Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

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PaulDavisThe1st

wikipedia:

>The region acquired the name Wyoming by 1865, when Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill to Congress to provide a "temporary government for the territory of Wyoming".

> The region's population grew steadily after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, and the federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868

> Once government-sponsored expeditions to the Yellowstone country began, reports by Colter and Bridger, previously believed to be apocryphal, were found to be true. That led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which became the world's first national park in 1872. Nearly all of Yellowstone National Park lies within the far northwestern borders of Wyoming.

> In August 1886, the U.S. Army was given administration of the park

> Democrats and Republicans alike in Wyoming Territory agreed by the late 1880s that it was time their territory became a state. Statehood was attractive to the territory’s businessmen and politicians, as it offered them much more local control over land and water issues

https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/wyoming-statehood

> Gov. Warren called a special election for Nov. 5, 1889. The Constitution passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 6,272 in favor to 1,903 against. [ this at a time where the total population of the state was around 60,000 ]

>Cheyenne businessman and rancher Francis E. Warren, was appointed to a second stint as territorial governor in 1889, replacing Moonlight. Warren strongly supported statehood. [...] (Territorial governors and other top officials were appointed by the president.

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I don't find your view of Wyoming's history persuasive. The territories were created and managed by the US federal government, with every expectation that they would either become states or simply remain US-controlled territory. They were never independent pseudo-states, and if they remained a territory, they had even less control over their own destiny than if they became a state.

You're certainly more educated on the history than I am. My main point is that the smaller states would have never agreed to a representative democracy which made their desires 100% irrelevant.

There's enough small states like that to get some leverage. WY is one example, but there's many more. And as we saw in the civil war, states and people were willing to go to war to defend their interests, whatever those interests were.

I simply can't imagine the feds trying to conquer Wyoming. There are no cities to burn. There would be a rifle behind every shrub-brush, and the casualties would be so massive, and so demoralizing, that they would be forced to allow those states to form their own federation. It would be a high-desert Vietnam situation.

edit: I'm actually so ignorant on the history that I didn't realize WY became a state in 1890. The Great Compromise was in 1787. So this matter was already long settled by the time they had a chance to become a state - this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control.

> this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control

Appeals to history like that don't work for me. You could just as easily say:

"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where only white men got to vote"

or

"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where slavery was legal and a slave was counted as 3/5 of a human being"

The emancipation proclamation, and later civil rights movements have changed those things in an explicit way. But I would argue (and I'm not alone in this) that many other legislative and judicials changes since the end of the civil war have undermined the historical notion of "a federation of states with independent control".

I don't disagree that it would be better if we were to explicitly modify the constitution to reflect these changes. But modifying the constitution is very tricky to do (a major defect in the constitution IMO), and so for now we have to deal a de-facto situation rather than one necessarily reflected in the words of an amendment or three.

The feds have never (so far) been faced with "trying to conquer Wyoming". As outlined in the quotes I gave last time, the federal government created the Wyoming territory, appointed its territorial governors, voted on whether to allow it to become a state. The federal government owns most of the land in Wyoming too. This story repeats for more or less the entirety of the western states. It is purely an imagined fiction that these were once sovereign independent nations that finally decided to join the continental union. They were paid for and controlled by the union until they decided to be states instead of territories, at which time they had more self-determination in many important ways (but less in others).

This process is more or less unrelated to the formation of the states that existed at the time of the DoI. These states had already existed for 40-100 years in various ways, and had never been part of anything other than the dominion of the British monarchy.

I would wager that even had the constitution not granted WY it's 2 senators for its 60k people, the handful of those who voted in 1889 would still have decided to become a state (the alernative was not some glorious independent future, but simply remaining as a territory).

Nice chatting with you, thanks for humoring me. If we don't modify the constitution legally, how do you propose we do it? I am aware that the constitution doesn't mean much of anything in the courts these days. But how is this different from the law of the west? The powerful make the rules with no accountability.

Historically, people have burned the government to the ground and started with a brand new document. I suppose that's what most people are advocating when they wish to change the constitution in a way which it does not allow.

If not by law, how is it decided? Can I decide? I suppose I can if I become a supreme court justice or someone like Bill Gates.

The founding fathers certainly knew that the constitution would be hard to change - that's the whole point. They saw what happened to past governments with wimpy foundations. I really can't see the point of keeping the constitution at all if we are going to violate it due to "current sentiments" - it's all a sham.

Perhaps they would have voted for becoming a state even without their 2 senators, but that seems far from certain to me. Like the American Revolution itself, I just can't see Wyoming people sitting down and taking what's given to them.

Of course, my predictions about the future of America are different from most. I think we've only just begun to hear the rumblings of a deep conflict. This election was not the climax, but the prologue.

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