Defend the Indefensible: The Undemocratic (and, right now, un-Democratic) United States Senate

1. California -- 1
2. Texas -- 1.6
3. New York -- 1.9
4. Florida -- 2.1
5. Illinois -- 2.8
6. Pennsylvania -- 2.9
7. Ohio -- 3.1
8. Michigan -- 3.6
9. Georgia -- 4.1
10. New Jersey -- 4.1
11. North Carolina -- 4.2
12. Virginia -- 4.8
13. Massachusetts -- 5.6
14. Indiana -- 5.8
15. Washington -- 5.8
16. Tennessee -- 6.1
17. Missouri -- 6.2
18. Arizona -- 6.3
19. Maryland -- 6.5
20. Wisconsin -- 6.5
21. Minnesota -- 7.0
22. Colorado -- 7.8
23. Alabama -- 8.0
24. Louisiana -- 8.0
25. South Carolina -- 8.5
26. Kentucky -- 8.8
27. Oregon -- 10.0
28. Oklahoma -- 10.2
29. Connecticut -- 10.2
30. Iowa -- 12.2
31. Mississippi -- 12.4
32. Arkansas -- 13.0
33. Kansas -- 13.3
34. Utah -- 15.0
35. Nevada -- 15.6
36. New Mexico -- 18.9
37. West Virginia -- 20.0
38. Nebraska -- 21.1
39. Idaha -- 25.6
40. Maine -- 27.6
41. New Hampshire -- 27.6
42. Hawaii -- 28.5
43. Rhode Island -- 32.2
44. Montana -- 39.9
45. Delaware -- 44.9
46. South Dakota -- 46.6
47. Alaska -- 55.2
48. North Dakota -- 57.0
49. Vermont -- 57.9
50. Wyoming -- 71.8

Might as well get stoned and go surfing.

America’s 25 Most Conservative Cities (in descending order)

Rank City State

1 Provo Utah

2 Lubbock Texas

3 Abilene Texas

4 Hialeah Florida

5 Plano Texas

6 Colorado Springs Colorado

7 Gilbert Arizona

8 Bakersfield California

9 Lafayette Louisiana

10 Orange California

11 Escondido California

12 Allentown Pennsylvania

13 Mesa Arizona

14 Arlington Texas

15 Peoria Arizona

16 Cape Coral Florida

17 Garden Grove California

18 Simi Valley California

19 Corona California

20 Clearwater Florida

21 West Valley City Utah

22 Oklahoma City Oklahoma

23 Overland Park Kansas

24 Anchorage Alaska

25 Huntington Beach California

yes, but there are many parts of california and new york state that aren't "very different" from the heartland states at all, and share many of the same problems.

The issue is whether it's more important for "states" to have a say, or for people. Which party it hurts or helps has varied. Right now it obviously helps the Republicans. But it's arbitrary and anti-democratic no matter who it benefits. I guess people accept it because it's what we know (and because 100 is such a nice round number).

xpost: I'm not sure a tyranny of the minority is exactly an improvement.

The issue is whether it's more important for "states" to have a say, or for people.

Obviously I was using "state" as a shorthand for the people of that state, and often the people of different states have very different priorities. For example the loss of manufacturing jobs might be a much bigger issue for people in states that are economically depressed than in states that have benefitted from a tech boom. And there's also the matter of funding for local projects - flood control, road improvement, or whatever else.

If democracy means nothing more than majority rule, why not just make Christianity the national religion, since the vast majority of the country is Christian?

and what i was saying is that the particular pocket of a state where a tech boom is happening may not have a significant economic effect on the whole state. the bay area has tech jobs, but in the central valley (not very far away) there's a lot of rural farmland and isolated exurbia. in new york, once you get out of westchester and the hudson valley, there isn't any of that nyc money and everyone's unemployed. the truth is that greater nyc's economy has very little bearing on the economic health of the whole state.

By what you're saying maybe the real problem is using the arbitrary "state" as a political unit, not non-proportional representation. But there are certainly issues that vary regionally, whether the variances coincide with states or not. Maybe a single-house system would work better but with some kind of weighting for less populous areas.

yes, exactly. a "state" is a geographical delineation, not an all-encompassing description of the people who live there.

It wasn't arbitrary in its design, but it's arbitary in its effects. People don't choose where they live based on whether it's a "big" state or "small" state -- most people don't, anyway -- but where you end up living for whatever mix of personal and professional reasons ends up having a big effect on how much representative power you have in the federal government.

And it doesn't protect against a tyranny of the majority, at least not in any thoughtful way. It was designed to protect the interests of individual states, at a time when those interests were considered distinct enough to need protection. But those differences have eroded considerably over time -- we all use the same currency, we allow largely unfettered interstate commerce, and most significantly we are all subject to a much stronger federal government -- and so what the Senate ends up protecting is the ability of canny small-state senators like Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens to divert massive amounts of federal money to highways in West Virginia and bridges in Alaska. The bizarre allocation of homeland security money, with Midwestern states getting many times the per capita funding as demonstrably more threatened coastal states, could not happen without the Senate.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate's "check" on the House was not a function of its 2-per-state structure, but of the way senators were elected, by elite groups of state legislators rather than by popular ballot. The Senate was supposed to be the educated aristocracy's bulwark against the masses. A lot of its vaunted traditions derive from that. So it's just basically a problematic institution all the way around.

http://www.blackhillsattractions.com/assets/pics/Attractions%20Pics/cornpalace.jpg

not at all! it was just the hokiest thing i could think of.

people in new mexico don't even have the same priorities as people in other parts of new mexico! santa fe and its surrounding mountain towns have some extremely wealthy residents, and with all the tourism there are plenty of opportunities for moneymaking (from minimum-wage service industry stuff all the way up to millionaire real-estate mogul). the weather is beautiful and there isn't a water shortage the way there is down in dry low-desert towns like albuquerque.

arizona faces a pretty similar divide.

