Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate…
Ultimately it’s because the US is a bad compromise. The original intent was for the US to be a loose confederation of somewhat independent countries similar to how the EU is currently structured, however the civil war showed that some of those States couldn’t be trusted enough to not treat their citizens like shit so the federal government had to be strengthened. This reduced it from a loose confederation into a mostly centralized government but with a bunch of territories that function more as testing grounds for stuff that isn’t quite ready to be promoted to the federal level.
The Senate is an awkward leftover of that transition. Under the original design it somewhat made sense, you could even argue that the House was the bit that didn’t quite fit under that model because every State was supposed to be equal to every other one. The thought was if you didn’t like the State you were in you could just move to another one. Slavery of course disproved that theory.
Under the post civil war design of the US the Senate is now the piece that doesn’t quite fit because the people are supposed to be the ones in charge now with the States being an awkward hold over from the earlier confederation concept.
So yes, ultimately it probably makes sense to eliminate the Senate and strengthen the House. It’s either that or you fundamentally restructure the powers of the US government again. The States have demonstrated that they can not be trusted with civil rights so at a minimum you would have to make civil rights the exclusive domain of the House leaving things like economic policies and trade to the Senate. What we have now is just awkward and doesn’t really work for anyone, the civil war was never really handled properly and it’s about time we cleaned up from that properly instead of taking a bunch of half measures and kicking the can down the road.
i gotta admit, the last decade sure feels like the confederacy has won a long, simmering war.
You think we handled that badly, check out operation paperclip for even more bad news.
Well, at least the war on terror and the war on drugs both went well, right?
"Oh, those weren’t ‘wars’, just the US government criminalizing and attacking different minorities?..
Oh beans.
We’ll get 'em in round three."
Additionally, the House was weakened with the Apportionment act of 1911. Instead of growing with the population as it was originally designed, it fixed the number of congresspeople at 435. This skews the electoral college such that the less densely populated states have more power over presidential elections.
And most of those same states still treat their citizens like shit.