Dylan Matthews says that the U.S. Senate is “a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.” His reason is that small states get too much representation.
It’s true that the Senate’s membership has little relationship to the true will of the people if that will is expressed in majoritarian terms. In that sense, it is not democratic. But the Senate was never supposed to be a smaller version of the House of Representatives. The Senate should be considered as an institution that made it possible to glue the disparate states together into something approximating unity. Ultimately, the Civil War could not be avoided, but the Senate is the only institution in government that had at least the potential of averting it. By preventing a majority from pursuing policies that would lead quickly to secession, the Senate gave peacemakers a chance even if no acceptable compromise was ultimately possible.
That people today talk about the Senate being anti-democratic is an indication that the country no longer suffers from the kind of regional differences that could lead to war. In today’s environment, those differences are only strong enough to cause massive dysfunction and attacks on the federal government by the southern-anchored majority party. But we’re not about to take up arms against each other.
It is now the Democrats’ turn to use the anti-Democratic nature of the Senate, this time as expressed by the filibuster rule rather than the skewed membership, to forestall radical changes (such as outlawing abortion) that could quickly lead Blue America to talk about secession.
Maybe the Senate should be abolished, but it would be a luxury we couldn’t previously afford. And I don’t really see the country as becoming more homogenous and unified. I see it as becoming more and more splintered along regional lines within and between states. This country aspires to small ‘d’ democracy, but it’s never had it in its long history and I’m not sure we’re ready for it.
One thing I’m sure about it is that we don’t have any need for a truly democratic Senate. It would just be an expensive redundancy, the only merit of which would be longer terms for its members.
If you want to know if we can afford to abolish the Senate, ask yourself how long the country would hold together if it was governed by a standalone House of Representatives led by Nancy Pelosi one day and John Boehner the next?
The undemocratic nature of the Senate seems like an affront to our values, but this is only because we think we can have a united country without it that consents to be governed in radically different ways from one election cycle to the next.
But I see less evidence for this proposition with each passing year.
We’ve all known for decades that the Senate is a quasi-democratic instrument, not truly representative of the population. I wonder just how disparate this current analysis is from what we might have seen during the 1800s when the nation’s population was even more tightly bound to a few seaboard states. What will be telling is when the Republican leadership finally breaks with the tradition they claim to love and revere in order to throw filibusters overboard so they can cram their radical policies down the nation’s collective throat. That outcome will make make the Senate truly anti-democratic and antithetical, having moved away from its intended purpose of slowing major policy changes down to just another authoritarian instrument of terror by the right.
This period didn’t last long. By 1840 Ohio was the third most populous state — half of the top six were west of the Alleghanies.
And the “cradle of Presidents” moved from Virginia to Ohio
It’s not whose vote counts, but who counts the votes. Life in Florida with a Bush governor taught me that.
While we focus on the big picture, some people are successfully seeking dominance in the state and local governments.
Imagine this: Senate Democrats have received more votes than Republicans
Look, we in the North, can think we won the Civil War all we want, but let’s face facts:
Sure, slavery ended.
But did it?
African-Americans in the South didn’t get full civil and voting rights until almost 100 years after Lee handed over his sword to Grant.
And that battle continues!
We are involved in what I call, “The Cold Civil War.”
And don’t look now, but it looks like the South is winning.
Congress after the succession would have done better funding the Underground Railroad, fewer deaths by far in the effort.
But we know there was unified heart for that.
You make a strong argument for a unicameral Congress.
When the one-person/one-vote Supreme Court ruling forced the redistricting of legislatures, many states created various proportional schemes for allocating the seats in the state senates. Some schemes just grouped some counties in a single seat and granted multiple seats to other counties based on population. Other schemes patched together precincts to more closely approximate and gerrymander the one-person/one-vote goal. With continued gerrymandering, it has become a mess. And the similar gerrymandering of Congressional districts has created minority-ruled Congresses and low voting turnout.
