Fundamentally, a union of states is in trouble when any
federal action is predicated on consent from the governor of the largest state.
The U.S. Senate was proposed precisely to give the smaller states a means to
thwart the domination of a few large ones in legislating at the federal level.
The European Council’s qualified majority vote mechanism and the unanimity
requirement on “big ticket items” such as taxation permit a supermajority of
states to reject the proposal of a few large ones. The U.S. House of
Representatives and the European Parliament offer no such avenue for small
states because those chambers are based solely on population. California and
New York, and France and Germany, can through their peoples’ representatives
have great clout in those bodies. Therefore, bicameral (i.e., two chambers)
legislatures are distinctly advantageous at the federal level of a union of
states.
The full essay is at "Essays on the E.U. Political Economy," available at Amazon.
