“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Democratic politicians have come to believe the most significant roadblocks to their agenda reside in two institutions: the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate. They slow down legislation or derail presidential candidates who are not popular in more rural—and hence, conservative—parts of the county.
Just how desperate liberal voters have become is alarming.
An unnamed legal scholar has proposed a plan to kill two birds with one stone by radically altering the character of the United States by adding 127 new states to the union. All of these micro-states would be composed of a single neighborhood of what is now Washington, D.C.
And yes, they’re serious. The audacious new plan comes from an anonymous article published in Harvard Legal Review.
The goal is to eliminate the Democratic Party’s problem on both fronts: Each of these new “states” would get two U.S. Senators and three votes in the Electoral College. That’s a total of 354 new senators and 481 new votes in the Electoral College, all gerrymandered to be part of safe, “blue” states.
He (or she) wants the Constitution altered to stop the U.S. Senate from…being the U.S. Senate.
Currently, each state gets the same number of senators, regardless of population – which gives less populated states a greater say (per voter) in the Senate.
Small states also have a greater voice in the Electoral College.
This was intentional. Our Founding Fathers worried that the nation’s enormous cities and urban centers would call all the shots – a “tyranny of the majority” – and so compromised by giving smaller states a greater voice.
The Harvard article’s author makes clear that the plan of the Founding Fathers is precisely what he’d like to undo.
“Article V of the Constitution requires supermajorities to amend the Constitution,” the article complains. It continues that “pragmatists” have been “reduced to advocating meager solutions: perhaps Congress could admit Washington, D.C., as a state; maybe Puerto Rico too, if we’re really feeling ambitious.”
The author says these plans, “while a step in the right direction,” are “inadequate” to truly change the constitutional character of the United States of America.
“The Constitution must be amended,” the article says. “To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states.”
These new “states” would then drown D.C. in new senators. Together, they would “add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments.” They would turn the Senate into a “body that represents citizens equally”—by forcing together citizens from different states. They would increase the number of House seats, replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote, and see to it that the Constitution’s easier to amend the next time they need to change the rules for their political gain.
This could be the perfect Trojan Horse to undermine America, because—as wild as it sounds—it would be entirely legal.
Congress can’t begin dicing up existing states into smaller states unless the state legislature agrees. But the District of Columbia isn’t a state. The Constitution vests total power over D.C. in the hands of Congress, which could subdivide the territory any which way it pleases.
As the left-leaning news outlet Vox explained, “Literally nothing in the Constitution prevents Congress from admitting the Obama family’s personal DC residence as a state—a state which would then be entitled to two senators, one member of the House, and exactly as much say on whether the Constitution should be amended as the entire state of Texas.”
As scary as that sounds, Vox doesn’t think the proposal goes far enough. Since “ratifying a constitutional amendment … requires the consent of three-fourths of the states,” it “makes more sense to divide the District of Columbia into 150 states, rather than 127 states.”
The website adds that it’s “a good idea to draw the boundaries of those new states to ensure that the electorate within each of the new states supports such amendments”—the “electorate” being just a family or two.
The Obamas, Bidens, and the head of every influential Democratic lobbying group on K Street could become the heads of new states and elect themselves U.S. “senators” overnight.
The proposal is a stark and desperate power grab. The Electoral College was designed to make sure presidential candidates represent the whole country—North and South, East and West, city and country. Anyone who has seen the map of how counties voted in the U.S. presidential election knows we are very different Americans.
Democrats cluster in a few dots of blue inside massive cities. Rather than field candidates who appeal to the whole American people, the Democrats simply want to change the rules.
While Democrats complain it’s not fair that tiny Wyoming has as many votes as California—even though it’s massively outvoted in the House—their “solution” to make each senator represent an equal number of people is ridiculous. It would force people in sparsely populated areas to be represented by someone who doesn’t even live in their own state.
The Atlantic drew up a map of what their proposal would look like. California would get 12 or 14 senators, and Wyoming get zero of its own. Wyoming would be submerged into one megastate along with North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Montana and Colorado. How is that fair?
The Democrats’ new proposal would lock rural Americans into a hostage situation, in which urban voters violate their rights by sheer might.
This kind of mob rule is exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. And it is exactly what the Democrats’ plan to admit 10 or 12 dozen new states to the union is planned to inflict.
Of course, Harvard might want to fix its own admissions scandal before it sets its sights on admitting new states to the union.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”