Democracy in America
Continuing on yesterday’s theme, if you add together the two Republican Senators from Wyoming with the one from Alaska, one from South Dakota, one from New Hampshire, two from Maine, two from Idaho, two from Nebraska, one from Nevada, two from Utah, two from Kansas, two from Mississippi, one from Iowa, two from Oklahoma, two from Kentucky, one from Louisiana, two from South Carolina, and two from Alabama, the 28 of them collectively represent (on a system in which you attribute half the population of a given state to a senator) 11.98 percent of the American population.
Meanwhile, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein together represent 11.95 percent of the American population.
Now of course Texas is also a big state (though at 7.81 percent of the population it’s a lot smaller than California) and there are small states (like Vermont and North Dakota) that have two Democratic Senators. So the point here isn’t a narrowly partisan one, though the wacky apportionment of the Senate does have a partisan valence. The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them.
Then you add in the filibuster…
71 Responses to “Democracy in America”
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June 16th, 2009 at 10:46 am
> The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre
> way to run things.
Look, even if there were only 100 people in Montana they would have a legitimate interest in preventing the resources of their region from being stripped away and sent to Los Angeles and New York. That’s why the Senate was constructed as it is, and it remains a legitimate concern today. I live in a densely populated area too, and it annoys me I don’t always get my way, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate interests related to geography, stewardship of a region, and diversity that shouldn’t be swept away by a tide of New Yorkers.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Sabato from UVA hits on this with his recommendations for changing the Constitution. He believes it’s time to change the
Senate to more equity in representation. I don’t remember the numbers exactly but essentially big states get more, small states are cut to one. Plus,add on 1,000 seats in the H of R, where a majority of those seats would go to large states, and you have a govt. that is much more representative of our country. It’s a farce that whenever we need to accomplish something in this country, besides go to war, we have to court Senators from states with more cows than people.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:52 am
It is certainly a legacy of the original expectation that States as such were the ones getting representation and protecting their interests as states against the federal government. For most of our history it was the state legislatures that sent the senators to Washington.
But a good democracy probably will have some “undemocratic” conservative features to avoid lurching between wildly variant policies. Other than the judiciary, how would you ideally insert this salutary conservatism and gradualism and need for broad consensus into a democracy?
June 16th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Look, even if there were only 100 people in Montana they would have a legitimate interest in preventing the resources of their region from being stripped away and sent to Los Angeles and New York. The situation now is that California and New York’s resources are being stripped away and sent to places like Montana. How is that any better?
June 16th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Funny you mention the filibuster, Matt, as you are one of the most consistent proponents of the idea that an effective 60-vote requirement in the Senate is “undemocratic.” I will agree with you that it is unwise, in the sense that there are already enough veto-points on legislation that it is unnecessary and perhaps even harmful. But your accurate analysis of the inherently undemocratic — if by “undemocratic” we mean deviation from the one-person, one-vote principle — nature of the Senate shows why, whatever the 60-vote cloture threshold’s other problems, it is not obviously “undemocratic.” Or, rather, that it is not obvious that a 51-vote requirement is inherently more “democratic,” because there is no reason to think that those 51 votes necessarily represent a majority of the US population.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:59 am
So the point here isn’t a narrowly partisan one, though the wacky apportionment of the Senate does have a partisan valence.
But a partisan valence which has switched over time. Which makes sense: more than anything else, the nature of the Senate helps stabilize the two-party system, since it allows a second party to have significant political power without attaining majority status, as long as it crafts its strategy to appeal to one of the many possible sets of states allowing this to occur. Of course the filibuster makes this all the more true, but it is inherent in the structure of the Senate even without the filibuster.
Look, even if there were only 100 people in Montana they would have a legitimate interest in preventing the resources of their region from being stripped away and sent to Los Angeles and New York.
And the tens of millions of people in Los Angeles and New York have a legitimate interest in preventing the fruits of labor from being stripped away from them and sent to Montana. And the real question is why do those people in Montana deserve a disproportionate say more than the thousands of different simiarly-sized sets of people who currently do not have their own Senators to represent them, but could if we redrew the state boundaries.
It turns out the only real way to answer that question is to explain how the interests of the people of Montana are inherently more worth protecting than any of these thousands of possible alternatives, and it just so happens that the haphazard historical process by which the state boundaries were drawn aligned with the best possible distribution of political power. Which is an argument that is likely to fall flat unless you happen to live in Montana.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:01 am
What if California divided itself into 10 states or so? I’m sure this is unconstitutional or something.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:02 am
In Serenity Prayer terms, the apportionment of the Senate must be accepted as something that can’t be changed. In fact, its the one part of the Constitution that is specifically unamendable. Granted, California is sui generis. Its too big to be governable as a single state, I still think the legislature (with Congress’s assent) should split CA into 4 states (with 8 senators) with its 4 federal judicial districts as the new states boundaries. But beyond that, there’s nothing to be done. However, seeing as Jim Crow is gone and the Civil Rights laws are on the books, the filibuster has clearly failed in its intended purpose and should be eliminated.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:04 am
But a good democracy probably will have some “undemocratic” conservative features to avoid lurching between wildly variant policies. Other than the judiciary, how would you ideally insert this salutary conservatism and gradualism and need for broad consensus into a democracy?
