What a F*ing Scandal the Senate Is

I know it’s miserable to ask usage questions, but why use an asterisk in the title when there’s none in the text?

The Senate was sort of designed to be a break on democracy, wasn’t it? As Corey is well aware, Senators weren’t even directly elected until, what, 1917? (Sorry, too lazy to look things up.) But I agree the pendulum in recent years has swung too far in the direction of minority-veto, b/c it used not to be the case that you needed 60 votes to do anything (which is the situation the present vote is partly addressing).

Btw, I for one like the fact that CT posters can be profane when they want to be. One of several respects in which CT differs from The Monkey Cage is that never in a zillion years would a poster on the latter blog write “What a fucking scandal [the Senate] is” (though I must confess I’ve stopped reading the Cage since it moved to WaPo — nothing against WaPo per se, I just got out of the habit and never bookmarked the new address).

I don’t understand your point LFC. I think we all agree that the Senate is anti-democratic by design. How is this a defense of its existence?

“Republican John McCain responded to the vote, “Now there are no rules in the United States Senate.””

Considering that McCain was the braggart for his previous deal, which the GOP eagerly violated, double f*ck him.

christian_h
I don’t understand your point LFC. I think we all agree that the Senate is anti-democratic by design. How is this a defense of its existence?

It’s not a defense of its existence, that’s true. So I guess one could argue it’s always been a scandal. But of course Americans are reluctant to think that the hallowed Founders could have gotten some things wrong (apart from, like, slavery). Whether the Senate was a mistake from the beginning is something I don’t have an immediate opinion on right now; from a practical standpoint, something like it was probably necessary to get the required agreement on the Const. (But I’m not sure.)

More to say here, but I’ll leave it at that.

Madison seems to have viewed the Senate as a “lesser evil” than not having a common government at all, since the small states wouldn’t enlist otherwise. Federalist No. 62:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa62.htm

Despite, or because of, the Civil War, there is little reason to believe the small states wouldn’t have the same attitude today. Even if one could get the two-thirds of both houses Article Five requires for referral, ratification of a Senate abolition amendment would still need ratification by three-fourths of the states.

And, yes, that’s not an excuse for the Senate, merely an explanation for its persistence in the teeth of blatant obsolescence.

The senate isn’t great, but it’s not nearly as bad as implied by the 17% figure, because some of the states that are overreperesented tend to elect Democrats and some tend to elect Republicans, and it cancels out. In practice, the senate is much more representative than it would be in the worst possible world (probably more representative than the house, actually).

Having two senators per state is a lot more defensible if you presuppose that senators are elected by state legislatures. Such an election method implies two problematic things: 1) All senators will tend to be from whatever faction dominates their state legislature, and 2) All senators will be focused on their states’ parochial interests–perhaps even spite-driven state rivalries–because they rely on the legislature for reelection and also probably come from the legislature themselves. That means that if a few states dominate the nation population-wise, then a proportional senate will be dominated by a few very homogeneous state delegations. That puts power into just a few hands and greatly reduces the diversity of viewpoints included (at least, included with significant voting power).

I think this is a problem in the EU Council of Ministers at the moment. CM voting is (partly) weighted by population, but each country’s share is cast as a single bloc controlled by the head of government/state. That means that three people (Merkel, Hollande, Cameron) can veto anything and basically dictate policy to the entire union.

If you have representatives elected by the people from districts or proportional representation, then the problem goes away and there is no excuse for continuing the unfair weighting.

“People probably won’t care too much about reforming the Senate as long as it’s not skewing things heavily against either party.”

The thing is, the parties are the way they are because of the anti-Democratic nature of the Senate – and also the electoral college, which has some of the same problems).

It’s the nature of modern politics that urban voters are more politically progressive than rural ones. This isn’t always true, but it’s generally true. In aggregate, the Senate grossly favors rural voters. Because you can’t do much if you don’t have the Senate, the demarcation line between the “left” party and the “right” party is wherever a party has hopes of winning 51 seats.

It’s true that right now the Democrats hold the Senate, but they manage it only because there are conservatives who can win as Democrats in rural states. The line between Democrat and Republican is pretty far to the right because it needs to be in order for Dems to have a shot at national governance.

If the Senate weren’t biased so heavily in favor of rural voters, the Democrats would be a more liberal party and the Republicans would have to be a more moderate party. There would still be two parties and the names would be the same but the perceived “moderate” territory would be quite a bit further to the left.