And what has turned out in state senates (and is even more evident in the US Senate) is that it is much easier to buy a small number of legislators than a large one and still easier to buy the blocking of action than the fast-tracking of action.
What is failing the United States of America is a political culture divorced from reality and any hint of serious consideration of issues when it comes to the operation of the formal processes. The game dominates so much that little helpful policy can make it through. Until that political culture of “anything goes” changes, there is little use in rejiggering the formal structures through which the processes occur.
It is almost as if the people’s will has been excluded for so long, and the Obama era has deepened the cynicism through Democratic corruption and cowardice, that there is increase popular abandonment of participation in the formal structures. Money has subverted them anyway.
The only good current argument for eliminating the Senate is that it would save about $1 billion in government expense. But it would also save the wealthy about $1 billion in campaign expenditures.
It would be a curious situation if Boehner didn’t have McConnell and Reid to play off of and the House actually had to do something.
As for the country holding together, it seems that the powers that be have an interest in a unified economy and seek to implement that now through parallel legislation in all 50 states (like the Uniform Commercial Code and the uniform corporation laws that have been implemented over the last 70 years or so). We might be seeing the early phases of the irrelevancy of the federal government that these interests have quietly created.
The one huge exception is the national security institutions and the intelligence community, which seem to be operating in concert with the powers-that-be without Congressional participation and a minimum of White House participation. Look for a way of directly relating the 50-states to the national security complex without a central national government as the next federalist proposal coming down the pipeline. Then the great conservative dream of Washington being totally irrelevant will come to pass. Virginia gets the Pentagon and CIA. Maryland get the NSA and that cluster of intelligence assets. And so on. The Dakotas and Nebraska get the nuclear arsenal. The National Association of State Legislatures or even the American Legislative Exchange Council become the venues through which the state legislatures coordinate their defense policy. It just means there are 49 additional members of NATO, right?
slightly disagree with your analysis – the corporations are trans-state, as it were, and unaccountable, as international law is in its infancy. I would distinguish the corporations and the security apparatuus [fourth declension] that imo have different interests and structures. this is something new, not fascism, not incipient police state because the “state” has been sidelined.
Corporations are rooted in the state privilege of limited liability and state provision of courts to enforce contracts. I’ve not yet figured out how corporations can effectively sideline the state and preserve these two functions of the state. Corporations like the freedom to become competitors but like the state to prevent new entrants from competing with them.
In principle and form, corporations are accountable to the states in which they are incorporated. In practice, they can buy impunity of politicians.
I don’t see how the state either withers or gets drowned in the bathtub under this contradiction. Co-opted, yes, but isn’t that what is generally referred to as fascism–the co-option of the state by corporations or the reverse?
longer reply tomorrow, but no, I don’t see them co-opting the state today . they operate outside national boundaries; the state doesn’t wither, nor does it drown, but it is weakened, there are areas in which it cannot guarantee its citizens what it is obligated to guarantee. the corporations have rights and privileges of where they are incorporated, but little obligations nor accountability
They have already co-opted the state.
