What’s Wrong with the United States Senate?

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.)