Consider this:

Conneticut is showing as the 29th largest state, Iowa the 30th. Population wise, Puerto Rico snuggles right in between them. Don’t they deserve a pair of senators?

Washington DC has more people than Vermont or North Dakota. Again, is this fair?

And might mention to the successionists in Colorado, if Manhattan, just Manhattan, succeeded it would be more populus than 12 states, yet New York would only drop one place, from 3rd most populous state to 4th.

With or without the asterisk, this arrangement totally deserves an F-bomb.

The filibuster was only tolerable when it was rarely used, which is to say when it was the nuclear option. The most telling statistic is that of the 168 times it’s been used, 82 have been during Obama’s administration. The Republicans broke it through overuse.

With respect to judicial nominations, it might have been acceptable to treat it like a peremptory challenge, allowing the minority party a limited number of vetoes to be reserved for egregiously objectionable candidates. Using it against every candidate destroyed its legitimacy.

The House of Representatives, of course, is hardly an example of democracy. The Senate has sent them several bills which would probably attract enough Republican votes to pass, if put up for a vote. Unfortunately, in practice, the Speaker can choose which bills are considered.

Note that the popularly-elected House has a Republican majority, even though a majority of votes cast were for Democratic candidates. This is partly a result of gerrymandering, but mostly due to Democrats being compactly clustered in cities. Senatorial elections are statewide, erasing this effect, which is more or less why Democrats continue to hold the Senate despite its deliberately non-democratic design.

Re: Population wise, Puerto Rico snuggles right in between them.

The issue there is it’s not entirely clear whether Puerto Ricans actually want to be a state. The statehood option has, IIRC, just under 50%, and is strongly dependent on the language issue (a majority would vote for statehood if they were guaranteed protection against Anglicization). I might be remembering this a bit wrong, but while there may be a majority there favouring statehood, it’s not an overwhelming one.

I think PR should be a state, and DC should either be a state or be handed over to Maryland.

@temp 15. I don’t know if that holds up. Back in the late 90’s, early naught’s I crunch the numbers. Every single red state came had population densities smaller than average (which mean they are more rural) and all had smaller than average population (meaning they got disproportionate representation) except one. The only state that was a red that was also large population was Texas.

@otpup 27 @temp 15
I was curious, so I did some quick spreadsheet calculations. Democrats, by all measures, have a slight disadvantage because of the state size, but it’s small.
Here are three potential measures:
1. If every state had votes corresponding to its share of the US population – Democrats should get 57.4% of Senate seats (I’m counting Sanders, VT and King, ME as Democrats here, which for all practical purposes they are)
2. The correlation (r) between Democrat’s Senate seats and a state’s percentage of the US population is ~7% – i.e. clearly positive, but small
3. The correlation between a state’s rank by population from 1-50 and Democratic seats is ~ -3% (i.e. the smaller a state the lower the share of Democratic seats). Also to the disadvantage of Dems, though not really much.

Data Spreadsheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApYAL3oB4wTkdGlqcTdxc056VmFSSThPR2M4djRHQkE&usp=sharing

(This is not intended as an argument either way and I think it doesn’t really affect what Corey is saying at all, but I was curious and I figured other people would be as well).

The previous situation was bad. Now, it is worse.

For me as an American, this is pretty scary. Here is the thing – the implication of this change is not just that legislation would move faster under Obama. It is that the speed of legislation in the United States is simply going to be faster under all future Presidents. We have simply given the majority more power.

If another Bush gets elected, and he gets to move legislation through both the House and the the Senate as quickly as he wants, the disastrous… I need say no more. Just wait till Sarah Palin becomes President.

> But one could point out that the House of Representatives may be more
> democratic, but it doesn’t seem to be more healthy.
+1.

Every few months, a new heart attack-worthy incident. What has happened to reasonable, responsible leadership? Every few months, a new crisis. Crisis after crisis and, of course, the central leadership awards itself more power. The buggers! This is huge, folks.

The best part of American government was precisely that legislation would move slower through the Senate. A stately pace, if you will. (The fact that legislation moves faster in California (via propositions) hasn’t exactly made the state of affairs in the state better.) The fact of the matter is that we are all operating under conditions of bounded rationality. We simply don’t know everything. The more time we have to mull over the big issues, the better. Brakes need to be applied on government from time to time. Again, this change is huge.

There are some things that may appear to be a good idea in the short term but are far from that in the long term. Sadly, this is one of those things.

