The big little states

Law professor Sanford Levinson's smart and readable new book, "Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct it)", has drawn much critical attention, pro and con. Levinson complains that it takes much too long to enact laws under our bicameral legislative system, and he is particularly critical of Section 3, Clause 1, the equal representation of the states in the U.S. Senate. It's "a travesty of the democratic ideal," he grumbles, and "should appall most Americans" because it give states with small populations voting power equal to large states.

Levinson says the only reason for Clause 1 was to get the small states to ratify the constitution. But the other salient fact, easily forgotten in today's nationalized sensibility, is that our country is a federation of states, not just voters. As the constitution is written, states have rights. We might deplore that, and many people do (just as they deplore the Electoral College), but my hunch is that we tinker with it at our peril.

One of the curious things about the United States is that, although it has a capital city, it doesn't have a political center. In most countries, there's the center -- London, Paris, Moscow -- and then there are the boonies, which can usually be exploited or ignored. This sense of exploitation of the back-country can lead to bitter grievance, or even breakups, as it did in the former Czechoslovakia, or it can let the outlands rot with no attention or development. But that doesn't happen here. Alaska and Wyoming -- and Rhode Island, for that matter -- can't be ignored by New York, Illinois, or California, because the country can't function without them. That may be undemocratic, but it may also be one reason the country has held together for so long.