Just having a legislative process with lots of independent veto points, where the people exercising those independent powers are elected by different subsets of the electorate on different schedules, incorporates a lot of gradualism into the system. Indeed, arguably the features of our Constitution which encourage very strong political parties (most notably the nature of the Senate and the Electoral College) work contrary to this end, because strong political parties become a way of aligning the interests of these different actors in a way that undermines their independence.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:07 am
There are plausible arguments to giving certain demographics special representation in Congress, but people who live in small states are not exactly the first minority group that would come to mind.
And the way that territory has been carved up is somewhat of an accident of history. One can imagine an alternate reality where New York City was its own state (or maybe even one for each borough!) and Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska were one big state. In such a system, the benefits of the Senate would be distributed in a very very different way.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:08 am
In a related post, I briefly discuss the latest Gallup poll suggesting that the largest single block of Americans consider themselves conservative while what is left is still a majority, NOT conservative, composed of so-called moderates and liberals. The labels are ridiculous and don’t refer to majority beliefs on specific issues and how they should be addressed. Go read and please comment: http://themightyliberal.blogspot.com.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:14 am
One can imagine an alternate reality where New York City was its own state (or maybe even one for each borough!) and Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska were one big state. In such a system, the benefits of the Senate would be distributed in a very very different way.
And no doubt status quo bias would lead to lots of people arguing that was the best of all possible worlds, just like they do in the real world.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:16 am
How many Democrats would have to vacation in Wyoming for two weeks (to become eligible to vote there) to swing the Senate election in favor of their candidate?
A few thousands?
Not much of an effort when you think about it.
No fighting in the streets required.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:18 am
The world’s worst legislative body will always be with us, but the filibuster doesn’t have to be.
“But your accurate analysis of the inherently undemocratic — if by “undemocratic” we mean deviation from the one-person, one-vote principle — nature of the Senate shows why, whatever the 60-vote cloture threshold’s other problems, it is not obviously ‘undemocratic.’”
This is the sort of misguided analysis that sets my teeth on edge.
The geographic apportionment of seats in the Senate is fundamentally undemocratic, and if I had my druthers the Senate would be abolished entirely. But it’s not pointlessly undemocratic. There is a defensible logic to having an upper house that represents each state equally, to mitigate against the exploitation of sparsely-populated resource-rich areas.
Requiring a 60% majority in this context is obviously undemocratic, in that it objectively shifts the decision point even further from one-person-one-vote majority rule. And for no good goddamned reason whatsoever. The only purpose served by this requirement is to make it EVEN HARDER to bring about political change supported by a large, decisive majority of Americans than was intended by the framers of the Constitution, who put an overly large number of veto points in the legislative process for the explicit reason that they were wary of democracy.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Obviously, the way we elect our president via the electoral college is just as bizarre and unfair for the very same reasons.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
The Senate is a “federal” institution: i.e. its purpose is to provide the federated units with a voice in federal decision-making. Federalism rests on a slightly different set of assumptions regarding what is “democratic” than those you find in a unitary state like France or England.
Now, to the extent that federalism, as a political principle, is something of a dead letter in the U.S., the makeup of the Senate may appear “undemocratic” and “unfair”. The US has been trending towards a unitary state since the 1930’s, and people’s expectations have shifted. But the setup isn’t inherently unfair. In Canada, where federalism is very much NOT a dead letter, there continues to be substantial support for Senate reform to create an institution along the lines of the US Senate (the Canadian Senate is an odd institution that I won’t try to explain here). In Germany, the upper house (the Bundersrat) has a similar purpose, and like the original US Senate, its delegates are selected by the Lander (States), not elected (in fact, sometimes the Lander’s head of government will himself lead the delegation). The voting there is somewhat staggered (votes per Lander vary from 3 to 6, based on population), but you still get stituations where Bremen, with 650K, has 3 votes, while North-Rhine Westphalia, with 18 million, only gets 6.
Anyway, the point is that whether or not the US Senate is fair depends on what kind of polity you intend to set up. If federalism matters to you, it is fair. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
“And the tens of millions of people in Los Angeles and New York have a legitimate interest in preventing the fruits of labor from being stripped away from them and sent to Montana.”
What happened to wealth redistribution? Honestly? People in those states should get more because they have less.
There’s a line between exploitation and help, but c’mon now.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I think your math is a little misleading. It is true that there are a lot more people in California than in Utah. That also means that there are a lot more Republicans in California who have no voice in the Senete than Democrats in Utah who are similarly unrepresented. If you really want to look at something closer to the real numbers, look at the House breakdowns.