> Even beyond that – assuming e.g. that Republicans take Senate, House, and
> Presidency in 2016 – it’s not terribly likely it’s going to happen (read various experts
> on why not).
Who is hysterical? I wrote a few short lines. This rule change is huge.

Ok, so how do you propose that brakes on government be applied? The previous state of affairs favored consensus. That was the key. How will consensus now be achieved?

One aspect of the US Senate that I do like is the “state election at-large” aspect, with Senators being elected by the entire state instead of having specific districts that can be manipulated to partisan advantage by state legislatures. That’s something I’d like to keep even if we changed it to a more proportional body.

@Hector St. Claire

The issue there is it’s not entirely clear whether Puerto Ricans actually want to be a state. The statehood option has, IIRC, just under 50%, and is strongly dependent on the language issue (a majority would vote for statehood if they were guaranteed protection against Anglicization). I might be remembering this a bit wrong, but while there may be a majority there favouring statehood, it’s not an overwhelming one.

I figure that if they ever really want to become the 51st state with overwhelming support, they’ll do the referendum and petition on their own without US government prompting. No need to rush it, especially since support for the other major alternative – independence – is tiny there.

AJ: “How will consensus now be achieved?”

Precisely as the founders intended, with a bare majority including the Vice President.

@30. Yea, I’m glad this excludes the Supremes. I remember being on the other side of this with W. How quickly memory evaporates!

41: nuke Houston from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

now the Senate is neither fish nor fowl, and as a result fails to represent anyone or anything adequately

Well, it represents the primary industries of the state, which are often dictated by the race-to-the-bottom concessions that a state government makes to those industries. So you had Delaware’s Joe Biden voting for a horrendous bankruptcy bill at the behest of the financial services industry, and Illinois’ Barack Obama voting for corn ethanol subsidies, or Minnesota’s Al Franken voting to help medical device manufacturers retain more of their profits, or California’s Barbara Boxer voting on behalf of Hollywood to extend copyright terms to forever minus a day.

The Senate is at the root of many shitty, regressive policies, from agriculture to something awful beginning with Z.

In a supposedly consensual institution i always thought it was a scandal that Senators representing over 80% of the population COULDN’T stop a presidential appt.

“How will consensus now be achieved?”

No consensus is possible with Conservatives. They have to be beaten and then beaten again pretty much forever. I am surprised that you haven’t realized this.

As many have said, the equal-representation compromise was almost certainly necessary for the Constitution to be accepted. But at least originally I’m not sure it wasn’t defensible even without appealing to necessity. You had 13 states — in the international sense of that word, at least in their own eyes — and you were asking them to unite and cede a good portion of their sovereignty to the new union. An expectation that they would still be represented qua states is not a crazy notion. If the EU today were to formally consolidate into one nation, retention of some body that would reflect individual (former) states qua states would not strike me as per se indefensible (though, in light of American experience, unwise).

Now, at least in the US, over the years this conception of the states as “states” rather than subunits of the nation has largely eroded (arguably anyway). Part of that is probably due to the fact that most of the subsequent 37 additions had no prior existence as “states,” and part of that is the growing importance of the national government (from the 1860s forward). And that’s in large part what leads to the largely correct view that now the Senate is a fucking scandal (in my view). Perhaps the greatest mistake of the founders was making the equal-representation Senate non-amendable; they probably should have, instead, included a sunset provision for the institution.

Re: If it means no Union anymore, as a New Yorker, I think I’m ok with that.

I don’t entirely disagree with this, but New York would certainly run into some problems without access to the oil from Texas, Louisiana and North Dakota. Maybe you could get hydroelectric power from Canada.

Of course, if the South was its own country, without the North to keep race relations at least moderately civilized, it would quite possible devolve into a bloody race war, which would be a lot worse.

For those that think democracy is a good thing, how much of that is that is based on democracy being something like a fundamental right, irrespective of the outcomes it produces and how much is based on democracy being more likely to produce good outcomes?

Texas is practically the only “red state” that receives less money from the Federal Government than it pays. Even Alaska, so rich with oil that its citizens pay no taxes and receive an annual payment from the “permanent fund”, is a net gainer from Federal money.

Cut ’em loose.

It was Rukmi, of course. I was just waiting to see if anybody would correct me.

What dn #22 and Glenn #50 said.

The 1789 Senate was created for two reasons. The first reason is that states were thought of as much more sovereign than they are now, and in fact under the Articles of Confederation, Congress was made up of delegations sent by the state legislatures, each with an equal vote (essentially Congress WAS the Senate). So there was an argument for incorporating what was the existing arrangement into the new federal government.

