Why Senators Act Like Jerks
We keep a top-secret list at The Horse of all the states in the union, ranked from the smartest to the dumbest. I can’t reveal any of the rankings (except that Oklahoma is the dumbest), but it’s not hard to work out. Just look at whom they send to the U.S. Senate (Inhofe and Coburn, to the everlasting shame of Oklahoma).
Ohio is on the rise, and if they ever get rid of John Boehner in the House and shed three counties in the southern part of the state, they’ll be downright above average.
Our list of the dumbest state legislatures and school boards differs somewhat. Texas and Pennsylvania, for example, are not entirely stupid, but their legislatures are, and in Texas the state board of education is dominated by creationists. They’re not only ignorant, they insist on ignorance as a legacy worth passing on to their kids. Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana have the same problem and may have to be quarantined to protect the national genome.
What brings all this up is the question of your representation in the U.S. Senate.
Every state has two senators, though clearly some should have only one and others shouldn’t be allowed any.
David Leonhardt noted in the Times this week that Nebraska (pop. 1.8 million) has an unemployment rate of 4.8% while Florida (pop. 19 million) has 11.4% unemployed. This means, first, that Nebraskans have one senator per 900,000 people while Floridians have only one senator for each 9 million people — and of those four senators, two of them (Nebraska’s) don’t give two hoots in hell what happens to jobless people.
Why? Because there are only 86,400 unemployed in Nebraska, and their two senators could get enough pork and enough graft from lobbyists to buy every one of them a Mercedes – except, of course, that the senators will keep the money for themselves in case they ever have to hire lawyers.
Jobless people in Florida outnumber Nebraska’s entire population, so why shouldn’t they get one of Nebraska’s Senate seats?
“The chair recognizes the gentleman from the state of joblessness.”
In the bottom six states in terms of population (Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, and Montana) each has less than a million citizens but owns a full complement of two senators.
The top six states average 21 million people each, and they also get two senators per state. Thus it takes 27 smart voters in California or Pennsylvania to balance off the blunders of one ignorant slob in Kansas. (That’s not an insult – they must have at least one.)
This is not to equate large populations with large brains. Texas, when it elected George Bush and then Rick Perry as governor, earned a double dunce cap while tiny Vermont and Delaware were near the head of the class. Nevertheless…
By and large, the most backward states have smaller than average headcounts — except in the Senate.
They are seriously over-represented in Washington and, consequently, lavishly over-funded with federal dollars gushing from backroom horse-trading to buy their ill-gotten Senate votes.
Since this process requires neither intelligence nor judgment and certainly not integrity, even the most ignorant electorates choose Senate place-holders who are otherwise unemployable, undesirable, and of no use whatever back home.
So now you know why the U.S. Senate acts the way it does.
What if we ran our schools that way? Every state would get the same number of teachers. One of them, in Montana, would be leading a classroom discussion of 20 students while a teacher in California or Florida would be shouting over the foot-scraping, squealing, and ring tones of 540 wild animals.
Which, come to think of it, sounds like the current edition of the U.S. congress.
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My old calculus teacher, Doc Wagner, once told the class, “If you want to tell a lie, use an average.” Which I hold to be pretty much true, except in your excellent analysis of the U.S. Senate. It’s hard to imagine a more fertile podium for excellence which is, instead, being used for national ignominy. It seems almost pointless to elect a dunderhead like Inhofe to the Senate, unless you just want to get him out of Oklahoma where he could do serious local damage, and give him to the whole country where he can do serious national damage. He is arguably the stupidest man in the history of the United States Senate. And since we are who we elect, what in heaven’s name does that say for the befuddled citizens of OK? ,,, which, in my view, isn’t.
Comment by Steve Alber — August 16, 2010 @ 7:55 pm
Well said. My friends in Tulsa, whose son is a lone voice of sanity in the Oklahoma state senate, assure me that our ratings are correct — that Oklahoma is the dumbest state — and that your rating of Inhofe is correct as well. Of course Inhofe’s fellow OK senator Coburn is only narrowly above that level, as are Demint, Kyl, Vitter, and a few others in competing dumb states. Yet somehow tiny Vermont produces Bernie Sanders, one of the best.
Comment by Al — August 18, 2010 @ 3:17 pm