Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate…
As a counterpoint, would you agree that every law Italy has should also apply to Norway?
Put more directly, would you agree there are geographic and climatic concerns in law making such that, i.e. Arizona needs unique laws that aren’t applicable or useful for any other state except perhaps close neighbors?
You could say that new government just wouldn’t blanketly apply laws or that they would use specific language to carve out conditions for specially affected states. But I look at the current US government and I don’t hold much hope for nuance or conditions.
The idea of some mitigating force to prevent domination of small, unique climes and insulated populations by some distant political body is sound. But it is like many things in the US: there is the spirit of something noble that has been made concrete – dense and unwieldy – by grubby plutocrats.