Also with semi-sovereign states, it was thought important to get most of the states to consent to treaties and to the makeup of the federal judiciary. Another way to have done this was to simply require two thirds of the state legislatures to agree to these things, but you already has a Senate made up of appointees from the state legislatures, so you could save time by just requiring the Senate to consent.

The second reason was to help preserve slavery. Particularly after the attempt to have slaves count as equal to citizens for apportionment purposes was defeated, the slave states wanted to counter potential opposition to slavery from the free citizens in the northern states as they became more populous. Having the president elected on a state by state basis (even with votes weighted by population) and having the Senate chosen on a state by state basis (without any weighting by population) worked effectively to do this. One result was obsessive political maneuvering to maintain equal number of slave and free states over the next seventy years.

Ifs often overlooked that in 1790 the Senate was made up of thirty members (two Senators from each of the original thirteen, plus Kentucky and Vermont). There were lots of provisions requiring two thirds agreement, but its much easier to get 20 out of 30 Senators to agree to anything (you only need four more than you would for a bare majority) than 67 out of 100 or even 60 out of 100. One potential reform that would just have the institution working more in accordance with how the original framers conceived would be to cut the number of Senators to one per state.

Anyway, both the original reasons for the Senate are now dead letter, largely because of the Civil War. Obviously there is not much point in keeping aspects of the federal government designed largely to defend slavery (the same applies to the Electoral College). The civil war undercut state sovereignty in a big way, and the victorious Unionists/ Republicans took to gerrymandering the states admitted to the Union after 1861 to entrench their rule (most obviously with West Virginia and Nevada, but this also applies to the Dakotas and Wyoming; though the Northeastern state boundaries have always been screwed up, the boundaries and populations of the states admitted between 1800 and 1848 generally made sense).

After that, electing Senators directly completed the transition of the Senate to a less workable version of the House, chosen from unequal districts instead of gerrymandered districts.

So the institution should be abolished, but at least getting parts of the federal government properly staffed is still a useful reform.

The firm believes that its analysis is based on the well considered opinions of well educated, High IQ individuals, and that the analysis is solid.

The righteous indignation here is really mystifying.

The underlying problem is actually in the state borders, which are… odd. The square-states-in-the-middle are too small and also too similar to each other: they are neither economic units nor cultural ones nor significant slices of same, and have no distinctive interests warranting personalised representation. You could merge wyoming with both dakotas and not lose a damned thing.

@ rw and the “echo chamber” of the Senate

“Echo chamber” implies that there is some original storyline to bounce around. Where does it come from? You can make a good guess about its origins by looking at the demographics of the Senate, and by comparing those demographics with those of the people they nominally represent.

It’s intended to be reflective of the will of the people, on some issues, so that the chamber echoes seems reasonable to me. Jury’s probably still out on whether the increased speed of modern communication has any impact (and whether positive or negative) on the stultifying effects intended by the Framers.

I don’t understand dismissing the percentage of representation that the Congress speaks for. As it’s split by the WaPo article in terms of how many voters the Senators represent, you can be sure that’s still inflated from the group whose interests the Senators actually represent.

Just as worrisome are the other ways in the Senate isn’t responsive. All members of Congress are wealthier than the average American, and this is reflected in the unwillingness of those members to shift the tax burden (despite what I believe are still persistent and extremely positive poll numbers in support of a policy change).

Otherwise, I think “echo chamber” is too vague a term. But I’m all for flinging a few sour grapes at the Senate when necessary.

I also think it’s hilarious that changing the filibuster rules was ever called the “nuclear option,” especially in light of the incredibly slight shift in power. This is a case of the media not doing any homework (but ehhh math) and just regurgitating what the pols feed them. I think the canny boxer of the Senate has done a good turn here, but at the end of the day it’s up to the people to grab back power – if they care to.

The federal government is nonetheless present all around us in supremely significant ways. The US military matters; so does the Federal Reserve; so does the Postal Service; so do all the internal improvements that the feds have funded; so do all the regulatory agencies; so does, yes, the welfare state, not all of which runs on autopilot.

The real question is: what is our national self-definition? Are we Americans first or citizens of our states first? If we value our Union and our democracy alike, why should we countenance the continued existence of a federal legislative body that so distorts democracy? Or at least, why do we permit it such great power?