And that's what state governments are for -- to decide how to address the relative needs and wants of Santa Fe vs. other portions of the state.

and it's not just economic issues: a lot of NYS has "heartland values".

Notice how, a couple of notable exceptions aside, the senators that people care about/listen to/get the most face time are all in the top half of the population ranking.

(xpost: THE SENATE IS NOT THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.)

I understand that it's not gonna change any time soon, it's in the Constitution and we're stuck with it. But that doesn't make it defensible.

As for which senators have or have had most clout, how 'bout Ted Stevens, Robert Byrd, Joe Biden, Tom Daschle, Patrick Leahy, Olympia Snowe...all from the 10 smallest states.

None of the arguments that have been put forward on this thread justifying the make-up of the Senate really hold water. If you really wanted to protect against a tyranny of the majority, you would create a system that protected meaningful groups of persons who have a real danger of having their rights trampled on: eg., religious, political or ethnic minorities. I don't see any reason to think that Wyomans (if that's the right word) are such a group. I don't see why those who live in sparsely-populated rural areas are such an important endangered group of people that their rights should be so heavily favored over the rights of everyone else who chooses to live in more densely-populated areas.

just b/c there are very conservative places in California doesn't mean that the state votes solidly left of center

yes, the Senate is undemocratic in its overrepresentation of small states, but the impact of that overrepresentation (aside from whether it's justified) is somewhat complex. many of those small states are rural. does that mean that, for instance, farming interests are overrepresented? yes, probably, but the identity of those itnerests changes over time, and it's worth considering whether that is necessarily a bad thing (compare the antitrust exemption for baseball, though that certainly has much less serious political consequences). does it give the body a general political/ideological slant? yes, probably, again, but again that slant also has probably changed over time, going in different directions.

as above, it's state boundaries themselves that are in part the problem, but i don't see how you go about fixing it (though there might come a tipping point where enough people decide that they're sort of silly) or fixing it without a serious risk of making things worse.

er, doesn't vote

Oh yeah, there's no way to fix it. You need three-fourths of the states to amend the Constitution, and way more than half the states would lose out in a proportionately representative system, so it pretty much de facto can't happen.

Well there's a difference between being irrational and being stupid. I mean one could argue that having an irrational method of apportioning representatives in one house of Congress is actually a good thing, simply because it increases the likelihood that there will be a split Congress, which would encourage moderation and consensus building between the parties.

Also, way belated response to Dan: what's "stupid" about just acknowledging the basically anti-democratic structure of a major part of the federal government? I know it's not gonna change, but I don't think it's even just recognized enough. I learned the history of Congress in school, but I don't remember any teacher really explicitly saying that the Senate was an undemocratic institution. I remember them going on about it being "the saucer that cools the tea" or whatever, as if we should be grateful for it. I think there's a tedency to pretend our government is more democratic than it actually is.

1940–1947 Sam Rayburn (Tex.)
1947–1949 ..... Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (Mass.)
1949–1953 ..... Sam Rayburn (Tex.)
1953–1955 ..... Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (Mass.)
1955–1961 ..... Sam Rayburn (Tex.)
1963–1971 ..... John W. McCormack (Mass.)
1971–1977 ..... Carl Albert (Okla.)
1977–1987 ..... Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr. (Mass.)
1987–1989 ..... James C. Wright, Jr. (Tex.)
1989–1995 ...... Thomas S. Foley (Wash.)
1995–1999 ...... Newt Gingrich (Ga.)
1999– ...... Dennis Hastert (Ill.)

Oklahoma's pretty much an anomaly, but big states traditionally rule the house.

This is condescending bullshit. The Senate is the only important part of the federal government that represents state interests, and whether or not you think that's a good idea is an entirely different issue. Not every single facet of the government is supposed to represent the national majority. That might be anti-democratic on the national level, but as stated upthread it helps prevent tyranny of the majority. (And of the minority. The situation right now is a fluke caused by 9/11, plain and simple.)

I do think that if you're going to argue that the Senate is "unfair" for giving equal representation to all states, then you may need to work up an arguement for even having states at all then. I mean, why should a dinky state like Delaware get to make its own corporate tax laws that attract business? Doesn't that take away from states like New York where said corporations do most of their business anyway?

And yeah, the Senate is supposed to represent "state interests," but what does that even mean in 2005? What exactly is a "state interest"? And why should the interests of "states" (which are just lines drawn on maps under various historical circumstances) trump the interests of actual citizens of the country? Why shouldn't New York, California and Texas each subdivide into 10 states, which would all have bigger populations than the 10 smallest U.S. states, and claim an additional 18 senators each for their citizens? It would make as much sense as anything else in the current system. More, actually.

xpost:
Yeah, well, that is the issue. And it's of course why it's not going to change, because we're not going to abolish states. And the thing is, I like states, I like the different character and personalities and histories they have, I don't think anyone would want to lose that. But maybe everyone could at least be more explicit about acknowledging the realities of the system. If the Republican Senate "majority" acted like it knew it was actually representing a minority of the population instead of threatening and bullying the "minority" that represents the majority, that would be a start.

