Rotten Borough I: Immigration's Rotten Borough Dynamic...
[Helpful VDARE note: "Rotten Boroughs" were districts returning members to the British House of Commons, prior to the democratic Great Reform Act of 1833, despite having few or even no inhabitants. As a practical matter, they were in the gift of local magnates. Well, guess what…]
Christopher Hitchens describes the Senate (in No One Left To Lie To):
"Owing in part to Article V of the Constitution, it is impossible to amend the provision that grants two senators to each state of the Union, regardless of population. Thus - in an arrangement aptly described by Daniel Lazare as one of "rotten boroughs" - unpopulous white and rural states such as Montana and Wyoming have the same representations as do vast and all-American and ethnically diverse state like New York and California."
When Hitchens says "all-American", I think he must mean un-American.
Originally the term all-American meant "From every state in the Union", and was applied to the W.W.I 82nd Division to differentiate it from locally recruited divisions. It's not logically possible for a state to be all-American, but if you redefine "all-American" to mean, say, "vibrant" or "diverse", then it's obvious Wyoming doesn't qualify.
Of course, the two senators and three electoral votes possessed by Wyoming are part of the genius of the American Constitutional compromise, with its Representatives and Senators.
A recent caller to Rush Limbaugh noted that the Electoral College meant that the "heartland had a right to be heard." Which it does, especially if you consider that there's nothing particularly morally superior about having superior numbers.
In THE PATRIOT GAME: Canada and the Canadian Question Revisited, Peter Brimelow wrote about the problems of a country where elections are based on straight numbers, with no Senators to defend the outlying regions.
Then he left Canada!
February 25, 2001
