Already South Dakota ha[s] no income tax, no capital gains tax, and no estate tax. Why not make the state even more hospitable to the wealthy by repealing something called “the rule against perpetuities” and rendering family trusts immortal?… South Dakota’s lax financial regulations are … fantastic enablers of illegal or brazenly immoral activity unrelated to tax-dodging...
We’ve put up with this moral sewage long enough. Let’s abolish South Dakota by merging it into North Dakota. If Congress has the power under the admissions clause to admit new states, shouldn’t it also have the power to dissolve them? Everybody makes mistakes! As Jonathan Chait argued some years back in [The New Republic] about Delaware, the Mount Rushmore state long ago forfeited through bad behavior any claim on our allegiance or respect… Now the place is just 77,000 square miles of undead family fortunes.
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Timothy Noah, a wonderful writer, in TNR.
October 7th, 2021 at 12:00PM
There’s a counterpoint on Power Line. We could take the offer seriously, and undo the Connecticut Compromise. Merge Rhode Island into Connecticut, and Vermont back into New York.
October 7th, 2021 at 12:34PM
Stephen: And Mr UD has argued that Maryland should take over Delaware because “look at a map. Just look at a map.”
October 8th, 2021 at 9:45AM
Mark Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes has more than anyone might want to know about the shape of states, although I can think of at least one New Republic contributor who ought to have read it.
Delaware, as well as New Jersey, began as Dutch colonies. The boundary of Delaware is a four-league radius circle centered on the Dutch Reformed Church at New Castle, to keep those Quakers at bay, continuing as the meridian tangent at the westernmost extent of that circle south to the latitude of Fenwick Island, thence east, to keep the Catholics at bay. Lord Baltimore was under the impression that Cape Henlopen, the beginning of Chesapeake Bay, was at that latitude. That’s why your Rehoboth is in Delaware rather than Maryland!
The Framers apparently saw the Connecticut Compromise as easier than redrawing the state boundaries to equalize populations and land areas as part of the Constitution. But subsequent Congresses attempted to equalize conditions among territories with sufficient population to become states. In the first round, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all got space along the Great Lakes (the Maumee River for Toledo, the Calumet River and flat lands for northwest Indiana, and flat lands to run canals for Illinois.) Those were political decisions, done in part to allow those states connections to the Great Lakes and Erie Canal, rather than have their transportation tied to the Cotton South. That lake access came at the expense of Michigan, and an honest-to-Lewis Cass Michigan Militia actually took up arms against Ohio’s surveyors! Not quite as fraught as the Polish Corridor, but the compromise was to take the Upper Peninsula out of Wisconsin Territory (not enough people for a state yet) and it became part of Pure Michigan despite “look at a map.”
Subsequently, equalizing land areas became the objective, which might have made sense before widespread factories and urban agglomeration. Thus, there’s a base line of the north-south section of the Missouri River plus assorted smaller rivers with states configured seven degrees of longitude east to west and three degrees of latitude north to south, counting down from 49. Thus, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma would have been yet another near-quadrilateral but for Texas south of 36 degrees 30 minutes being annexed in under Missouri Compromise provisions. Thus the Oklahoma Panhandle is those 30 minutes of latitude south of the 37th parallel.
The Dakotas might have become states in the Benjamin Harrison administration, but the equal-area principle was in place at the creation of Nebraska before the Civil War.
TMI, I know, but enjoy!
October 8th, 2021 at 4:06PM
Stephen: Thanks! Did not know any of this, and it’s fascinating. I read it to Mr UD, who claimed to know about the circle.
He doubled down on his MD/DE thing by reminding me that the last time we drove into a state park in Delaware – near Rehoboth, natch – and the woman at the entrance said five dollars for in-state, ten for out-of-state, he said, “We’re from Maryland, so that’s in-state.”
October 9th, 2021 at 5:31PM
My compliments to Mr UD, and if I ever buy a season pass for the Wisconsin parks and find myself Up North, maybe I’ll try a variation on that argument at J. W. Wells or Lake Gogebic or Indian Lake, all in Da U.P.
An additional Delaware nugget: that northwest border looks like what you get with a kindergartener learning to use scissors because the initial surveyors weren’t as good as Mason and Dixon!
October 9th, 2021 at 10:15PM
Also, a correction. Cape Henlopen is a logical place to note where the Delaware River estuary becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Chesapeake Bay is the Susquehanna River estuary.