"Ar/Kansas". That's great.

(And see if you can make out Ward Cleaver's take.

What doesn't make sense is giving some of those peoples' interests more representation than others based on nothing more than lines on a map. The people of Rhode Island deserve representation, but what is so special about living in Rhode Island that they should get 6 times the representation as their neighbors in Massachusetts? What greater good is being served by giving people who happen to live in Rhode Island more power than people who happen to live in Massachusetts? Even if people in Rhode Island do have demonstrably different interests than people in Massachusetts, why should their interests matter more in the federal government than the competing interests of people just over the (imaginary) state line?

Why can't states have interests? Can cities? Counties? Nations? If the U.S. can have any interests, so can Oregon, and so can Multnomah County, and so can Portland, and so can the Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood, and so can my apartment complex. And all those places do have interests, of course, because they have responsibilities -- there are certain things Oregon has to do for Oregonians, and Multnomah County has to do for its residents, etc., etc.

The issue isn't whether the interests of the residents of Oregon should be represented -- of course they should. But should they be represented in one of our major governing bodies with 10 times the weight of the interests of residents of California?

That's what I'm wondering. Hence the "Defend the Indefensible"...

just because the weather is nice in california and florida they should hold all of the political advantage?

if you want to weight political power by average temperature, north to south, that's fine by me and President Dean.

places in the west may be people poor but they are resource rich and maybe we should allocate political power based on hectares of farmland or some other stupid arbitrary measure?

yeah, stupid arbitrary measures like one person, one vote. instead, let's allocate political power based on oil reserves and turn the keys over to Abdullah and Hugo Chavez.

add Iowa, Indiana, Arizona and Virginia, and there are still more people in New York, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts

That said, rule by arbitrarily decided-upon districts seems fairer than rule by politically decided-upon gerrymandered districts.

As for New York, Texas and California "ruling," I don't want anyone to rule anyone, I'd just prefer a system where each citizen had equal representation in Congress. How is that unreasonable?

It has never been the point of the Senate to give equal representation to each citizen. Its objective is to give equal representation to the states. If your pursuit of happiness leads you to a little shack on the edge of some prairie somewhere, you deserve to be represented in at least one house of congress the same as someone who lives in a megapolis. It doesn't seem fair, but hey. At least you've got twenty-four hour Chinese delivery.

And following up on the Electoral College effect:

In 2004, Bush won 31 states, Kerry won 19. Since 2 of each states electors are based on their Senate seats, that means Bush got 62 electoral votes from the Senate contingent, while Kerry got 38. If you remove those votes from the count on both sides, the Electoral results change from Bush 286-Kerry 252 to Bush 218-Kerry 214. Not enough to change the outcome this time, but you can see the distorting effect it has. Small-state voters' overrepresentation in the Senate makes them also overrepresented in presidential elections.

So when you vote for president in California, your vote counts a little less than if you vote in Oregon, where it counts a lot less than if you vote in Wyoming. That seems worth keeping in mind.

NOW, if you want to reform the Electoral College - award Electoral votes by congressional district, for example - that would be more than fair.

But they like having more, which is why Electoral College reform will never happen either. Once you give people power, it's kind of hard to convince them to give it up.

Defend this then: Why should both houses of congress represent the nation's population equally? Why should China get just one vote on the UN's Security Council?

But within the U.S. why should both houses of Congress represent the population equally? Well, why shouldn't they? The entire idea of democratic self-government is one-man (or woman) one-vote. Of course, we've been a long time working toward that, but it's at least the trajectory we've followed. The House of Representatives is easy to defend, in principle: each representative, whether from Utah or Georgia, represents approximately the same number of American citizens. As noted above, there's lots of ways to screw with this, and it's gone through its own evolution, but the basic idea is straightforward. The composition of the Senate, otoh, is harder to justify.

It still favors people in small states slightly.

California: 35,893,799 voters/53 reps = 677,241.491
Wyoming: 506,529 voters/1 reps = 506,529

It'd also be interesting to find out how many people in small states actually vote vs. how many people in large states actually vote

...The latest Fox News poll puts Bush’s approval at only 33 percent. According to the polling firm Survey USA, there are only four states in which significantly more people approve of Bush’s performance than disapprove: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska. If we define red states as states where the public supports Bush, Red America now has a smaller population than New York City. ...

...So what’s left of the conservative agenda? Not much.
That’s not a prediction for the midterm elections. The Democrats will almost surely make gains, but the electoral system is rigged against them. The fewer than 8 million residents of what’s left of Red America are represented by eight U.S. senators; the more than 8 million residents of New York City have to share two senators with the rest of New York state.

ok so out of curiosity (because sadly this is the kind of thing i get curious about) i went and toted up the current party split in the senate in terms of actual population represented. (since the senate via filibuster has emerged as the gop's frontline in blocking legislation.) the democratic minority in the last senate actually represented a majority of the u.s. population. so it stands to reason that having made gains, the democratic majority now represents an even bigger majority of the population. and they do.

at a rough figure, the 49 republican senators represent about 43 percent of the population. so their relative prominence in less populated states gives them about a 6-vote swing in the senate. of course even if the senate were somehow proportionately representative (and again i have no idea how you'd do that), 43 votes is still enough to filibuster with, so arguably this doesn't really matter at the moment. but it's possible that with wins next fall the democrats will occupy senate seats representing over 60 percent of the u.s. population, but still won't have enough votes to end filibusters.

anyway. fwiw.

