Not so supreme.

• Author: Ryan, Matt
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

I appreciated the series of articles on the Supreme Court in your July issue. But while the proposition advanced by Mark Tushnet in Nick Gillespie's interview ("Not So Supreme") that "society's going to be pretty much where it would've been if the courts hadn't said a word about it" may apply to abortion, pot, and sodomy, it does not apply to the Court's tinkering with states' basic governance.

The "one man, one vote" decision has put the states into a one-size-fits-all straitjacket when it comes to organizing their legislatures. It denies them the ability to use the same rationale as was used to set up the U.S. Senate by giving a considerable weight to geographic representation. This may mean little to the flatlanders who live in the East, but to those who live in the and West, it has meant that in states like Colorado the water flows to urban concentrations east of the front range at the expense of the Western slope. It means that sparsely populated eastern Washington is hamstrung by a Growth Management Act that was written for sprawl-averse, population-rich Puget Sound Basin.

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