolve, rather than the Supreme Court cooking up a solution by fiat.
A thoughtful post. Thank you.