ANOTHER REASON TO REVISIT BAKER V. CARR?

Politically and economically, you can think of New York as actually two states, maybe three, lashed together. Downstate is rich, funded by high-skilled and high-productivity industries like finance and advertising. It’s also liberal. Western and northern New York are poor, either rural or deindustrializing, and conservative.

In theory, this should be a good deal for New Yorkers outside the downstate area; they should enjoy high levels of government spending funded by richer people downstate. Instead, in some ways it’s proven a disaster. Decades of population decline mean that Democrats control the state assembly and drive policies — like the Medicaid financing system — that work well enough downstate, but prove disastrous in the rest of the state.

The heavy regulatory and tax burden on those poorer counties makes their problems worse. As population has declined, jobs and young skilled workers have fled, while the old and needy remained. Anyone thinking of moving back (and lots of exiles want to), faces not only the burden of finding a job, but also of paying the taxes that downstate politics require.

When the problem gets too bad, the state legislature tosses some money at those declining counties. But the fundamental problem doesn’t go away, and they continue to slowly strangle under a government burden designed for the politics and economics of a richer place.

This is why Congress should take action under the Guarantee Clause to ensure that state politics aren’t totally dominated by small-but-densely-populated urban centers.