A non-binding vote in 11 Colorado counties on the question of seceding from the Centennial State to form a brand new state of North Colorado is "the start of a new and lamentable trend that... may be with us for a long time in American politics," groused the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky in his November 5 story, "Colorado's Strange Secession Vote."
Of course, Tomasky noted correctly, a push for the formation of a new state is not going anywhere soon. But, the liberal journalist insisted, the long-term plan is really more sinister and perhaps racially-charged (emphasis mine):
The secessionists have a Plan B in Colorado, which is to remake the state senate to be like the U.S. Senate—with two senators per county. But there’s this precedent called Reynolds v. Sims, in which the Supreme Court held in 1964 that state legislative districts have to be roughly equal in population, so such a scheme would be unconstitutional. Yes, think about that: The U.S. Senate is described in the Constitution, so it’s constitutional. But if a state or locality tried to emulate it, that’s unconstitutional. Just to be clear I’m not saying here that they should be able to. I’m saying the Senate is indefensible.
At any rate, this particular effort isn’t going anywhere for now. But mark my words, there is going to be more of this, maybe a lot more. Republicans, eventually, are going to get behind it, because it will mean more senators for them. They’ll just need time to figure out a way to sell it with a straight face, so they can hop up on Fox and start preaching to the rest of us about things like “simple fairness” for the beleaguered people of North Colorado or Western Maryland or Eastern Washington or what have you. Borders are political constructs in the first place. No reason they can’t be changed if the people who want to do the changing have enough political muscle. And can’t you just see a conservative Supreme Court someday invalidating Reynolds v. Sims, which after all is just another grim Warren Court precedent? The background of Reynolds, it should go without saying, is that yes, black areas were often severely underrepresented. So we might have a fight on that front someday, too.
At what point does Old Glory start looking cluttered? And for starters, where would that fifty-first star go, anyway? It isn’t crazy to think that within 15 or so years, we may be finding out.
As you can see from our archive on him, Tomasky has a nasty habit of playing the race card in darn near everything he writes, so it's hardly surprising that he would do so here.
But Tomasky does everyone a favor in showing his far-left credentials, such as blasting the institution of the U.S. Senate as an indefensible vestige of our country's constitutional order. Leftists love to oppose anything that slows down the march of big government, and certainly the U.S. Senate has by and large been the means by which the brakes have been tapped to keep the government from growing as fast and as big as it could have if the federal Congress were merely composed of the House.
