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People are dunking on this tweet, but there's the germ of a good argument here and it's worth pulling out. The problem is that Kentucky is trying to have things both ways, and people are rightfully sick of it. Allow me to explain. https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/status/1254579372876615680
The US has always had a weird tension at its heart. Are we an alliance of independent states, each equal in importance and dignity, or are we one country?
If we're one country, then Bharara's tweet is rightfully verboten. You can't and shouldn't deny your countrymen fiscal support that they're entitled to. If we have a moral obligation to pay for Medicaid for poor New Yorkers, then that same obligation exists for poor Kentuckians.
But if we're one country, then the existence of the Senate starts to seem totally unjustifiable. After all, all people are created equal, and we're united in one collective entity with equal obligations to each other--South Dakotans and Californians alike.
It's wildly unfair to give South Dakotans more weight in governance than Californians, but that's what the Senate does. Now for a long time, this was tolerable.
Part of it is that the stakes were low. It's similar to how nobody cares that New Zealand and Japan have the same votes in the UN--because the UN doesn't really affect many people, relatively speaking. When the federal govt was small, the Senate could be ignored.
This changed in the Depression and WWII. That was the point we realized that you can't operate a modern economy without a coherent national regulatory state, national-level redistribution of wealth, etc.
Federal spending in the post-1945 era was dramatically higher than in pre-1932 times; it never returned to normal. Not coincidentally, this was the time when the South finally started to catch up with the rest of the country in economic terms.
But for a time, the tension of the Senate could still be ignored, largely because levels of polarization were extremely low. The rural-urban divide didn't cleave neatly along party lines, mainly because the South was still electing Democrats even though the urban north was too.
Like, it's genuinely weird that Al Smith and Theodore Bilbo would be in the same party; the political economy of the coalitions that elected them was wildly different. It proved unsustainable.
So towards the end of the 20th century, you saw the rural-urban divide start to be reflected in politics. Two antagonistic, morally incompatible worldviews, reinforced by partisan identity, lifestyle, and almost every other cleavage in society (Ezra Klein's book is good here).
And now we have what is technically one nation, with mutual bonds to one another, but where one political coalition has been given an unfair and politically relevant advantage. So Kentucky gets all the benefits of living in a united single nation (economic support from NY).
But it also gets all the benefits of living in a confederation of equal states with fewer mutual obligations to each other (equal representation in the Senate). People are rightfully pissed off that Mitch McConnell is getting to have it both ways. That's a fair reaction!
