Rotten Boroughs II: Immigration
Threatens the Senate,
Electoral College...
Rotten Borough
I: Immigration's Dynamic...
By James
Fulford
[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
