Let's take Wyoming

[boxofdelights]

In Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, Elie Mystal quotes Cardozo School of Law professor Kyron Huigens:

The reason the popular vote diverges from the Electoral College vote is that each voter in Wyoming has more voting power in the Senate—and so in the Electoral College—than each voter in California.
Here is the proper calculation…. If Carol [resident of California] has one vote in the Senate, how many does Will [resident of Wyoming] have?
Fifty-seven.

Kyron Huigens, "The Electoral College Is Actually Worse Than You Think—Here's Why," Observer, February 27, 2019.

Wyoming has 584,309 inhabitants, two senators, and three electoral college votes. Mystal suggests that buying 500,000 Black people a townhouse in Wyoming would be a more effective way for some billionaire to defend democracy than a futile Presidential run. And it doesn't have to be 500,000: 278,503 people turned out to vote in Wyoming in 2020. And some of them voted for Democrats! 120,069 more Democratic votes would have sent Wyoming's electoral votes to Biden/Harris, and elected Lynnette Grey Bull instead of Lynne Cheney. In 2018, 74984 more votes could have elected a Democratic senator from Wyoming.

The Inflation Reduction Act will invest $369 billion in "energy security and climate change". Can we send some of that money to Wyoming? People who work in clean energy and climate change tend to vote Democratic. Also, creating a lot of high-paying jobs will make the whole community more prosperous.

I'm looking at the Californication of Colorado here, that turned Colorado blue, and thinking that Wyoming is the logical next step for Californians who are being evicted by climate change. If there were jobs in Wyoming, I bet they'd go there. What do you think?

Comments

[lunabee34]

Thanks for linking to this!

[boxofdelights]

It is an interesting demonstration of how much the reader brings to the text. Justice Scalia claimed to be an originalist. I'm sure he sincerely believed that his interpretation of the Constitution was based only on what the Founding Fathers actually wrote. But Mystal reads the same documents, and points out that the right to individual self-defense that Scalia read into the Second Amendment is not mentioned anywhere there. The justification for militias that does appear in Madison's correspondence is the necessity for slavers to suppress slave revolts.

[lunabee34]

Oh wow. That's so frustrating because it's not what is commonly taught about the need for militia at all, but it makes terrible, terrible sense.

[boxofdelights]

And it makes sense that Scalia can't acknowledge it, right? For Scalia, slavery was a terrible mistake, that got corrected, so America can be what it was supposed to be. We can't let it continue to have effects on us. It was wrong, we corrected it, let's move on.

But that doesn't work for Mystal. If slavery had no consequences he wouldn't be here, but he is, and he can't stop seeing all the other effects that still exist.

[lunabee34]

Nods nods

[loligo]

I fantasize about this scenario on a regular basis.

[boxofdelights]

Would you want to move to Wyoming though? Assuming you and your spouse could find jobs there.

[silveradept]

That certainly seems like the way to go - put incentives to lure Democratic voters to those states where there's more power per person and then let them do things that will bring infrastructure and jobs to the area, along with energy resilience and cheaper power, potentially.

You just have to get the first set of people to go there and stick it out until everyone else does as well.

[boxofdelights]

That's what my daughter said when I told her this thought: she wouldn't want to go first. But if there were high-paying jobs, the organic grocers and yoga studios would follow!

[silveradept]

They absolutely would follow. To get the first batch out there, the lure would be high wages, great infrastructure, and low cost of living until everyone else came following after. The billionaires would want to adopt a town and pour their money into improving all the utility systems and the Internet access until it was suitable, and then get people to move there with the promises of adorable housing and good utilities, and then do the same thing with the next town over, until you had that critical mass of people who would follow on. (And, likely, gentrify, because of course that will happen.)