>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states.
Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum?
Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions to hell in a handbasket. You can't keep using a thought experiment as a reason to consider catastrophic outcomes from non-regionalist democracy plausible when the empirical evidence runs against it.
And, just to finish off, there's the issue that the current "states" don't even make sense as regional divisions. The citizens of rural upstate New York have far more in common with Vermonters, Western Massachussans, and even citizens of rural Pennsylvania and Illinois than they do with citizens of New York City. Yet because of the division into states, the interests of rural New Yorkers are neglected relative to those of Vermonters just because rural New Yorkers live on the same side of the completely arbitrary border as urban New Yorkers -- even tangential and immaterial association with cities is penalized under this system!
>Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
This presumes that those nine states have completely unanimous elections. It is entirely fair that elections should be fought over the issues that matter to the largest portion of the people possible, that politicians should stand for election by putting forward the most appealing rational positions, rather than by catering to a disproportionately represented minority and deliberately neglecting the majority of citizens.
Despite the constant fear-mongering of antidemocratic political philosophers, majoritarian democracy, with the rule of law enforced, has never actually resulted in the predicted rounds of war, death, famine, and pestilence. To oppose democratic rule based on violent-mob rule being a bad thing is disingenuous.
State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states.
It may seem like a historical relic now, but each state joined the union under the premise (and likely binding law/treaty) of retaining some sovereignty. Each state has it's own laws, courts, police, military, etc. It's a feature, not a bug, that rural states can prevent the cities from imposing a tyranny of the majority on them at a federal level via the senate. Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.
Take for instance Nevada. If the majority of the population of Nevada wants legal gambling, they should be able to have it. A pure federal democracy would allow 9 states to make a law banning gambling nation wide. That's far less likely to happen in the current system as low population states have reason to band together and prevent any federal over riding of the freedom of their state's citizens to self govern.
> In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union.
That's true of some of the states, such as the original 13 and Texas, but it's not true of most of them. Most states never had any form of sovereignty and were just arbitrarily created divisions of territory.
Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum?
Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions to hell in a handbasket. You can't keep using a thought experiment as a reason to consider catastrophic outcomes from non-regionalist democracy plausible when the empirical evidence runs against it.
And, just to finish off, there's the issue that the current "states" don't even make sense as regional divisions. The citizens of rural upstate New York have far more in common with Vermonters, Western Massachussans, and even citizens of rural Pennsylvania and Illinois than they do with citizens of New York City. Yet because of the division into states, the interests of rural New Yorkers are neglected relative to those of Vermonters just because rural New Yorkers live on the same side of the completely arbitrary border as urban New Yorkers -- even tangential and immaterial association with cities is penalized under this system!
>Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
This presumes that those nine states have completely unanimous elections. It is entirely fair that elections should be fought over the issues that matter to the largest portion of the people possible, that politicians should stand for election by putting forward the most appealing rational positions, rather than by catering to a disproportionately represented minority and deliberately neglecting the majority of citizens.
Despite the constant fear-mongering of antidemocratic political philosophers, majoritarian democracy, with the rule of law enforced, has never actually resulted in the predicted rounds of war, death, famine, and pestilence. To oppose democratic rule based on violent-mob rule being a bad thing is disingenuous.