What possible reason can there be for still having states?

In our toxic political century, we've been hearing a lot about the original intent of the founding fathers, who we now just call the founders (even though they were all men).

Original intent is important to conservatives, who seem to believe that such wonderful things happened in the late 18th century that we should do our best to live exactly the way the founders did.

That's about as goofy as it gets, but they need to believe that because if they don't, all they're doing is looting the federal Treasury with tax cuts for the rich.

The fact is, their original intent was to do what they had to do to get 13 very different states to agree on enough things to surrender some of their sovereignty to form a central government.

That's why slavery was legal and why slaves were counted as only three-fifths of a person for population counts.


Actually, considering that they were writing a constitution for a coastal nation of about 3 million people, their work has held up surprisingly well.

With one exception.

States.

More than 225 years since the Constitution was put together and ratified, states are about as useful as powdered wigs, buggy whips and Ben Franklin's scrotum.

New Jersey

There is just no reason anymore that an American citizen living in Texas shouldn't be governed by the same laws as one living in Michigan or Oregon. If you asked a man in 1790 about his citizenship, he might tell you he was a citizen of Virginia, or possibly Massachusetts. Although if he was from New Jersey he might say he was from New York.

Yeah, even back then.

But if you ask someone in 2014 about his citizenship, he would be far more likely to say he was an American. Unless he was from Texas.

I'm not a Georgian and I wasn't a Californian or a Virginian. I am an American, and I think my rights should be the same no matter what state I visit.

I don't think children should get a crummy education because their state doesn't want to spend the money. Every American child should have the same right to a crummy education in states that do spend the money.

 A reasonable change?

When I speak of eliminating states, I don't mean completely. Mostly I would get rid of two things -- different laws and the way we do representation. It's completely ridiculous these days that Alaska has the same number of senators as California.

I've written before that if you start with the smallest states and work your way up, you could get 51 votes in the Senate -- a majority -- from men and women representing about 20 percent of the people. I'm all for eliminating the tyranny of the majority, but this is ridiculous.

Now that we're no longer a tiny little country, we really should elect both representatives and senators through the concept of one person, one vote. Otherwise you've got a guy married to a sheep in Wyoming whose vote counts as much as the entire city of Santa Monica.

So maybe you rejigger the map and then call the different areas "districts" or "departments" instead of states. You can still govern at the district level and even the local level, and of course some laws would be different based on geography.

Obviously grazing rights matter more in the open west than in New York City. But the basic rights should be the same. An American should get the same level of education, be able to marry who she wants or get a driver's license the same whether she lives in Detroit or Des Moines, Minneapolis or Mississippi.

I'll bet the founders would agree. I've heard they were pretty smart guys who could have adapted to the 21st century without much trouble.

Especially Ben Franklin.