Re: The Joy Of Democracy

On 10/24/24 7:09 PM, Joel wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On 23 Oct 2024 19:46:30 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>

Do you know how the Electoral College is formed?

>
I know about the “Three-Fifths Compromise”. That allowed the
slave-owning states to get more say in the election of the President
augmented to some extent by their slave population, without those
slaves getting any actual votes. Clever, don’t you think?

  It was fucked up, and then they had the audacity to secede because it
was threatened.  Fuck crackers.
 

Washington DC gets 3 votes despite not being a state.

>
I wonder why there is so much opposition to it becoming a state ...
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_Voting_Rights_Amendment>

  It would be a black-plurality, highly safely Democratic state, so the
redneck states will never agree to it.

Specifically because it would be +2 Senate seats favoring Democrats.
Same holds true for Puerto Rico on the question of Statehood.
Plus there's the other longstanding racism element of this which was alluded to ... its why we literally gave away the colony of the Philippines in 1946.
US President Taft (1909-1913) favored Statehood; he had previously been their Governor and believed that they were unready for self-government. But ultimately, the combination of Filipinos not being white and English speaking, and by 1939 being 16 million “colored people” in population, it was seen as too big/populous/obstinate/hard for whites to take over (see: Manifest Destiny), resulting in the territory being cut loose.
Plus there were probably some thinking further ahead, into the balance of political power ramifications in elections:  at today's population, the Philippines would've been a prize with ~138 Electoral College votes.
<https://www.pacificislandtimes.com/post/2020/06/11/why-the-philippines-couldn-t-be-a-us-state>
-hh