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…
It is absolutely absurd that people in Wyoming get 2 Senators, while California has the same.
California has ~66x more people in it.
Yes, I realize back in colonial times, the idea of having a state and its interests considered as “equal” with each other was a thing, but this is a sadly dated notion. Back in those times, they were against the idea of parties, too, but we see how that’s gone. Now we have a bunch of red states with hardly any people in it overpowering the representation of huge populations in states like California in a body like the Senate.
If you consider the cluster of mostly flyover areas having almost no one in them, but huge swathes of land and carved up into several states, they have 18 Senators to California’s two. If you add up all the people in: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah…it’s ~18 million, which is still less than half of the population of California, which is ~39 million.
Somewhere there needs to be some kind of notion of rebalancing things and bringing some kind of sanity to the situation. I don’t know the best answer, and I definitely don’t think abolishing the Senate is the answer, but as it stands, it is completely ridiculous. Maybe for every X million you get an extra Senator, say something like every 5 million.
The senate should exist. Giving small areas extra power is a fine compermise. The biggest problem with the senate is not that it gives disproportionate representation, that is the point of it, but that there are many small non-state areas that cannot benefit from it. They should have two senators each if they choose to accept it.
DC is probably the most notable non-state area of the us. Give them statehood if they want it. There are 5 inhabited territories, each of which should have two senators and statehood should they choose to accept it.
The us also has 326 Indian reservations. They are all small inhabited non-state parts of the us. They should each get two senators and statehood should they choose to accept it.
Giving every segment of the united states a place in the senate will fix the issues with it. The most underrepresented places in the senate are not the largest ones, like California as the article claims, but those parts of the country that do not have senators at all. This is a solvable problem.
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.
the civil war was never really handled properly
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.
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.
And most of those same states still treat their citizens like shit.
They work for the corporations and not the people. That should be enough to get rid of them, regardless of proportional representation.
Don’t abolish it, just give it representatives in relation to the states’ number of citizens. The difference from the House would still be that they would represent the states. In some countries, such a Senate’s members are actually bound to vote according to their states’ parliaments decisions.
Better just to abolish it.
The Senate was founded in notions about the “greatness” of Ancient Rome, which was a plutocratic Republic run by the aristocracy. They allowed plebeians later on, which at one point had some influence, but that was always secondary to the interests of the aristocracy.
Makes perfect sense if you look at who the USA was founded for: White, male, Puritan, property-owning slave masters and merchants.
Abolish aristocratic rule all together.
No. The point is to give participation to a) the people on a federal level, I.e. the House of Representatives, and b) the states, especially with regards to laws that directly effects the states, I.e. the Senate.
These are two different kinds of representation and are important to strike a balance between State and Federal powers.
Abolishing the Senate would disempower the states and turn the US into a centrally managed government without any input or representation on the state level.
The current method of having two senators per state (or two electors per state extra for the presidential election) is crap. On that behalf I am with you. But the bicameral system as such is important, and should be fixed instead of abolished.
I don’t know how you get his interpretation. Abolishing the senate puts proportional representation towards majority will, which is true democracy. That along with abolishing the electoral college. It doesn’t centralize anything in and of itself. It puts power where it’s supposed to be, in collective body of the voters. Now if the will of voters is to centralize power, so be it. That’s democracy.
Other countries have this sort of direct democratic parliamentary system. Why does the USA always need to be the special snowflake of the world stage? Answer: it’s to mantain the power of the Epstein class and maintain the agenda of economic imperialism.
As a counterpoint, would you agree that every law Italy has should also apply to Norway?
Put more directly, would you agree there are geographic and climatic concerns in law making such that, i.e. Arizona needs unique laws that aren’t applicable or useful for any other state except perhaps close neighbors?
You could say that new government just wouldn’t blanketly apply laws or that they would use specific language to carve out conditions for specially affected states. But I look at the current US government and I don’t hold much hope for nuance or conditions.
The idea of some mitigating force to prevent domination of small, unique climes and insulated populations by some distant political body is sound. But it is like many things in the US: there is the spirit of something noble that has been made concrete – dense and unwieldy – by grubby plutocrats.
The classic democracy cures all vs democracy doesn’t fix everything. You both are right. (One of those rights has a different meaning though)
The gets into an interesting debate. What if the majority of voters are subject to self-destructive propaganda?
The framers of the US constitution were fearful of “mob rule.”
Well, I’d argue with our current republic, we’re being ruled by a minority opinion based in self-destructive propaganda. So those who ascribe to majority belief get dragged in the opposite direction of progress by the minority.
Direct democracy puts the burden of proof on the minority who disagrees with majority of opinion. If the MAGA platform is so great, then the minority need to convince the majority that disagree with them that it’s the way to go.