And that is sort of the point. The way Congress is setup is specifically so that the House is granular representative more so that the Senete, which acts as more of a regional balance system. This is by design. If you have a problem with that you should not argue for fixing the Senete, but with doing away with it all together, because you have a problem with its entire reason for existing in the first place.
Given that regional differences often carry large policy preferences by design, such as the preference for pro-auto policy in Michigan and pro-corn policy in Iowa, I tend to like the fact that while the larger states will steam roll the smaller states in the House but the structure of the Senete still gaurantees the less densely populated regions a fair hearing. Which again, is the entire point.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:27 am
If you take the population from the 20 smallest states and half of that from the 21st smallest, you get about 11% of the US population. The Senators of those 11% can bring all legislation to a halt. California has 12% of the population (of areas which get Senators).
June 16th, 2009 at 11:28 am
> And the tens of millions of people in Los Angeles and New
> York have a legitimate interest in preventing the fruits of
> labor from being stripped away from them and sent to
> Montana. And the real question is why do those people in
> Montana deserve a disproportionate say more than the
> thousands of different simiarly-sized sets of people who
> currently do not have their own Senators to represent them,
> but could if we redrew the state boundaries.
Because even though I live in a densely populated area and would seem to benefit from the change you propose, I don’t consider myself to be so smart and omniscient that I can know what is best for an entire subcontinent of 18 million square kilometers now and forevermore.
> And no doubt status quo bias would lead to lots
> of people arguing that was the best of all possible worlds,
> just like they do in the real world.
Here come the 38 states!
http://www.tjc.com/38states/
Personally, I think it might be worth a try. But then again, I also have a lot of respect for the outcome of long-term, messy, organic processes which leans against many of the grand, super-organized schemes such as this one and the ones Matt Y tends to propose.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I do want to point out that one-person-one-vote is a very recent concept, established no earlier than the Great War. Whether a legislative chamber corroborated that principled is not of concern to the American Constitution as relating to the Senate.
Another: senators do not represent people; they represent states. It used to be that senators were chosen by state legislatures (which I regard as a superior system, much less liable to mob rule), not by direct franchise.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:30 am
For Wyoming you would need about 100-130,000 new democratic voters, if everything else stayed the same. Last time something like that was tried that I can think of was when a bunch of abolitionists moved to Kansas to try to ensure that it would be admitted as a free state. They ended up calling it Bleeding Kansas.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Requiring a 60% majority in this context is obviously undemocratic, in that it objectively shifts the decision point even further from one-person-one-vote majority rule. And for no good goddamned reason whatsoever. The only purpose served by this requirement is to make it EVEN HARDER to bring about political change supported by a large, decisive majority of Americans than was intended by the framers of the Constitution, who put an overly large number of veto points in the legislative process for the explicit reason that they were wary of democracy.
Its not for no reason whatsoever. By preventing 50%+1 from being enough to pass you encourage compromise with the other side. The stated purpose is to reduce the ability of a system where whoever has 50%+1 today is able to walk all over the minority. You might not like that or find it to be sufficient, but it is the reason. And I do not recall the people on this blog complaining so much when Democrats were using the power of the filibuster against a Republican White House/Congress. We would have loved to be able to get up/down votes on all our judicial nomination, but your fillibuster stopped us, and required the Gang of 14 compromise to get things moving again. And now that there is a Democratic White House/Congress you are frustrated by the fact that the other side has a say in what you can do.
Again, this is a feautre, not a bug.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:34 am
And I do not recall the people on this blog complaining so much when Democrats were using the power of the filibuster against a Republican White House/Congress. We would have loved to be able to get up/down votes on all our judicial nomination, but your fillibuster stopped us, and required the Gang of 14 compromise to get things moving again. And now that there is a Democratic White House/Congress you are frustrated by the fact that the other side has a say in what you can do.
Trenchant.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Myles: Senators represent states, but states represent people. Insofar as a state is democratic, the interests of a state is identical to the interests of the people who live in it, and insofar as a state has other interests, (to maintain power for its own sake, say) it is not democratic, and therefore not worthy of formal respect.
There is probably a place for things like Canadian Senate and Bundesrat, but these institutions are (1) purposefully weaker than their respective lower houses and (2) given seats in a manner which, although not exactly proportional to population, are far closer to proportional than the US Senate.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Right, pure majoritarianism would be a great idea – applied to modern America, your theories would have done wonders for blacks up through at least the mid 90’s, and would currently do wonders for gay people. There are plenty of religious minorities that would likely be pushed around as well.
Do you think before you post?
June 16th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Check the archives. To his credit, Matt was complaining about the filibuster back when the Republicans had the majority, also. Arguably, not as vociferously, but he still openly opposed it. The same is true for many of the commenters as well.
Anyway, the complaint about the filibuster isn’t just that it’s undemocratic, but that it’s undemocratic and non-traditional. There’s a good argument for keeping non-democratic institutions like the Senate simply on the grounds of tradition and longevity.