In the abstract, I agree with the idea behind our *bicameral* legislature. Democracy is not just about majority rule but about respecting the rights of all individuals. The desires of an individual city-dweller should not be more important than those of an individual farmer just because there are more city-dwellers than farmers, etc. Of course in reality now states themselves are so big and diverse that this doesn't hold. But I don't think a simple majority-rule system is the answer.

I guess I already pretty much said all that upthread though.

yeah and i probably said all this too, but the senate isn't about protecting individual rights; constitutionally that's more the role of the justice system (and the bill of rights itself, obviously). and it's not a matter of farmers vs. urbanites or anything like that; lots of big states have lots of farmers (new york, california, texas, florida). so why do farmers in wyoming have more power in the senate than farmers in pennsylvania?

protecting the interests of the very arbitrary units called "states" seems like a pretty thin justification for what amounts to the political disenfranchisement of people in populous states. (or the overenfranchisement of people in less populous ones.) i accept it as historical fact, and one that was necessary to get the constitution signed in the first place. but i think it's interesting how many americans seem to think it makes some kind of moral or philosophical sense, which i think is mostly because we grow up with it and so we assume it has some kind of legitimate rationale.

keyth schooled you 2 years ago on this point, are you still wasting time worrying about this?

keyth's post made no sense. and on the relative scale of stupid things i think about, this isn't even in like the 50th percentile of stupidity.

keyth's post made sense to me, and i'm the one who understands my junior-high civics lessons

yr a teacher, right? do you teach history? i'm curious because i'm trying to remember exactly how this whole thing was framed in my various american history classes. all the compromises involved in the constitution were amply covered (a lot of them were more noxious than this one, obviously), but i think the curriculum still more or less emphasized the fundamentally democratic nature of american government. like, i don't remember any serious discussion of whether "states' rights" really made sense as a philosophical basis for half the national legislature -- and if so, which "rights" exactly were being protected, from who, etc.

i know the history and the history is why we got what we got, ok fine. but there's a difference between it being historically, politically necessary and it being morally defensible. is all i'm sayin.

(and the real protection of the local interests of people in iowa or alaska is the basic division of powers between the federal and state governments, which is true for large and small states alike. keeping significant control of education, transportation, utilities, law enforcement, environmental protection, etc., at state and local levels allows for a huge amount of local and regional differentiation according to the wishes of the residents. whereas allowing disproportionate representation at the federal level mostly makes it cheaper for corporate interests to buy votes in those areas. much easier to get a senator elected in nebraska than new york, and their vote on the farm bill's worth just as much.)

no, i'm a chemistry + physics teacher (and right now i'm in school) so i can't claim any real intellectual status in this argument.

keeping significant control of education, transportation, utilities, law enforcement, environmental protection, etc., at state and local levels allows for a huge amount of local and regional differentiation according to the wishes of the residents

but i think what you're sort of willfully ignoring here is that historically a very, very big and important part of the legislative powers is deciding on tariff, taxation, embargo etc

so, for example, in 1800 you had the same number of dockworkers and a similar size shipping industry in rhode island and new york. today, you have the approximately same number of dockworkers in missouri (#21 in number of people employed) and florida (#4 in number of people employed) so if the main role of the congress is hashing out, say, the rules and regulations of interstate trade, then it makes perfect sense to give missouri and florida equal votes in the senate. by the same argument, it would make perfect sense to give nebraska and new york equal say on the farm bill. i could keep going with this - there's about as many farmers in california as there are in iowa (around 500,000 in each state, i think, though that doesn't count undocumented labor). of course, i have no doubt that we have 10x as many starbucks employees in california ...

i don't think anybody really thought that the role of congress would some day be reduced to arguing over stem-cell research and estate tax. in that case, then of course it doesn't make sense, since the estate tax affects each american more or less equally. whereas making laws on interstate shipping can devastate some local economies in a way that makes it important to give them a bigger vote (you can read up on the embargo act of 1807 if you want to find out how the shipping industry in rhode island got fucked over)

if you look at article I section 8 you'll see that regulating interstate trade is more or less why the congress was established!

i don't think anybody envisioned acts of congrees having a whole lot of effect on the day-to-day operation of the petit-bourgeoisie. and that's basically the difference between here (palo alto) and wyoming, is that we have a HUGE much bigger and better-developed professional and service class but we don't have a proportionally bigger class of people that rely on

now i believe you raised a pertinent objection upthread

we all use the same currency, we allow largely unfettered interstate commerce, and most significantly we are all subject to a much stronger federal government

i'm not sure about the "largely unfettered interstate commerce" part but the "subject to a much stronger federal government" part is correct. and this is a good and important objection, that if the role of the government is very different than it used to be, should the rules of the government change? *maybe*, but i'm not sure then that proportional representation in the senate is going to change things all that much.

you had an argument upthread about 550,000 wyoming-ers vs 35.4 million californians, i think it's worth exploring further and i'd like to hear a non-abstract example because i have a hard time thinking of a non-hypothetical case where the 550,000 wyoming-ers shouldn't have exactly the same # of senators as 35.4 million californians.