little time to reply, work deadline, but see response below this comment
[also as a reply to Voice] – intense work deadline, very little time. But, my point, compare, say German and Italy in WWII – all the major institutions were under the state, in the service of their fascism, etc. todays billionaires, for example, try to buy political office specifically to further their acquisitions – greed- they are not identical to the state, they don’t control the security apparatuus or the military and their ideology pretty much boils down to greed and “the instrumental concept of the human” i.e. other human beings [and world resources] are only ends to their means. this is very different from the elaborate symbolic ideological structures of Germany and Italy of the time; furthermore, the security apparatuus are not in the corporations spheres – not to say they are problem free. All I’m saying is trying to reduce today’s problems to those of the 30’s and 40’s [or 20’s] will not help us understand them
I appreciate the thought that went into this analysis, but I think you underestimate how hollowed out and dependent on contractors the government is. You say they don’t control the security apparatus, but notice that Snowden was an employee of a contractor, not an employee of the NSA. Does the NSA have employees other than managers and contractors? How dependent on contractor’s (self-serving0 advice are they? I became concerned about this in the ’70s when I was a civil servant in the Navy Department. This trend accelerated under Reagan. IIRC, Reagan fired 10,000 Navy employees in the DC Area and replaced them with contractors. Already, under Carter, high level positions were revolving doors. I recall we hired a GS-18 (top supergrade) as Chief Naval Architect from Litton industries. Surprise! Surprise! He selected the designs from Litton to which he eventually went back. A colleague at the Post Office who was a sailor in the ’80’s told me that all those ships were prematurely scrapped when the Falklands War pointed up the unsuitability for combat operations of their design (insufficient water tight doors, aluminum superstructure that catches fire when hit with an Exocet missile) which the British had also copied. It is food for thought that the WWII era Gearing Class Destroyer on which he first served as well as his last ship, the USS Missouri, were more combat ready than the later Spruance class destroyers that replaced them.
well, your point is important and I would argue in line with what I’m saying. privatization was initiated under Reagan and it has weakened gov. Analyzing the differences between fascistic govs of the mid 20th century and today – very strong central gov and, as I pointed out, all the attention to the symbolic representation of the fascistic state – is important to understanding what is going on now.
But if we abolished the Senate, we would obviously enact constitutional changes to have substantially more members, which solves the problem of switching from Boehner to Pelosi and back. IOW, the Republicans would be locked out of the new House just as they are of the presidency. If we had a more representative government, that is, which more districts and districts drawn the way California’s are.
I’ve thought about this before, but I’ve concluded that the question is really moot. Whether it would be a good idea to abolish the Senate or not, it would require a constitutional amendment, and I don’t see how three fourths of the states are going to ratify it. Most states are over-represented in the Senate, so why would they give that up?
Someone forgot to tell that to the gun-wingers.
A lot of countries have an “upper” house that represent regional sub-units of government. But they are almost all usually very weak compared to the “lower” house. But they are an unavoidable part of a federalist system. If you have a federal system, you have an “upper” house that represents those units.
What makes America’s Senate unique is the power we gave it, primarily because we had to knit disparate states – that saw themselves as almost completely independent of one another – into a whole. That’s why the Senate used to be selected by the state legislatures.
Ridding the system of the filibuster entirely is a good start to getting rid of some of the unique powers of the Senate.
But what if it’s not Boehner and Pelosi swapping places in bi-yearly votes but Boehner and Goehmert swapping places in monthly, weekly, or daily votes.
Im not sure I agree 100% that we no longer have the “differences that lead to war” or taking up arms.
More precisely, while I believe those differences may exist, the will to fight over them does not. If the old confederacy re-seceded, I think most of us gladly would say “fare-thee-well” and wash our hands of it.
Would you want a nuclear-sporting fascist terror state next to your backyard? Would your conscience be soothed by shooing most of North America’s starving orphans, future slaves, and abused elders to a neighbor we have no control over? I can see it right now: air sirens warning everyone who’s not white, heteronormative, or a conservative Christian to get the fuck out of the country right now unless they want to be put to the noose and jackboot of the new American fascist. Inevitably many people get left behind and then the iron wall goes up, damning them. But hey, we get to have a chance of living like a Scandanavian social democracy paradise, so it was worth it. Real progressive and Christian of us, eh? Would make MLK and Eugene Debs and Mother Jones real proud of us.
Yes, it fucking sucks that America is being continually dragged down into the shitter by revanchist conservatives/neoconfederates. But the other possibility, in which they become Russia 2.0 and have a free hand to commit whatever atrocities that they like and the weaponry to stave off any relief effort, is just too much to bear.
So, just to be clear, if the confederacy seceded (again) you would be comfortable sending your sons and daughters to fight and die to keep them part of the union? You yourself, if you were of fighting age, would sign up to fight?
I would not.
