Matt on the Senate

Link

Alec MacGillis has a great piece in the Post on the evils of the U.S. Senate. Probably little of it will be strikingly new to anyone who’s read my extensive whining on this subject, but this bit of history—how the GOP manipulated the entrance of new states into the union in order to artificially preserve control of the senate—isn’t as well-understood as it should be:

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It turns out that if territories had been turned into states in order of their population, rather than in order of the partisan needs of the Republican Party, that control of the legislature would have looked quite different in the late nineteenth century.


Francois' response: Gerrymandering is a fact of politics and this is just a more sophisticated type of gerrymandering. Much like Democrats trying to get DC turned into a state, something which is blatantly unconstitutional.

Besides, would Matt really have preferred the Democrats of that time over the Republicans? Seems to me that the Republicans were much more progressive on the issues that mattered most in that time than the Democrats. The Democrats may have been less pro-business, but would any progressive place business regulation and progressive taxation ahead of civil rights? Seriously? I guess some would, since the party still lauds homophobes like Robert Byrd for his progressive economic record, but to me it's an example of misplaced priorities.