i mean, take abortion. you're posing some nightmare scenario where 550,000 red-staters are imposing their pro-life will on 35.4 million pro-choice blue-staters.

but isn't the reality that there's something like 15 million pro-life californians and 20 million pro-choice californians? and there are 15 million people who are getting exactly ZERO votes in the senate.

i mean, i can see that this is starting to lead into an "abolish the senate completely" type of argument but i think what it really gets at is that the house/senate has been quite good at regulating interstate trade and managing our resources but in the arena of doing things OUTSIDE their original job description it's all been an ugly compromise.

so do you think that alaska should get proportional representation on the arctic national wildlife refuge drilling or not?

those are lots of interesting points, some of which go to basic problems with even proportionate representation -- i.e. that at any given level, someone wins an election and someone loses, which is how you get anti-abortion californians and pro-choice tennesseans both completely unrepresented in the senate, which could well be true even if the senate was somehow made proportionately representative. when you have 100 people representing 300 million, obviously a lot of people and interests are going to be left out.

but where i have problems with the basic structure of the senate is exactly something like this:

there's about as many farmers in california as there are in iowa (around 500,000 in each state, i think, though that doesn't count undocumented labor).

ok, but those 500,000 farmers in iowa are much more represented in the senate than the 500,000 farmers in california. by virtue of living in a large state -- and one whose politics these days are more decided by urban interests than rural ones -- the california farmers are essentially disenfranchised relative to the iowa farmers. what difference that actually makes on any given piece of agricultural legislation, i have no idea, but it's not hard to imagine scenarios where it would matter. and if you're an iowa farmer, it's a lot easier to register your interests or concerns with your senators than if you're a california farmer. (if you're a wyoming farmer, you've probably had dinner with your senators.)

and alaska is an interesting case because the entire alaskan delegation is traditionally kind of a subsidiary of alaskan oil interests, and as such has been relentlessly pro-drilling. which is what you'd expect, and you can argue they're just advocating for their interests, and that's fine. but in less populated states, it's much easier for whatever the major industries are -- the oil industry in alaska, or in farm states companies like adm and monsanto and whoever -- to dominate the politics. oil companies want to drill off florida too, but they've had a harder time getting the support of the florida delegation, because florida's a big and diverse state with a lot of competing interests.

so one effect of the senate's structure is that it makes senate seats in small states cheaper to buy for people who have the money to buy them -- which is usually the local corporate and industrial interests. so, of course alaskan representatives should have a voice on anwr. but should 670,000 alaskans -- 2/10ths of 1 percent of the u.s. population, and a 2/10ths of 1 percent particularly heavily influenced by corporate oil interests -- have the same say over the use of federal land as 36.5 million californians (12 percent of the u.s. population)?

otoh, i also think there's a lot of value in the bicameral structure, and i think the senate serves a valuable legislative role. i don't know that the american system is better than a straight parliamentary system, but i don't know that it's worse either. and in general i like the diffusion of power, and two houses is more diffuse than one. but how to fairly organize a second house if not along basic lines of proportionate representation, i don't know. the senate as constructed is certainly not fair or democratic in the one-man-one-vote sense, but it has the virtue of seeming fair (it has an intuitive appeal, every state gets the same vote, which makes sense as long as you pretend states are something real and not just agglomerations of people).

but i also think it's fair to point out when the senators representing 43 percent of the population are essentially dictating law to the other 57 percent of the population.

well the alaska thing you're saying is interesting, because you're supposedly arguing for democracy here and yet you have a very obvious distrust of democratic process!

also for a guy who's so skeptical of these abstractions called "states", you're quite willing to buy into this idea of "corporate interests" and "industry" as these shadowy autonomous juggernauts that are automatically inimical to the interests of "the people"

which makes sense as long as you pretend states are something real and not just agglomerations of people

^^ this kind of bothers me--your problem with the senate isnt actually that states are "fake" or something; it's that they have different amounts of people in them. i mean, any kind of representation is going to have to make some (arguably) "arbitrary" distinctions about where and how to do it. and plus, doesnt montana (or maybe wyoming?) have just 1 congressional district? isnt that just an agglomeration of people too?

i dont mean to split hairs, but it seems like the supposed arbitrariness of state boundaries, and therefore the arbitrariness of assigning senators to states, is a big complaint for you. but as far as i can tell, theyre not particularly more arbitrary than congressional districting, and in fact youd have a good argument to say that theyre actually less so!

Proportional senate proposal = 2 senators per state but each has a vote weighted by the size of their constituents. Of course, then 10% of votes are controlled by two people, but at least we don't need to modify the Senate other than voting laws.

i dont mean to split hairs, but it seems like the supposed arbitrariness of state boundaries, and therefore the arbitrariness of assigning senators to states, is a big complaint for you. but as far as i can tell, theyre not particularly more arbitrary than congressional districting, and in fact youd have a good argument to say that theyre actually less so!

congressional district lines can be pretty ugly -- "defend the indefensible: gerrymandering" would be a whole other thread -- but they adhere to a basic concept of equal representation: each district has approximately the same number of people. state lines reflect various factors, mostly geography and the history of conquest and settlement of the country, but they take no notice at all of population.