Out here on the Oregon High Desert folks tend to think of everything east of The Rockies as New York, and could give a flying fig what “the south” does.
And no, fighting wars for anyone (other than Cascadia) ended in my family with me. I would not and did not allow my sons to go down to war.
As the Senate question, I think is as moot in the generally accepted vernacular whither or no we will overcome our experiment with Fascism, overthrow our International Banker and Insurer overlords, or the white dogs lose the race war they’ve started. It’s your problem, not mine, not ours.
The sound you don’t hear is me jacking a round into my well-oiled AR. Don’t have to be a Peace Freak to be against War.
“If the old confederacy re-seceded, I think most of us gladly would say “fare-thee-well” and wash our hands of it.”
No, I wouldn’t support a war against a nuclear power that had +100 million people in it. I was objecting to the whole lackadaisical ‘good riddance’.
I’m sure some progressives would think that they’d be okay with it… until the South goes full North Korean terror state within a generation and they become an even bigger headache. But it was definitely worth it to get real UHS, dismantling most of the security theater, a revitalized infrastructure, having our violent crime rate drop to that of a West European social democracy, and a 15 dollar minimum wage, am I right?
Gotcha.
So, if the south seceded (again) you would want other people’s children to go do the fighting.
So would you. Except that you’d prefer the ‘fighting’ to be done in a bedroom or concentration camp — far, far away from your house, of course, so you can pat yourself on the back for your pacifism.
If the bigots secede, it likely will not just be the South. If the South secedes, I don’t have the luxury of choices. It’s good to know how much convenience offsets progressive politics.
That’s a hypothetical best dealt with through prevention.
It’s really quite a mess when states with less than a million residents have equal representation in the US Senate with those states that have tens of millions of residents and complex economies.
Unfortunately, the power and will to change anything in this country towards greater fairness and democracy doesn’t exist.
Former Confederacy by current population:
2 – Texas 26,956,958
4 – Florida 19,893,297
9 – Georgia 10,097,343
10 – North Carolina 9,943,964
12 – Virginia 8,326,289
17 – Tennessee 6,549,352
23 – Alabama 4,849,377
24 – South Carolina 4,832,482
25 – Louisiana 4,649,676
32 – Mississippi 2,994,079
33 – Arkansas 2,966,369
That’s a total population of 100 million that the Democratic Party and its consultants have written off. That’s a little less that one-third of the population of the US.
Then you add in the other states written off:
15 – Arizona 6,731,484
16 – Indiana 6,596,855
26 – Kentucky 4,413,457
28 – Oklahoma 3,878,051
33 – Utah 2,942,902
34 – Kansas 2,904,021
37 – Nebraska 1,881,503
38 – West Virginia 1,850,326
39 – Idaho 1,634,464
44 – Montana 1,634,464
46 – South Dakota 853,175
47 – North Dakota 739,482
50 – Wyoming 584,153
It seems like it would be easier to try to build a progressive base in some of the small states instead of writing them off. Wyoming is smaller than the average population of a Congressional district. Out of that 584,153 people is there no progressive with the political talent of Gale McGee?
Thanks for bringing up this topic. That said, IMHO you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Equal representation in the Senate was necessary to get the original states to agree to the Constitution. But it is over 200 years on, and I do not see any justification for having such an anti-democratic institution. Yes, it slows things down, which might have some advantages, but so would an upper house in which the states are represented in proportion to their population. Such an upper house would not be a pointless redundancy – 49 out of 50 states have bicameral legislatures in which both houses are collected through proportional districts, and some countries (like Germany) have a similar arrangement.
I don’t see any reason why this country couldn’t – at least in theory – be governed by a parliamentary system. I think it is instructive that almost every stable Western democracy has adopted that system, rather than the US system with separation of powers. We have been lucky that our system has worked for so long, because evidence from other countries that have adopted our system – usually in Latin America – indicates that the inherent contradictions of having multiple powers centers usually leads to some kind of authoritarian takeover.