Yes, thank you, the postman is one fed you meet. And he could be the only one you meet in your whole life. The unemployment insurance is mostly a state-level program. Even medicaid is defined and run by the state. If you’re an ordinary (mostly apolitical) person (like most people are) you have no idea what the federal reserve is, and the idea that one would vote for a federal politician in order to influence the federal reserve (and how?) is ludicrous. You vote for your local and state reps because you want more snow-plows, the potholes fixed, and liquor store to open on Sundays. That’s democracy. The federal part is pure circus.

Charley Carp #70, I’ve always thought it curious that no one in California has used their initiative system to put a proposal on the ballot to split the place up. There is no eccentric billionaire available in the entire state to fund this? Its especially odd given some of the proposals that have made it the ballot. Also, whenever a secession proposal makes it onto the ballot somewhere, its always some places in the sticks where the people don’t want anything to do with “gubmint” or the big cities and which don’t really have the tax base to make a viable state (these always get voted down). You never see a city try to secede from their state, though the way the American system is set up tax dollars from cities are always sent to rural areas, never the other way around.

But actually all this implies that the system is rigged enough so that the existing states are not going to split unless the powerbrokers in the state capital want them to split. The only divorces will be Czechoslovakia style divorces. The Maine separation was a one-off political deal made as part of the maneuvering to keep the number of free and slave states equal, and I don’t think Massachusetts pols really cared about keeping a remote and impoverished part of the state (the same reason why Virginia pols don’t make a fuss over losing West Virginia, even though that particular split was almost certainly unconstitutional, and why Maryland pols don’t want D.C.).

In any case, the problem with the malapportionment in the Senate really is about the small population states, and can’t be solved by splitting the big states. The estimated population of Wyoming is 576,000. The estimated population of California is 38,041,000 (checking Wikipedia for the figures). To eliminate the discrepancy, you would have to split California into seventy states, not five. Even to bring the discrepancy down to ten to one you would need to split California into eight states, one of which would be the city -not the county, the city- of Los Angeles (population 3,858,000). Consolidating the least populous states -the ones, excluding Alaska, whose House delegation is smaller than their Senate delegation- is unavoidable in any serious reform of the U.S. federal system.

Mao Cheng Ji, have you heard of the concept of “federal mandates”?

I don’t think there exist a single person who is Americans first and the member of his/her immediate community (not even the state) second.

This is impossible to prove or refute, since the entire idea is ridiculously slippery. But I think it’s dead wrong, even aside from the silliness of making absolute statements about “not a single person.”

For one thing, many people are too transient to feel very much a part of their “immediate” community (whatever that means: Boston? Brooklyn? Cherry Valley, Ohio?) or even their state, since they’ve lived in a variety of places and expect to live in more in the future.

Beyond that, my experience, which I doubt is uncommon, is that being “American” has been hugely important on both sides of my family: my dad’s side, where my grandparents were immigrants from Italy in the early part of the 20th century, and my mom’s, where lines of ancestry have been traced to Connecticut in the 1630s, including a founder of New Haven.

On the immigrant side, there was a lot of importance placed on becoming and being American (and “talking American” instead of the language of “the old country” — and yes, my grandfather called the language “American,” not “English”), especially in a context where there was a lot of overt prejudice against “Italians” (there weren’t hyphenated Americans in those days, at least where I grew up) on a local level. On the other side, there was a lot of pride in having been Americans even before the nation existed as such, and in having ancestors who fought in the Revolution. On both sides there was pride in having been served in the American military in two world wars.

The Maine Option

Such options never die, they just get referamed.

Noises have been made about northern/eastern Maine becoming part of Atlantic Canada.

On another axis, people have made noises (not that anyone is listening very hard) about splitting the state in two across an east-west line. Where the line would be drawn depends on who’s talking. Both the northerners and the southerners want the other side to take the middle.

Mao Cheng Ji
Nation-state nationalism is a recent invention, sustained by propaganda, imposition of the official national language, mass media. It’s a transitory phenomenon.

‘Recent’ does not equal ‘transitory’.
John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State (which, as w quite a few bks, I’ve looked at rather than thoroughly read) is a comprehensive study of the varieties of the phenomenon. I see from Amazon that Breuilly also wrote the intro for the new (’09) edition of Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism.

I don’t know how Mao is defining ‘transitory’ but even if you date modern “nation-state nationalism” from the mid-19th cent. (in the European context) that’s still a long time. For states that developed earlier (eg France and England/ Britain) it wd go back further than that.

