What's Wrong with the United States Senate?

Wednesday, 12th January 2011

Plenty, obviously and not the least of it is the sort of person that gets elected to the world's most insufferably self-regarding body. But what really annoys high-class liberals such as Hendrik Hertzberg and Ezra Klein is the Senate's supposed lack of democratic legitimacy. Well, that's what you get when you choose to build a Republic. Jonathan Bernstein sums up the complaint, thus:

Now, I happen to agree with Hertzberg (and nearly everyone else) that the two-per-state Senate is a terrible idea, and does not at all comport with generally accepted ideas of democracy.

Bernstein acknowledges that this ain't changing any time soon. Or ever, for that matter. But allow me to make a modest case for the equal representation of the many and various states in the upper chamber. At the risk of seeming facile, the clue lies in the country's very name: the United States of America. Before there could be unum there had to be pluribus. The states, by definition, are the constituent components and once you think of the country as a bottom-up rather than top-down entity then the iniquities of equal representation in one half of Congress ceases to seem quite so dreadful and become instead entirely reasonable.

And for good reason. There's an argument, in any case and in any country, for checking the principle legislature and since small states and their interests can easily be overlooked in the House of Representatives it's useful that they be given greater voice in the upper chamber, even if this means they themselves may sometimes exert undue influence. Viewed from that perspective, it's not at all unreasonable for Wyoming to have the same representation as California.

Similarly, I have little problem with the smaller parts of the United Kingdom enjoying marginally greater representation at Westminster than a strict calculation applied on a per capita basis would warrant. Ditto within the European Union and at the Council of Ministers. Majorities - that is big countries or populous states - enjoy great advantages anyway and their interests are most unlikely to be overlooked or even thwarted all that often. But offering smaller players some greater measure of protection is a useful compromise even if it dents the purity of the democratic ideal.

And in the American context it boils down to whether you think states actually count as players with discernible interests of their own or whether you think they're simply an anachronistic inconvenience stymying the great march of progress. Well maybe they are but so be it and too bad.

(Relatedly, the argument over the Second Amendment has something of this quality. Sure, there's the bit about a well-regulated militia and all that. But you can't have a militia without a gun-owning citizenry. So the militia part of it - often held as a reason to impose greater measures of gun-control - is subordinate to the right of the people to bear arms. Similarly, the states are the necessary bit for there to be a single United States government and so their rights to representation as equals seem entirely reasonable to me. Democracy be damned, anyway.)

Filed under: Americana (479 more articles) , US Senate (10 more articles) , Washington (169 more articles)

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Charles Barry

January 12th, 2011 11:23pm Report this comment

Alex is dead right that equal representation in the Senate won't change ever.

The equal representation of the states in the Senate is unique amongst all parts of the Constitution that it cannot be amended by the usual constitutional processes. Instead, it requires both an amendment and the consent of every state affected by any change.

So to make the Senate more representative (in the mould of the House), it would require the unanimous consent of all the states, because any such change would alter the equal representation of all the states. Only if all the 10 or so small states all decided to act altruistically rather than in their self-interest would such a change occur. The likelihood of this is, well, never.

ndm

January 12th, 2011 11:36pm Report this comment

-- Similarly, I have little problem with the smaller parts of the United Kingdom enjoying marginally greater representation at Westminster than a strict calculation applied on a per capita basis would warrant.

One problem is that over-representation in the Senate is not marginal but in some cases is almost two orders of magnitude. A Britain which had an upper house with 25 members from each of the four nations would look significantly different than the Britain of today. The population disparity between England and Northern Ireland can't be too different from that of California and Alaska.

DDS -- NRA Life Member

January 12th, 2011 11:38pm Report this comment

I'm appalled that such learned men as these still think that The United States of America is, was, or was ever intended to be, a democracy. The founders made it no secret that what they were building was a Federal Republic. Perhaps the gentlemen slept through that lesson in their high school civics class.

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