Nope. Abolishing instead of reforming the Senate would make the states meaningless. If that is what you want, OK. But you need to understand what you demand.
Abolishing the electoral college is a good idea, indeed. But then it would be wise to reform the office of the president, too, and split it into two jobs, like many other democracies do: a head of government for the “business” end, and a head of state for ceremonial duties.
And while you’re at it, get rid of that stupid “first part the post” system. That’s what rode the US into the deep shit creek in the first place.
Wait until you find out between the discrepancy between House districts across states. Theres a special formula used to calculate the number of districts each state gets but it’s kinda BS and still ends up with unfair distribution.
It’s all because it was capped in the early 20th century instead of just being properly rebalanced.
WI has 1 house rep for every 575k people and CA gets 1 for every 750k people. If it was distributed evening based on the state with the lowest population, CA would get something like an extra 15 votes.
*Note - My numbers could be off a bit. I actually did the math myself several months ago. I didn’t look it up to write this, I just am remembering off the top of my head
lemme tell you about the prposed Wyoming rule
Ironically, though, Senate seats are more often in play than House seats, because their borders are set, and they can’t be gerrymandered to advantage one side or the other. Yes, the population of a state can lean one way or the other, but thatis much harder to game.
I would be in favor of keeping the Senate, but balancing out the seats a bit, and removing the requirement that 2 seats go to every state. Large states might get 3 or 4 Senators. Small states may have to share one. You may have some “redistricting” where which state is assigned to which seat changes, but there would no longer be such a discrepancy between Senators and how many people they represent.
US divided up into 50 approximately equal-population states:
Maybe keep the traditional state borders if you like, but divide up the Senate by those boundaries or something like them. Probably still vulnerable to a certain amount of gerrymandering, so that’s a concern, but almost certainly better than our current arrangement.
If this were the solution I would think you’d have to be constantly updating borders. Even if you ignored the inevitable conflicts which would arise of this, this solution itself would spur a certain amount of migration. (Thinking of the current trend of MAGATS moving to cultural “safe-spaces”, places like Florida and Texas.) This kind of radical border redrawing would accelerate these pre-existing trends IMO.
I always kinda liked the idea of having the most populous city of every State elect a senator, directly counterbalancing the rural overrepresentation.
Simply removing the permanent apportionment from 1911 that artificially limits the House would dramatically reduce the effect of the gerrymandering. The House should be nearly 3x as large as it is. The odds of the House being within one or two seats at any given point would basically be zero.
could you do something weird like take the state with the least population, and set that as a floor for every other state? alaska gets 1, california gets round(population/alaska population) ?
This is generally called the “Wyoming Rule”, because since 1990 it’s been the least populous state.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/was-nevada-the-least-populous-state-until-1960/
I’m almost positive CGP Grey did something along these lines, with spreadsheets and everything, but I cannot for the life of me find the video.
There was a multipart series on voting.
Is it one of those?
Possibly, though it would’ve been one of the newer ones.
As it is, the Senate makes representation in Congress less proportional, which I think makes it less democratic.
I have wondered, though, if the Senate could serve a different purpose. I wonder if the Senate could become a body of experts, like medical experts, scientists, and those with extensive knowledge, education and experience in an important field of study. That way, there would be a kind of technocratic body that could push back against or otherwise moderate misinformed policy that might come from voters and their representatives. Just a thought I’ve had.
There already were federal departments for such things.
Cdc. Fda, education department. And a ton more. Trump has just been dismantling them.
There already were federal departments for such things.
That’s true. Those departments have served a similar purpose to what I described.
There’s really no reason, then, not to abolish the Senate, in my opinion.
There can be a reason to leave two different legislative bodies both agree on legislation before it advances, with different rules, as it ensures more deliberation before new laws are sent to the President for signature.
And as I mentioned in another post, there can be value in having an entire state vote for a Senate seat, because then that seat is not so easy to gerrymander.
Perhaps we need a different system than “2 Senators for each state, regardless of size”. But then in order to get that, the current States need to mostly agree, and there are enough small states which will lose too much power.
Or we could fix gerrymandering.
At this point I’m for completely and permanently disenfranchising conservatives at any cost.
When it comes down to it, you can’t make one set of rules for a population this size that everyone will agree with. So there is no correct answer, only the answer that gets the side that shares your opinion a majority.
I wonder how many people would be okay with banning agriculture. Its a terrible idea that would end in so much bloodshed, but like… There have to be people out there that would think it’s what they would like
There certainly are. Think about zoning. There are plenty of places in the US, where agriculture beyond a certain scale is banned. And if you talk about livestock, PETA would love a word. There is just no way to make everyone happy. Sometimes I think contentment is against human nature.