But the filibuster in the modern sense, where virtually everything requires 60 votes, is a new phenomenon dating back a few decades at best (and really much less). So we’ve taken one of the least democratic institutions in the US, and changed the effective rules to make it much less democratic than it was before.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:50 am
[...] Matt Yglesias has discovered the facts that 1) each state gets two Senators and 2) some states are bigger than others, a condition that has obtained since the inception of our current system in 1789. There was, as some may recall having read, this thing called the Great Compromise whereby delegates representing sovereign states under the extant Articles of Confederation agreed they would have a bicameral legislature wherein one house represented people and another represented said states. This compromise, incidentally, was a diminution of the power the smaller states had under said Articles. [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Admittedly, Ben Nelson behaves like a Republican a good deal of the time, but he’s a Democrat (Nebraska does not have 2 Republican senators).
June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
And the way that territory has been carved up is somewhat of an accident of history. One can imagine an alternate reality where New York City was its own state (or maybe even one for each borough!) and Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska were one big state.
Some accident, some deliberate. The states between the Appalachians and the Pacific other than California and Texas are about the same size physically because they were drawn that way. The people who worked out the state boundaries gauged how many degrees of latitude and longitude might make up a good size for a state and drew them up accordingly. Unfortunately, they could not allow for some states having the resources for large metropolitan areas and some states having none.
I strongly suspect that keeping political power out of the hands of large cities was on their minds, as well. Traditional civil strife in Europe tended to focus on conflict between urban centers, royal governments, trading towns, and provincial gentry, with the occasional peasant revolt or urban riot spicing up the mix. Until New York City exploded in population in the 19th Century, the United States had no urban power foci like London, Paris, Lisbon, Rome, etc.
All that said, on the short list of things that saved the United States from the rule of a permanent Republican thugocracy, we can list the political power still dispersed to cities and states, new media to undermine the power of the Beltway, the inability of any party to Gerrymander the US Senate.
The Democratic minority in congress could be made invisible by Rove and Cheney and their allies on the news networks. However, Democratic senators, no matter how spineless, could not be shut out of the national debate and the networks, shallow creatures they might be, could not ignore their social rank and celebrity status. They were the one opposition element that could not be ignored.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
“Myles: Senators represent states, but states represent people. Insofar as a state is democratic, the interests of a state is identical to the interests of the people who live in it, and insofar as a state has other interests, (to maintain power for its own sake, say) it is not democratic, and therefore not worthy of formal respect.”
Once again, the level of basic civics education in America is pathetic. This misconception that a society is just an undifferentiated mass of people without any structures or institutions is what is bizarre.
It’s fair to point out that America’s federal system is in conflict with the drift toward a unitary state, but I’d suggest people think real long and real hard about whether they want a unitary state in America.
Mike
June 16th, 2009 at 11:54 am
What happened to wealth redistribution? Honestly? People in those states should get more because they have less.
There’s a line between exploitation and help, but c’mon now.
At best that is an argument for giving disproportionate representation to the poor, of which there are many millions, not to some arbitrarily selected small group of people which excludes most of the poor and includes some non-poor. In other words, I wouldn’t have a per se problem with something like poorer communities getting a net benefit from federal taxes and expenditures, but there is at best an accidental and highly imperfect fit between that goal and the current structure of the Senate.
Again, when you boil this all down, you end up having to defend the notion that the mostly-arbitrary historical process of state line-drawing just happened to disproportionately allocate political power in the best possible way in light of the result we would like to see on the issues of today. Which really isn’t a plausible notion when you think about it seriously.
Because even though I live in a densely populated area and would seem to benefit from the change you propose, I don’t consider myself to be so smart and omniscient that I can know what is best for an entire subcontinent of 18 million square kilometers now and forevermore.
Nor can the people of Montana make that claim. So the question is why do you think giving the people of Montana a disproportionate say in the political process, and not the thousands of other possible similarly-sized groups of people we could imagine having emerged from this historical process with such a disproportionate say, just happened to result in getting the best possible decisions for the entire country. In other words, you have the burden of proving why the people of Montana are so much more special and wise than the thousdands of other possible such groups–I’m just taking the neutral position that we have no real reason but status quo bias to think that is the case.
I also have a lot of respect for the outcome of long-term, messy, organic processes which leans against many of the grand, super-organized schemes such as this one and the ones Matt Y tends to propose.
I understand the inclination to prefer institutions and traditions which have proven their worth over time over untested proposals, but in this case there is just no reason to believe the outcome was the result of any “organic” process. Rather, you are just looking at the accumulated results of many different haphazard short-term political decisions, decisions that cannot be meaningfully reconsidered over time due to the peculiarities of our Constitution.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Insofar as a state is democratic, the interests of a state is identical to the interests of the people who live in it, and insofar as a state has other interests, (to maintain power for its own sake, say) it is not democratic, and therefore not worthy of formal respect.
The interests of a state are identical to the interests of its people, but the interests of a state are not identical to the national political affiliations of the the group of the people within the state who happen to be the majority group.