think of it this way: you could split texas up into 11 states, each of which would still have more people than live in new mexico. the 11 new states would all have the basic characteristics of states: a contiguous territory inhabited by people who by virtue of proximity would have some shared economic, political and cultural interests. following the logic of the senate, each of those states would get two senators. so the exact same texas population that currently has two votes in the senate -- just like new mexico -- would instead have 22 votes. i think it's kind of hard to justify a system that can equally easily give 2 votes or 22 votes to the same group of citizens.

there's another unintended but practical effect too. for various reasons, smaller states tend to be less racially diverse than larger states. black and latino populations are disproportionately concentrated in large urban areas, which tend to be in more populous states. there are more african americans in chicago than there are people in the whole state of south dakota. but because of the senate, living in big states is a bad formula for political representation in congress. which is why about 10 percent of the house of representatives is black, but only 1 percent of the senate. there are 5 times as many mormons in the senate as there are african americans, because mormons had the historical good luck to end up concentrated in less-populous states.

to the same group of citizens

not the same group when it comes down to federal regulation of, uh, uranium mining

like, we GET that new mexico has the equivalent of 11 times more *proportional* representation but you need to give a a real-life example of why this is or isn't a bad thing.

well the alaska thing you're saying is interesting, because you're supposedly arguing for democracy here and yet you have a very obvious distrust of democratic process!

no you're always going to have corporate and industrial interests and so forth, and the "democratic process" is not any kind of ideal thing, just a rough and relatively peaceable way of working out competing interests. all i'm saying is that within that process, giving one group of 670,000 people equal say with another group of 36.5 million people is not really "democratic" at all.

you need to give a a real-life example of why this is or isn't a bad thing.

homeland security spending by state

what's the beef? looks OK to me.

i mean, suppose each state gets a super-duper homeland security central supercomputer. and each one is going to cost, say, $20 million. then *of course* it's going to be nonproportional, because that's not going to scale w/ population - and why should it?

if you want to interpret that chart as homeland security gave each citizen in wyoming a baseball cap AND a sweatshirt ($39) and all i got in calfiornia was a lousy DHS ballcap ($12) you can make that mistake if you want to.

i mean, of course it's NOT going to be proprotional

it's a bit like arguing "california has 65 times as many citizens as wyoming - why don't we have 65 times as many AIRPORTS?"

shouldn't the air force be spending 65 times as much money in california than in wyoming?

for homeland security thinking about states equally doesn't make sense to start with -- much different security concerns in kansas and arizona. there's no reason each "state" needs the same superduper homeland security supercomputer. states don't have equivalent interests in the first place. but then that basic category error is compounded by the overrepresentation of small states, which is what allows guys like ted stevens and robert byrd to turn their states into net profit centers of federal funding, while larger states tend to run net losses.

and in any system you're going to have some parts of the population paying more into the system than they get out of of it, and vice versa. when that is based on something like individual income, it's easy enough to justify (at least if you're a progressive liberal type) -- it makes sense for the wealthy to subsidize the less wealthy. but when it's based on lines on a map that take no account of actual population, i think it's a harder case to make.

shouldn't the air force be spending 65 times as much money in california than in wyoming?

well i guess my question would be, why shouldn't it? in other words what's so omg daffy absurd about the idea that political representation (and the dedication of resources etc that comes with it) should be tied to population?

because economics, duh

also "resources" in general aren't controlled by the congress, just certain ones, and in the case of the air force there are a lot of reasons why it might make sense for air force spending to be inversely proportional to size!!

unless you think manhattan is a good location for an air force base.

inversely proportional to population, i mean

it's just basic common sense that cost doesn't scale: a banquet for 1000 isn't necessarily 10x as expensive as a banquet for 100 which isn't necessarily 10x as expensive as dinner for 10.

if that homeland security money is mostly just putting infrastructure down in federal buildings and airports and shipping and military installations then i imagine the costs would be similar in kansas and arizona.

i mean the equivalent of all this would be if new york state suddenly said that in the state senate, each of the 62 counties would get one vote. which would mean that the 24,000 people in yates county would have the same political sway in the state senate as the 2.2 million people in queens county. that proposal would be laughed out of town as hugely undemocratic, not to mention terribly weighted against large urban counties. it would lead to racial disenfranchisement, and would give vast empty acres in western new york the same political pull as, say, downtown buffalo. it would inevitably lead to overprivileging small counties and their local industries and economies, at the expense of the more populous counties. and it would be very hard to justify. that's pretty much the situation with have with the u.s. senate.

i'm coming into this late, but aren't your concerns, tipsy, mitigated by having another deliberative body that must sign all bills, in which representation is determined by population? called the house of representatives?

if that homeland security money is mostly just putting infrastructure down in federal buildings and airports and shipping and military installations then i imagine the costs would be similar in kansas and arizona.

first i'm not conversant enough with the homeland security budget to know how much of it is fixed costs of that sort, but if you look at the various accounts of how the money is spent, it looks like your normal federal clusterfuck of everybody-grab-what-they-can. even if you allow for some fixed costs around federal buildings, installations, and so forth, you're still going to have many more of those in states with large populations than small ones, so it's not likely to justify a per-capita multiplier of three between wyoming and new york. (and in fact the per-capita gap has dropped a bit in the last few years, especially now with big-state-friendly democrats running the senate. if this was all a matter of "fixed costs," you wouldn't have that kind of variation.)

any philosophical defense of the senate has to somehow take into account giving "states" greater political consideration than people. i don't know what that defense would be, any more than i can imagine giving "counties" in new york political precedence over the citizens of the state.

aren't your concerns, tipsy, mitigated by having another deliberative body that must sign all bills, in which representation is determined by population? called the house of representatives?

and tracer, sure, up to a point. but that's the thing: justifying the house is easy, at least in the abstract. each american is more or less equally represented there. (how that works in practice is more complicated obviously.) but justifying the senate in the abstract i think is a lot harder on any grounds but historical accident.

in my example of rearranging the new york state senate to give equal representation to counties, the inherent inequality of that scheme would be somewhat mitigated by the proporationate representation in the general assembly. but i sort of doubt that would make anyone in brooklyn feel a lot keener about it.

what do you think of the process for passing constitutional amendments, where each state casts a vote? this, too, is totally nothing to do with population. should constitutional amendments be subject to a nationwide referendum instead?

