Some background: the US has a Senate and a House of Representatives. As you may or may not remember from your 10th-grade American History class, this was a compromise between the states with small populations (who favored an equal number of seats for each state) and the large states (who favored seats based on population). Eventually Roger Sherman masterminded the Connecticut Compromise, which led to our bicameral federal legislature.*

As you might expect given the bicameral nature of England’s Parliament, the colonies usually had a sort of bicameral legislature, with a representative assembly and a council of high-ranking government officials. (To be honest, I’m pretty much going off the wiki page here as I have no particular recollection of the nature of colonial governments beyond hazy remembrances of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. And apparently, according to wikipedia, Pennsylvania didn’t have a bicameral legislature until 1790.) Now, the need for a bicameral legislature at the federal level is clear: the US Constitution provides for a federal government with a certain amount of deference to the individual states, with the equal representation of the Senate protecting the smaller states from being overrun. One could certainly take issues with this approach, but it’s definitely justifiable.

However, there’s no real federal impulse within a state, so having two houses is just silly, even in theory. People have made arguments on similar grounds to the ones made at the federal level, suggesting that a big city would have too much influence on the rest of the state, but a state isn’t a federation, and no sovereignty is shared between state and county or state and city in the same way that power is shared between the federal government and the states. A state is just a mass of people. Obviously a small town will have different interests from a big city, but that doesn’t mean that small towns should have outsized power in the same way that small states do.

Secondly, this notion was completely blown away (rightly or wrongly) by Reynolds v. Sims, a 1964 Supreme Court decision which, following on the heels of Baker v. Carr, ruled that state legislatures (and both houses) had to have districts proportional to population—the famous “one man, one vote” principle. In other words, having a bicameral legislature became completely and utterly pointless.** It adds extra cost and complexity—why do I need a state representative and a state senator? The extra salaries for the politicians and staffers are unnecessary. Bills can pass through one house, then get hung up in the other one. It’s just plain wasteful.

Unfortunately, politicians have no real incentive to take away their jobs, so a massive wave of unicameralism is unlikely to sweep the nation. But it’d be nice if it did.

* I was just thinking that there should be a sequel to 1776 called 1787. I’d go see it.

** In theory, I suppose some sort of party-based proportional representation, with one house operating like current houses, and the other with every party receiving votes based on its proportion of the vote. But I see no reason why Democrats and Republicans would allow any breach of their two-party system.

Why does this misconception arise? I really have no idea. My copy of the World Almanac says that Grover Cleveland is considered the 22nd and 24th president due to a ruling by the State department, but a search of their website turns up nothing of the sort. And even if the State department says so, that’s not a very good reason. I’ll certainly grant that there have been 44 presidencies, but definitely not 44 presidents.* I call on Americans, and upon people of good sense everywhere, to take matters into their own hands and refuse to submit to the nonsense perpetrated by, well, whoever the hell is perpetrating this nonsense–I really have no idea who they are. But next time you hear people call Obama the 44th president, confront them. Tell them only 43 men have been president. Explain how silly it is to count Grover Cleveland twice–was he two different people? Of course he wasn’t. In time, I fervently hope we can overcome this idiocy and prove to the rest of the world that we Americans actually can count to 43 and 44 without screwing up.

* Note for the terribly pedantic: under the 25th Amendment, George W. Bush temporarily relinquished his authority as President because he had to be sedated for colonoscopies, once in 2002 and once in 2007. But Dick Cheney was only the “Acting President of the United States,” so don’t try to claim there have been 44 Presidents that way. Also, George H.W. Bush served as Acting President of the United States during a surgery performed on Ronald Reagan in 1985, but that’s irrelevant since he became the next president anyway.