There are proto-nationalisms that can be discerned well before the modern nation-state existed. I had occasion to be looking recently at my copy of Kantorowicz’s monumental (the overworked word is apt) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology which has a section discussing this, citing inter alia Gaines Post’s 1953 article “Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages.” For a more recent discussion of a somewhat later period, see e.g. Norman Housley, “Pro deo et patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe, 1400-1600,” in Contamine, ed., War and Competition between States (2000).

I’m encouraged to see pushback on the idea that American national identity doesn’t matter to Americans. Mao may see a culturally Balkanized US but that doesn’t tally well with my experience at all. I acknowledge that, as JanieM says, that the terms I used are infelicitous in their conceptual slipperiness – but it seems to me that most Americans do possess a certain cosmopolitanism and sense of national solidarity that is unusual for a country of this size. “America” may be a myth, but it’s a myth that a lot of people have believed in for a long time now, and like it or not the long arc of our culture and politics has generally bent towards the national. (“The politics of Vermont and Louisiana have nothing in common” – but what about the politics of New Hampshire and Louisiana? The behavior of the major parties is actually remarkably consistent throughout the country. The substantial divides are not sectional – they are 1. urban/exurban, and 2. racial. Our inability to reach a functional consensus on so many issues is not due to insurmountable political divides but to constitutional institutions that promote both corruption and gridlock. The Senate is one of these.)

I believe Mao lives in Switzerland. (He mentioned it back when he was abb1.) That might explain his perspective on the relative salience of national vs. local identities.

I certainly don’t agree that state identities predominate over national for most Americans. They are, however, quite significant, and I wonder if the people poo-pooing them (for people in less populated states, especially) know any Americans either. We all wear a number of different identities at the same time — father, husband, lawyer, Democrat, Montanan, American, WASP, human, Red Sox fan, skier, mountain biker, internet blowhard. Each exists in a context, and will likely be weakly or strongly held at different times. But just try to take one away at gun point, and see how you do.

Folks who want to “reform” the Senate or eliminate states are asking someone else to give up something that (a) the person asking doesn’t care about losing and (b) has real value to the person being asked to give it up. In the coercion fantasy so many people like to entertain, what is California offering me to give up my Senate representation? Nothing. No, wait, nothing but the subjugation by a distant polity. No thinks.

It’s the exact issue that was presented in 1787, and the answer is the same now as then.

(The Montana-Montana State football game was today. Attended by the gov, our congressman [who had a bet with our AG, an alum of the other school], our senior US senator, and a full stadium otherwise. The forces of light and goodness did not prevail [as indeed they have very rarely done since the mid 80s]. Identities of this type are running high just now.)

I mean, seriously. Can anyone think of any problem, any problem whatsoever, where the best area to tackle it over is “the geographic limits of the state of Illinois”? Because I can’t, and if you can’t either then the set of problems best addressed by the illinois state government is empty and the purpose of the illinois state government void.

Sure, as a badge of cultural identity it’s fine, but as a governmental subunit it’s a horrible horrible stupid idea.

I may detest the Senate but I also don’t have any illusions about changing it anytime soon. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that the US would have done well to rewrite the whole Constitution after Appomattox, rather than kludging the whole thing by shoehorning a handful of amendments into the existing structure ad hoc. But it wasn’t to be, and now we’re stuck, for better or worse – I’m quite certain it will take another existential crisis to bring about that level of change.

If any Senate reform becomes possible, it will not be done by redrawing the states or by apportioning the Senate by population but by simply curtailing the chamber’s power. It won’t be abolished but will be made subject to override by the House, like in the UK. Of course as crappy as the Senate is, Article V is an even worse affront to democracy; perhaps “amend Article V” should become a long-term progressive goal?

Reminds me of the old joke:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

I did a post on my own blog a little while back, figuring out the senatorial “clout ratio” between states. Wyoming has a 66:1 clout ratio to California, given their populations. My home state of Vermont has a 61:1 clout ratio to CA. My recommendation was to give every state at least one senator and otherwise round off a state’s percentage of the national population and give it that many senators. California would get 12, Texas 8, New York and Florida 6, and so on. Vermont would get one, of course, as would Wyoming. We’d end up with 112 senators. It would reduce the maximum clout ratio to 6:1. Still some political insurance for small states, but not egregiously out of balance. As a Vermonter I’d be willing to give up a senator for greater national democracy. We’re like that up here.

By the way, among the original 13 states the maximum clout ratio in the senate was 11.7, between Virginia and Delaware. James Madison, in The Federalist #62, lamely excused it as the best that could be done, with no real political or philosophical principle behind it.