There is always a problem with second chambers. The idea of a second amending body is pretty standard across all political systems by how to constitute it in a way that is representative but different from the lower chamber is always difficult so you go from the systems of appointments for life (in the UK and various banana republics) to appointments based on geographical representation which is different from that in the lower chamber, like in the US, Germany etc. It is never that satisfactory because it ends up being a different compromise on representation. In the US it is complicated further by the fact that the responsibilities of the two houses overlap more than they do in some other systems.

i think it would be fun to get rid of all the current senators and replace them with a 50-person senate comprising the governor of each state. most state governors work about eight weeks out of the year, anyway. they could work from home, using the internets.

what do you think of the process for passing constitutional amendments, where each state casts a vote?

yeah i think that has the exact same problem. and ditto each state's presidential electors being based on their congressional delegation, including the two senators. (somewhere up above i calculated the advantage this gave george bush in 2004, which was considerable.) basically, i think anything that gives representation to states rather than people is on shaky philosophical ground, at least from the standpoint of democracy. if the goal is something other than democracy, then maybe you can make a case for representing the interests of "states," but i'm not sure what it would be.

The United States is a Republic not a democracy. It was never set up to be particularly democratic.

tipsy is trying to reverse-engineer tyranny of the masses. will explain later.

tipsy as fair and good as your plan might be i think it would run into something called "politics". proportional representation in both houses would be a massive power giveaway from the rural states to the metropolises (metropoli?) -- isn't this actually the very issue involved in "the great compromise"? southern states wanted a unicameral legislature, with two representatives from each state; northern states wanted a unicameral legislature with members distributed according to population; the compromise is what we have today. it's hard to imagine any other solution being agreed to, really.

I think the fifty stars on the flag should be sized according to its representative state's population.

Cuz then that flag would look CR@ZZZZZzzzzY!

for all the rhetoric, i still haven't seen anything posted that convinces me that a rural vote should be worth five times an urban one, or whatever the ration is.

New York City secession, plz

ok here's a really simple and obvious hypothetical

say a bill was proposed to levy a new federal tax on farmland. would it be fair to have this vote determined solely by a chamber with representation proportional to population? er no.

say i was made of straw, just to suit your argument.

is a farm tax really so outlandish a hypothetical??

with strictly proportional representation you basically have new york, california and texas deciding on every federal law, for everyone.

the point of the arrangement of the us senate is to make sure that a bill isn't just popular, it's WIDESPREAD in its popularity

give rural votes huge weighting on all issues, just in case there's a proposal on agriculture? how arbitrary is that?

everyone in new york, california and texas agrees on everything?

lets split california and texas into two states each and combine montana, wyoming and alaska and then everyone would be happy

IIRC abraham lincoln was very dubious of the senate structure too - it arrogated way more power to his southern enemies than he would have liked; abandoning it, however, would likely have improved the chances of another secession - or series of secessions - as rural states repeatedly found themselves out of the loop

i like how the pro-proportionality contingent here thinks that actual politics are unnecessary to the formulation of political structures

splitters!

xpost yeah i appreciate the necessity of the system, particularly at the time of the formation of the political structures tracer, that doesn't mean that you can defend them as fair or necessary today, just probably unchangeable.

I find the idea that the States are just some 'arbitrary historical accident' downright gross.

an example from elsewhere: what if you had a student government association for a middle school comprising 6th, 7th and 8th graders? let's say that for some reason the 7th grade was much bigger than the other two groups. in voting, 7th-graders win every position (treasurer, vp, etc). is that fair?

give rural votes huge weighting on all issues, just in case there's a proposal on agriculture? how arbitrary is that?

-- darraghmac

senate was *invented* just for that purpose!

i HATE the seventh graders!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

basically, i think anything that gives representation to states rather than people is on shaky philosophical ground, at least from the standpoint of democracy. if the goal is something other than democracy, then maybe you can make a case for representing the interests of "states," but i'm not sure what it would be.

House of Representatives is weighted towards interests of democracy, Senate is weighted towards interests of federalism. Sure, the Senate seems peculiar if you just flatly disregard the sovereignty of the individual states, but first you ought to win that debate.

an example from elsewhere: what if you had a student government association for a middle school comprising 6th, 7th and 8th graders? let's say that for some reason the 7th grade was much bigger than the other two groups. in voting, 7th-graders win every position (treasurer, vp, etc). is that fair?