You confuse the two. Political affiliations, which essentially is now what Senate representations mean most of all, are not the same thing as interests, and much less the political affiliations of (in most cases) not even a majority, but a plurality.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:56 am
By preventing 50%+1 from being enough to pass you encourage compromise with the other side.
Except when the other side doesn’t want to compromise and is determined to give 0 votes to, for example, your plan to help the economy. It takes two to be bipartisan, and the Republican Party has been repeatedly purged to make it much more unlikely.
We would have loved to be able to get up/down votes on all our judicial nomination, but your fillibuster stopped us, and required the Gang of 14 compromise to get things moving again.
Wow, way to contradict yourself in one sentence. “You stopped us, except for the part where you didn’t actually stop anything.” Failed attempts to filibuster are not equivalent to successful ones.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:59 am
To state the obvious, you can allocate power to the state level, including having state governments select representatives to the federal government, while also maintaining proportionate representation at the federal level. So those are really two entirely different issues.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
But the filibuster in the modern sense, where virtually everything requires 60 votes, is a new phenomenon dating back a few decades at best (and really much less). So we’ve taken one of the least democratic institutions in the US, and changed the effective rules to make it much less democratic than it was before.
A fair point. I think it is important to keep in mind why the use of the filibuster has changed though. The use has changed because the parties have become more polarized and thus more likely to play hardball. Simply removing the filibuster without changing the culture will mean that the majority is just as inclined to steam rolling the minority as it is now, but the minority doesn’t have its best tool to fight back.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, both side have praised the filibuster as a grand thing for protecting minority rights and both have decried it as an pointless barrier to getting things done, depending on who was in the majority as the time. A lot of Democrats are railing agianst this sort of thing now because you are in power and likely will be for at least 6 more years. But changing the rules now will mean dire things for you later. Remember the Rupiblicans who wanted to kill the filibuster when they had power a few years ago? Look pretty short sighted now don’t they.
A tool the everyone loves when they are in the minority and everyone hates when they are in the majority sounds like a decent tool.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
> I strongly suspect that keeping political power
> out of the hands of large cities was on their minds,
> as well.
That’s the problem with the 38 States map in fact: it cuts against the way that Illinois and Wisconsin (among others) were deliberately laid out to avoid putting the capital in teh largest city.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
This misconception that a society is just an undifferentiated mass of people without any structures or institutions is what is bizarre.
That’s quite right, too.
The great difficulty of American states is that their boundaries are not, generally, organic. For the most part, they are straight lines intersecting with other straight lines on a map.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
We would have loved to be able to get up/down votes on all our judicial nomination, but your fillibuster stopped us, and required the Gang of 14 compromise to get things moving again.
Wow, way to contradict yourself in one sentence. “You stopped us, except for the part where you didn’t actually stop anything.” Failed attempts to filibuster are not equivalent to successful ones.
The Gang of 14 compromise took place only after YEARS of successful filibustering and STILL did not get all nominees an up/down. It was therefore a compromise. Which was the point.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
There’s a good argument for keeping non-democratic institutions like the Senate simply on the grounds of tradition and longevity.
That isn’t an argument, it’s ancestor worship.
If the track record of the Senate is good, that might be an argument for keeping it, but has anyone ever done a systematic review of bills that passed the House but were rejected by the Senate, and whether (in the benefit of hindsight) they would have been better off passed? (Or, IOW, how would our government have actually acted differently if we had a unicameral legislature?)
June 16th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
For all the founder-worship that treats the Senate as divinely-inspired brilliance, many of the founders hated the institution with a passion. James Madison was an ardent opponent of apportioning it on equal basis by states and thought it was a giant mistake until the day he died.
The original idea that large states would oppress the small states never panned out. All the major political conflicts between states have been between regional blocs of states, not large states vs. small states. Are California, Texas and NY ganging up on Wyoming and Vermont?
Also, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of one-person-one-vote, forcing states to abandon Senate-like apportionments within states. On principle, the same thing should apply to the federal government. Obviously, it can’t because of the Constitution.
That being said, in the grand scheme of things, getting rid of the equal vote provision is a bit of a pipe dream. Given *how* many issues need updating in the Constitution, I would rank this fairly low. I would rather see (a) a larger House drawn by nonpartisan redistricting with members elected in 3-5 member districts by STV or cumulative vote, (b) abolition of the Electoral College, (c) easier third-party ballot access, (d) full public financing of elections, and (e) filibuster abolition. (I’d also like to see a 4-year House term elected alongside the presidency while we’re at it.)
I will add that one *possible* Senate reform that has been suggested by some political scientists is having each state get ONE senator, with an equal number of senators elected nationally on a party-list basis. This is a mixed-member system, as used in the German Bundestag. Perhaps that could pass muster, although maybe it would require that there only be one “national” senator per state as well.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
States with lower than average per capita income, which receive less than a dollar of federal spending for each dollar of taxation (poor states subsidizing the others):
Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Oregon
States with higher than average per capita income, which receive more than a dollar of federal spending for each dollar of taxation (rich states on welfare):
Rhode Island, Maryland*, Virginia*, Alaska, Wyoming.
