The People v. the U.S. Senate

Anti-majority Senate Republicans.

The structure of Congress was a pragmatic deal struck by the authors of the U.S. Constitution to induce smaller states to ratify the document and create the United States of America.  The principal carrot for small states was the U.S. Senate which would give small states equal power with large states.  Its very structure was anti-democratic, but it was the sweetener needed to achieve ratification.  Fast forward to today and the imbalance of power in control of legislation and important confirmations is now firmly controlled by a minority of the population that has little acceptance for changing demographics, social norms and/or a fast changing economy.  The recent Kavanaugh confirmation underscored the problem.  The result: some are calling for abolition of the Senate or a major restructuring to end small state obstructionism.  Here are highlights from a piece in The Atlantic:  

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 50–48, with one senator absent and one abstaining. Only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted with the solidly Republican majority, which represented just 44 percent of the country’s population. Indeed, when Americans last voted for their senators (over a period of six years), Democrats won the popular vote by more than 8 percent. It’s that disproportionality—and the reality that a majority of the country’s population is represented by just 18 senators—that is driving concerns about the Senate’s ability to function as a representative body in a changing America.

The Senate is embedded within the Constitution as few other institutions are, with a special clause that some believe makes it immune to the standard amendment process. Adding more diverse states is one solution — Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and other U.S. territories would likely send Democrats to Capitol Hill if they gained representation, somewhat balancing the chamber.

And both Puerto Rico and D.C. seem agreeable: Last month, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, stepped up his campaign for statehood, while the district’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is a passionate advocate of admitting D.C.

[B]oth those who want abolition and those who want more modest, but nonetheless significant, changes agree: The Senate is increasingly unrepresentative of the American populace.

The Republican Party has an inbuilt advantage in Senate races. Since Democratic voters tend to cluster in cities and their inner suburbs, Republicans are more spread out over large geographic areas. While rural strength in a state like New York or California counts for little in Senate races dominated by large coastal cities, the abundance of sparsely populated, geographically vast states in the West and Midwest is a big help for Republican domination in the chamber. Wyoming, for instance, reliably returns GOP senators despite having about as many people as Albuquerque.

There’s also demography: The states Trump won, which tend to be more Republican in general, are also whiter. In the political world of 2018, that makes them harder to win for Democrats, though the party holds numerous safe seats in heavily white northeastern states in which the GOP is not seriously competitive. The most diverse states are also the largest, and, therefore, the most underrepresented on a per capita basis.

Senate critics also contend that smaller states tend to be more conservative, while larger ones are more likely to back Democrats, though this argument is belied by the nine largest states, which are represented by an even number of Democrats and Republicans. Yet even if partisanship is put aside, those nine account for more than half of the country’s population.

While other countries have disproportionately selected legislatures—Norway intentionally allocates extra voting power to rural areas, for instance, and Canada’s provinces have stark differences in parliamentary representation—the Senate’s extreme imbalance is essentially unique in the global pantheon of representative democracy.

On June 11, 1787, Roger Sherman rose in a Philadelphia room filled with other landowning men and recommended a bicameral legislature for America, with one house apportioned by population and the other apportioned equally among the states. This deal—the Connecticut Compromise, as it would later be known—has organized American legislative governance for nearly two and a half centuries. Sherman’s original proposal was not, of course, designed to boost popular representation.

The Senate would express the interests of the states, conceived of as sovereign entities unto themselves rather than as a wholly cohesive nation. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the spring of 1913, senators were elected by the legislature of their respective state.

Those who want to eliminate the Senate wholesale argue that the ship has sailed on states as sovereign entities. The federalism, they contend, fundamentally undermines basic democratic due process and the voting rights of actual people.

Daniel Lazare, a journalist who specializes in American politics and has written three books on constitutional issues, argued in Jacobin in 2014 that the Senate is “one of the most cockeyed systems of minority rule in history, one that allows tiny coteries to hold the entire country ransom until their demands are met.”

Senate abolition, no matter its support among left-wing groups, remains a remote prospect in the near term. Constitutional and political hurdles are massive, and despite gaining traction among many in the left-wing commentariat, popular support would likely be more elusive. However, stopgap measures—subdividing large states, for instance, or adding U.S. territories and the District of Columbia to the union—may be more viable and could address some Senate critics’ most immediate concerns.

But calls for radical reform can be useful in themselves. Issues of voting rights and disproportionality generally gain traction when attention is turned toward issues like the relative representativeness of the Senate. Electoral change—including measures to combat voter suppression and gerrymandering, or even more fundamental changes like instituting a proportional voting system for House elections—may become more palatable to the electorate at large as massive systemic changes like Senate abolition are discussed. “It’s always good to have a John the Baptist out there, painting a picture of what could be, but people change their minds relatively slowly,” Beyer says.

But in the near term, Democrats may not need John the Baptist—what they need may be Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and time. To rearrange electoral geography, American history would suggest that time is the most critical.