Yes, we would have a greater amount of change if an election meant a total switch from one party to another. But keep in mind that voters might make different choices in congressional elections if they knew that their vote would result in complete government control. I think this would lead to some moderation of the parties. Certainly, I don’t think that Republicans would do as well in congressional elections if people knew that they were voting for the Republican platform, rather than casting a protest vote.
Our Constitution has many anachronistic features, and I think it is a mistake to think that there is something beneficial about them, just because we have lived with them for so long. Incidentally, I highly recommend the book Our Undemocratic Consitution by Sanford Levinson. It explains a lot of ways that our Constitution is suboptimal, and what the consequences of this are. Some of the consequences are ones that are not immediately obvious – like the fact our system ends up giving immense power to the courts, in part because the political branches are so often paralyzed.
I think Germany is a great example to bring up. The Nazis were a weak minority party and losing ground when they decided, like our Republicans, to obstruct everything. What they obstructed was the formation of a government in their parliamentary system resulting in three more elections within a single year. What they wanted and got was a seat in government for Hitler. Then they just got rid of the legislature.
What the Republicans obstructed was the formation of a government under regular processes. Like the Nazis, they were rewarded for their obstruction because of the nature of the political culture of the time, a vindictive people in an economic depression who scapegoated a minority. It seems to work just as well when the minority is President as when they are the stereotypical leaders of some of the opposition parties.
In this case, the Republicans seek to get rid of the President so they can form their Permanent Republican Majority.
The compromise that made the Senate appear undemocratic was to balance different regional interests as defined by the states. That compromise comes at the expense of one person one vote since the population of the states was never equal. The driving regional interest was race, in this case, slavery.
The House was supposed to represent the people by maintaining the one person one vote principle. That principle was destroyed when for racial reasons our governments adopted redline segregation along with encouragement of white flight from the urban areas. Now the idea is to balance, once again on racial lines, the rural and urban interests within each state, again at the expense of the one person one vote principle.
I think the idea of the Senate representing state interests and the House representing the people has served us well in the past. While a person’s vote for Senate means less from a more populated state at least it’s one person one vote principle inside the boundary of each state. The problem is within the House where political corruption has ended the one person one vote principle, once again for racial reasons. The reform goal for the House would be results where the party vote divide would roughly reflect the party representative divide. The most effective solution would be for each state to elect all its House representatives at large same as it does for Senate.
That would mean fifty-three separate House races on each CA ballot. Most voters have trouble figuring out one race. So, can’t see that this would be effective.
If the House is to represent the people then the people must have an equal say. Democracy is never easy. What is suggested was an extreme but there are many answers to how to make each person’s voter count equally and CA is one of the better states. We have a problem when it takes three times the number of Democratic votes to win the same representations as Republicans. My point is to not get rid of the Senate but to return the House to the people, all the people on an equal basis.
You’re right. The Senate has always been undemocratic, that has never never been a secret. In fact, it’s more democratic than it originally was, now that Senators are elected by direct popular vote.
The bigger problem is the extreme gerrymandering of house and state legislative districts. This should be done away with, and I think it is at least possible.
of the Senate is just never going to happen. No resident of a small state will ever agree to it – no one believes their state has too little power.
As an academic exercise it is interesting – but I don’t think it is in any way within the realm of possibility, any more than I think getting rid of Iowa and New Hampshire’s role in the Presidential Process is.
I’ll keep this simple. In the past year I’ve driven on the highways of California and the highways of Wyoming. California has one senator per 19 million people. Wyoming has one senator per 280 thousand people. That’s a difference of 68-to-1.
I’ll give you one guess which state has impeccable highways and which state is overwhelmed by deferred highway maintenance.
Yet the majority of residents of the smaller state, which receives far more federal tax money in than they pay out, believe that they are superior to Californians because they have lower state taxes – and furthermore believe that the reason for lower taxes has something to do with excessive government social programs.