MD and VA are understandable because of their proximity to DC, so I’d toss them out of the discussion. They are also neither large nor small states. VA, while the 12th largest state, is barely above mean population. Maryland is below it.
The states getting clearly screwed are the 2nd, 7th, 8th and 27th largest. The states benefiting without warrant are the 43rd, 47th and 50th largest.
It isn’t redistribution of wealth. It is legislative extortion.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
To state the obvious, you can allocate power to the state level, including having state governments select representatives to the federal government, while also maintaining proportionate representation at the federal level. So those are really two entirely different issues.
To have the states being Sovereign in selecting senators while not having the Senate’s distribution corroborate with the modus operandi for sovereign entities, equal votes for each entity, would be implausible.
An analogy might be useful. Whereas in most elections each elector is to be regarded as sovereign in and of himself, and his choice reflecting his personal sovereignty, in regards to the Senate the individual state stands in as the sovereign entity, in and of itself absolute, and not merely as a representation of other entities. Thus, the parallel to one person one vote would in this case be one state one vote (or some other parallel number).
June 16th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
One can understand and be aware of all of the arguments for the senate as is and reject them as dumb. Because they are dumb. It leads to worse and more unfair outcomes. I don’t really understand what those defending the status quo expect to accomplish. Those that oppose it know the reasons for the way things are and, having considered those reasons, reject them as inadequate in comparison to the reasons for overturning the status quo. There is no light to be seen. I very much doubt that given a Rawlsian veil people whose ideology was not advanced by the status quo would accept it is superior to the proposed alternative. A similar problem occurs with the case of DC voting rights (and a minor contradiction occurs because the more intractable problem of senate allocation would, should the less difficult problem of DC voting rights be solved, lead to swing from disenfranchisement, to Wyomingesque overenfranchisement.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
The problem with JD’s “analysis” is that it pretends that the Republicans didn’t get pretty much everything they wanted for the entire time they held onto their bare majority. The fact is, the “up or down” vote demanded by the same thugs who had obstructed the process of judicial nominees was a fucking joke. The fact that there were so many vacancies was directly related to the fact that the Republicans had prevented those positions from being filled. Giving their whines all the force of the pleas for mercy from an orphan – who has just killed his parents.
Years of successful filibusters? Yes, by Republicans.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
To clarify; as is originally intended, Senate selection is to have no relationship to voters whatsoever, and in any case do not represent voters.
Just as United Nations representatives do not corroborate to national conditions, either.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
That isn’t close to the reason for the 60% cloture level. Originally it was to ensure that open debate on legislation occurred, that no simple majority could force through their agenda quickly and secretively to present a fait accompli to the people. Once debate had been thorough, th evote was taken. Fifty percent plus one was always assumed to be the level needed for passage of legislation.
The current use the Republicans are making of it isn’t even traditional. It had been used, for better or worse, to prevent very narrow sets of policies. The Republicans are using it to negate the last election. The entirety of the agenda which saw huge margins of victory last November is being filibustered. It is shamefull. Every Republican Senator knows that they are perverting the rules of the Senate in a disgusting way. Some might feel guilty and do it anyway, others probably like it.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
That’s the problem with the 38 States map in fact: it cuts against the way that Illinois and Wisconsin (among others) were deliberately laid out to avoid putting the capital in teh largest city.
Of course that was a deliberate goal of that particular exercise:
You could have equal-sized states while maintaining small, centrally-located, state capitals, if that was your goal instead.
To have the states being Sovereign in selecting senators while not having the Senate’s distribution corroborate with the modus operandi for sovereign entities, equal votes for each entity, would be implausible.
That is pure pseudophilosophical nonsense. Sovereignty has always applied WITHIN the relevant territorities. It in no way implies equal representation within bodies encompassing multiple sovereign territories.
Of course, the truth is that the whole federal government is a compromise on sovereignty. That said, it is also true the framers of the Constitution intended the Senate to represent the states as if they were equals, but you don’t need any pseudophilosophical nonsense to conclude that: they just wrote it that way.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I agree that it is an outrage that all those people in California have only two Senators. As others have said, it is time for California to break up into several smaller states, thus solving the problem.
Break up California now!!!!
June 16th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
The fiction written in the Constitution that states have any sovereignty has caused a lot of trouble. I think it is about time we had it explicitly eliminated in an amendment. After the Federal government defeated a collection of states in a war, it should have been part of the terms of readmission (and future admissions) to the union. A sovereign state can withdraw from the Union. There are no sovereign states.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I hate to agree with Myles, but as a lifelong Californian and Democrat, the disproportionality of the Senate really doesn’t bother me. Apportioning state senates by county is unconstitutional because states are not federations of counties; counties are merely internal divisions of states created for administrative purposes. Not so with the states relative to the federal government. The states are kind of semi-sovereign and represent a cultural, legal, and geographic continuity in a way that mere aggregations of people do not. While there are a few exceptions, states are kind of like mini countries with an interplay between urban and rural areas.
