In the wake of the Kavanaugh cloture vote, a number of observers, mostly on the left, called for admitting new states to the Union. The idea, as I understand it, is that if, say, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were states rather than, respectively, a federal district and an unincorporated territory of the United States, the outcome of the cloture vote might have been different, as both states could be counted on to back liberal policies. I’m not so sure this is true, whether or not admitting these two new states would be sound, for reasons I’ll explain.
But first, it must be said that there is ample precedent for admitting new states to the Union to either preserve or alter the political balance of the Senate. Consider, for example, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when Missouri was admitted as a slave state while Maine, which had hitherto been a district of Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state. By admitting the two states at once, the balance of power between slave states and free states in the Senate was preserved. The Compromise of 1850 was similarly designed to ease tensions between North and South. In the decades following the Civil War, when the Republican party was ascendant, many sparsely-populated states were admitted to the Union in part to shore up the GOP’s dominance, as Morris Fiorina noted in his recent book Unstable Majorities.
And so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that some on the left are calling for the admission of new states to tilt the Senate in their direction. One approach would be to take a large liberal state, such as California, and to slice it up into several states, each of which would be entitled to two senators, as the political scientist David Faris recommended last year in a tart column urging Democrats to embrace “ruthless procedural hardball.” Further, he has called for admitting not just the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico but also the Virgin Islands and Guam. Others have made similar arguments without necessarily sharing Faris’s goal of shifting the Senate leftward. In 1998, Michael Lind called for the carving up of all populous states in an essay titled “75 Stars,” the point of which was that doing so would make the Senate more democratic, regardless of the impact on its political coloration.
To return to the Supreme Court, though, I wonder if it really is true that admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would make a material difference when it comes to the politics of abortion, a central concern of Judge Kavanaugh’s liberal critics. Judging by data from 2014 (dated, I’ll admit), an overwhelming 70 percent majority of adults in the District favor a permissive approach to abortion. That sentiment was shared by only 48 percent of adults in Wyoming, the least populous state and a frequent target of abuse from those who rue the fact that it elects just as many senators as more populous California. Puerto Rico, however, is a different story. According to the Pew Research Center, “roughly three-quarters (77 percent) of Puerto Ricans living on the island said that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, compared with half (50 percent) of island-born Puerto Ricans living on the mainland and 42 percent of Puerto Ricans born and living on the mainland.” That is, on abortion, Puerto Ricans living on the island are more conservative than District residents are liberal. The net effect of admitting both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico on the politics of abortion might therefore be a wash.
Granted, liberals might then move to admit another unincorporated territory, such as Guam, home to 159,358 residents, or just over a quarter of the number of people living in Wyoming. As it turns out, though, Guamanians appear to hold very conservative views on abortion as well, as evidenced by widespread support for restrictive abortion legislation. Perhaps the U.S. Virgin Islands (with a population of 104,901) will come through for partisans of abortion rights? Hope springs eternal.
One suspects that some of our friends on the left have convinced themselves that because Puerto Ricans, Guamanians, and U.S. Virgin Islanders don’t line up with their understanding of what critics of abortion look like, voters in these unincorporated territories would necessarily embrace a pro-abortion stance. There is reason to believe otherwise.
All that said, I’m skeptical of the wisdom of admitting the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the politics of abortion aside. To give proper political representation to District residents, the federal government could simply return most of the land originally ceded by Maryland, just as it returned the land ceded by Virginia in 1846. Maryland would become a somewhat more populous state, and its new residents would be incorporated into its congressional districts. As for Puerto Rico, it is worth noting that the island is home to a movement for national independence, supporters of which routinely boycott elections, including referendums on the territory’s future status. That strikes me as a good reason to tread lightly: The threat of secession is not to be taken lightly. Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, meanwhile, seem mostly satisfied with their current arrangements, though I can see why some conservatives might want ardently pro-life Guamanians electing senators.
But carving up existing states? That’s an idea I could get behind. I’ll bet California’s interior and the northern third of Florida are home to many politicians who’d greatly enrich “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”