The U.S. government is set up with a lot of checks and balances; the three branches of government famously have ways of checking each other, and then there’s things like the continuity of the lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court vs. the ephemeral nature of the House of Representatives. The larger point is that it’s very simplistic to just see things as being “more democratic” and thus better the closer we are to direct democracy. We’re a republic, not a democracy, and I think it’s a very good thing that a swing in the legislature doesn’t necessarily correspond to a swing in the executive, and vice versa.
Some things change slowly, and others change quickly, and in doing so we can effect change while also having a reasonable amount of confidence that the stability of the nation isn’t riding on the shoulders of a single person or the outcome of a single election.
Also remember when talking about the distribution of wealth in the country that land takes money to maintain, too. The amount of Interstate highway, for example, is not and should not be a function merely of the population of a state. Wyoming and Nebraska have more Interstate road mileage per capita than the rest of the country, and there’s nothing wrong with that — they form a vital link between the more populated areas. Likewise, managing the forest and mineral resources of large Western states requires a lot more involvement per capita from the federal government than anything in Massachusetts.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Illinois and Wisconsin (among others) were deliberately laid out to avoid putting the capital in teh largest city.
This is actually more common than not among the states. Only 17 of the 50 states have their largest city as their capital. Of the 10 largest cities in the country, only one of them (Phoenix) is a state capital. This is, again, another example of balance in the United States. Big cities have a tremendous amount of influence in their states anyway by virtue of being big cities, and the physical separation of capitals from the largest cities helps balance this influence.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
A sovereign state can withdraw from the Union. There are no sovereign states.
If the word were in more common use in that context, its misuse would be a problem. No one thinks that states can secede from the union except the States Rights crackpots, so this is a non-issue.
As it is, having a strong central government while having soveriegnty technically flowing from the states has big constitutional advantages. It throws up bureaucratic and political barriers to abuses of power.
A national police force, a national spy agency, or a purely national military will always be a threat to freedom and democracy. Police powers in our country are a default state authority except where our laws specify otherwise. Federal officers have no general authority to order state and local cops around. Our national intelligence agencies have to justify any action they take within our boundaries and have rivalries with the FBI, state cops, etc., to keep them in check. The National Guard, for all its faults, is not a Federal agency and cannot be used as such without negotiations with state governments.
We have casually let these boundaries weaken over the years, and do so at our peril.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
If you’re going to complain about state boundaries forming historic inequities in representation, what about Rhode Island? It’s not even the size of a large city; why does it get the same Senatorial representation as California or Texas?
If you’re going to advocate for rationalization of states, keep in mind that a significant number of (traditionally-Democratic) states would likely be consolidated; New England is just about right for one (and still only a quarter the size of Texas!)
Seriously, though, this is one of the things that will not be changed anytime soon, because nobody really wants to be the one to crack open that particular can of worms. If you thought there was a lot of fuss and politics around military base closings, imagine the possibility of the elimination of entire state governments!
June 16th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
No conceivable principle of Democratic representation or political equality makes this apportionment fair. To hear #1 tell it, spending New York’s resources on New Yorkers is somehow scandalously unfair, but whisking New York’s resources away to Wyomingers is, of course, the natural and fair state of things.
The defenders of the status quo, though good at sniffing about their rights, never offer anything resembling a principled justification. And that’s because they can’t. It’s just that they want to be on the national dole.
What principle entitles you to extra representation on the basis of geography?
As I have said before, no one, but no one at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 thought this system was fair. People are often dragged to the embrace of conclusions, agreement, and compromise kicking and screaming. And so it was with the Framers.
Or, eh, in other words, what DTM said.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
If you’re going to complain about state boundaries forming historic inequities in representation, what about Rhode Island? It’s not even the size of a large city; why does it get the same Senatorial representation as California or Texas?
Absolutely. Defenders of the status quo tend to select small-population states that fit whatever rationalization they are providing, and overlook the small-population states that do not fit, or even run counter, to their rationalization. The fact that Providence practically gets its own state, whereas many larger cities do not and indeed have to share states with other cities larger than Providence, is just as arbitrary as anything else about the status quo.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
My home state of Delaware has more representation in the Senate than any other state at the moment.
Two democratic Senators and a tie-breaking vice president(though not technically representing Delaware). All from 0.28% of the nation’s population
Though tie-breaking doesn’t seem particularly useful with the constant threat of a filibuster. Making the position of vice-president even more irrelevant.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
…otherwise we’d have the national spy organizations tapping Americans’ phones without a warrant.
It’s been my experience that the system we have supports state’s abuses of power while limiting fairness and efficiency in the federal government, but when the federal government wishes to abuse power, states do nothing to inhibit it. Federal abuse of power is only checked by another branch of the federal government.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
American’s reverence for the Constitution has an eerie quality. To me, it is a failed document. If the country is still drawn along the battle lines of the Civil War, a war the wording of the Constitution essentially predetermined, then we have not made much progress in 225 years and the slave owner founders who fucked up at the beginning bear a great deal of the responsibility.
Besides, it is an illiberal document, even for its time -read Tom Paine, and guaranteed sprawling, fractured and complex government by empowering states to such an extent that they are basically countries within a country.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Uh, in case no one else mentioned it.
Nebraska has only one Republican Senator, technically Nelson is a Democrat.
two from Nebraska,
June 16th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Sigh. And people complain about the Republicans yakking up American exceptionalism. We’ve had a more or less functional republic in this country for some 230 years, which is about 10 times as long as democracies usually last. Are we just spiritually superior to other people, or is it possible that somebody got the initial contract documents mostly right and successfully corrected the worst of the mistakes along the way?
…otherwise we’d have the national spy organizations tapping Americans’ phones without a warrant.
. . . routinely, as opposed to it normally happening in dark corners whenever the system is being corrupted by stupid, corrupt people.
It’s been my experience that the system we have supports state’s abuses of power while limiting fairness and efficiency in the federal government, but when the federal government wishes to abuse power, states do nothing to inhibit it. Federal abuse of power is only checked by another branch of the federal government.
It’s been my experience that the Federal governments ability to abuse power is limited by its inability to ignore constitutional restraints, to bend state and local governments to its will, and its need to hide its actions when it wants to commit said abuses. Ever live in one of those countries where they’ve had coups and fixed national elections every few years for the last century or so?
American’s reverence for the Constitution has an eerie quality. To me, it is a failed document. If the country is still drawn along the battle lines of the Civil War, a war the wording of the Constitution essentially predetermined, then we have not made much progress in 225 years and the slave owner founders who fucked up at the beginning bear a great deal of the responsibility.
As I noted above, in a world of nation states where democratic governments do not come up that often and are typically overthrown after a decade or a generation, 225 years of continuous democracy borders on the miraculous. What sort of standard are you using?
June 16th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] 16, 2009 in history and current events | by eric Matthew Yglesias has discovered afresh the massively inequitable US Senate. As longtime readers of this blog know, it’s [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
It’s funny that you title this post Democracy in America:
– Democracy in America, p. 247 (Lawrence, transl.)
I don’t see how it follows that a more democratic legislature means a better legislature.
Now, a democratic legislature has a great feature: it ideally takes the interests of everyone in the community (who can vote) into account. But, we have a lower house that roughly takes all citizens interests equally into account, and all citizens are represented in the senate even if not equally.
So, I don’t see why the purpose of our design of the legislative branch should be to make it as democratic as possible, particularly when there are good reasons for having unequal representation in the Senate (see post 1, by Not Really)
June 16th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Read the Federalist Papers. It provides a good explanation of why Federal systems survive and democratic ones usually have difficulty. Federalism seems to have worked pretty well. Pull out a few bolts and you may be surprised what happens.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
If only we had a bicameral legislature with a House of Representatives where the members were proportional to population to balance out the 2 Senators per state that allows a tiny state like Delaware to be on equal footing with a large state like NY.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Yes Mike, that solves the problem doesn’t it?
What the hell is wrong with you?
June 17th, 2009 at 2:51 am
It may be wacky, but it was wacky in 1789 as well. If you really want to change it, get on the phone with some law professors, get an amendment drafted, and start moving the petitions. Otherwise focus on how to operate within the system as it is utterly clearly and by design laid out.
June 17th, 2009 at 2:53 am
The above is from a different Mike (me).
June 17th, 2009 at 9:49 am
To those who state (correctly) that the constitutional text doesn’t permit an amendment reforming the Senate, the solution is rather simple. Close down the “Senate”; simulatenously open up a new “upper house” with a different name and institutional framework. Problem solved.
Politically, of course, this is about as likely as free ponies for all. But that objection should be laid to rest.
June 17th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Ultimately, no legislature is going to function unless the minority is willing to let the majority rule and the majority is willing to let the minority participate. It requires manners and mutal respect, two commodities scare in modern American culture.
The traditional rules worked well enough in the past, but the current Republican thugocracy won’t play by the rules. They abused the Democrats when they were in the majority and are monkey-wrenching their programs and the process while they are in the minority.
June 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
The only workable solution to this disparity of power is not a constitutional amendment — there are enough small states (4 or fewer congressional districts) to prevent ratification — but the division of large states into smaller ones (northern and southern California, greater NYC and upstate New York, south, central and panhandle Florida, etc.). Even then, small-state senators would try to block it and probably would succeed (as they have with DC statehood).
This recession is probably going to force people to relocate, as the early ’80s recession did. Then, people moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. This time, it appears the movement will be from old-economy industrial towns to new-economy “ideopolises.” Some of these places are in smaller states with histories of electing far-right politicians. It will be interesting to see whether in-migration will change their political character — whether what happened in Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and Arizona will now happen in Idaho, Utah, Montana and Nebraska.