-- Tracer Hand, Monday, December 17, 2007 5:43 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i dunno- did they get the most votes?

again- assuming all seventh graders vote the same, and by extension all inhabitants of highly populated areas? how come there's more than one candidate in new york, if all seven million or whatever voters always go FOR THE SAME GUY?

the point of the arrangement of the us senate is to make sure that a bill isn't just popular, it's WIDESPREAD in its popularity

widespread geographically, maybe. you get the support of montana and utah, you're covering a lot of land. but so what? why do all those acres in montana and utah weigh equal to all those people in new york and florida (which have a lot of acres themselves, anyway)?

and the rural-urban split is the wrong way to think about this. vahid noted that california has maybe as many farmers as iowa. i grew up in total rural farmland in western new york. but new york farmers have a lot less political pull in the senate than iowa farmers. wyoming ranching interests are way more represented than texas ranching interests. it's true that smaller states tend to be less urban, but a lot of more populated states have plenty of rural areas, rural residents and rural interests. plus also this invocation of "rural interests" seems rooted in some sentimental ideas about farmers vs. city slickers that doesn't have much to do with modern agribusiness.

Sure, the Senate seems peculiar if you just flatly disregard the sovereignty of the individual states, but first you ought to win that debate.

this doesn't have to do with the sovereignty of states, it has to do with the representation of states at the federal level. new york is just as sovereign a state as alaska. the division of power between state and federal levels of government is a fine check against overweening federal power, and it functions the same way in big states as in small states. the issue is that in representing the interests of constituents at the federal level, small states have disproportionate power. you could make a case that this actually impinges on the sovereignty of more populated states -- by virtue of having more people, the states are less able to represent the interests of their constituents at the federal level.

in any case, it's not a sovereignty issue.

I find the idea that the States are just some 'arbitrary historical accident' downright gross.

there are a lot of things about american history that are downright gross. the haphazard organization and delineation of state boundaries is sort of the least of them.

but again, going back to my example of the n.y. state senate, there are various historical and political reasons for the drawing of new york county lines. they didn't just arise out of nowhere, they were done to satisfy one political purpose or other. and they function ok -- each county government is larger or smaller depending on the size and resources of its population and so forth. which is true also of the states. but if you tried to make the argument that yates county (where i used to live) should have the same representation in the state senate as queens county, which has nearly 100 times the population, on the grounds that you needed to protect "rural interests" or something, i don't think you'd find many people outside yates county willing to make that case. even if you assured people in the larger counties that, don't worry, the general assembly will still be proportionately representative.

this also doesn't have to do with the tyranny of the masses. there are other checks in the constitution against that. if anything, what the senate structure makes possible is a tyranny of the minority, which is preferable to "tyranny of the masses" exactly how i don't know.

(i.e. even in a more fairly representative senate, you could maintain the 60-vote cloture rule, which is the senate's biggest hedge against majority tyranny. but you'd need to actually represent 40-plus percent of the electorate in order to stop cloture.)

they didn't just arise out of nowhere, they were done to satisfy one political purpose or other.

So, like, the opposite of arbitrary historical accidents?

The Senate wasn't created to "protect rural interests." It was created to protect the interests of SMALL states, and balance the power of states with different sizes and populations. Large population states (irrespective of size or population density) have lots of representatives in the House. The existance of the Senate has nothing to do with rural/urban differences, or to unfairly "increase" the power of empty acres in big, empty states. Delaware in particular was afraid that its interests, as a state, would be overrun by big states with lots of people, and lots of room for more people.

i appreciate the necessity of the system, particularly at the time of the formation of the political structures tracer, that doesn't mean that you can defend them as fair or necessary today, just probably unchangeable.

yeah this is really all i mean. and there were several compromises made to get the constitution ratified in the first place, most obviously and horribly on slavery. that one at least was eventually rescinded. and the senate as devised was way less democratic than it is now, obviously, since senators weren't even popularly elected until 1913. so there's plenty of precedent for us not being forever bound to 200-year-old ugly compromises. but i agree there's no way this one's going to change.

The United States is a Republic not a democracy. It was never set up to be particularly democratic.

i love this meme or whatever you call it. as if there's some contradiction between a republic and a democracy. a republic can be democratic, a democracy can be republican. the u.s. was established as a democratic constitutional republic, and has become progressively more democratic as we've gone along, with the abolition of slavery and the expansion of voting rights. (i mostly hear "it's a republic not a democracy" from republicans, i guess because they don't like the sound of anything with democrat in it.)

So, like, the opposite of arbitrary historical accidents?

no, i'd call the particular confluences of politics, geography and economics that produced the various state boundaries at various times "historical accidents." that is, they weren't predestined by anything, and their rationale was contingent on the context of the particular moment when they organized as states.

The Senate wasn't created to "protect rural interests." It was created to protect the interests of SMALL states, and balance the power of states with different sizes and populations.

yes i know. i'm not the one invoking rural interests here. i'm the one saying rural interests in big states get sort of screwed vs. rural interests in small states. as for the rationale of balancing the power of "states," that's exactly what i don't buy, on any grounds except "well we needed to do this in 1789 to get the thing signed."

i think gerrymandering and the total uncompetitiveness of most House seats is a bigger problem than the existence of the Senate.

i think that may be true.

but i can only obsess over one wonky constitutional pet peeve at a time.

the best thing going for a bicameral leg branch is that the fucked-up nepotistic bureaucracies of the two can usually be counted on to cancel each other out. the best explanation I ever heard for the structure and rules of congress was "do you really want these people to be able to get a lot of stuff done? - no"

The United States is a Republic not a democracy. It was never set up to be particularly democratic.

this is the lamest political myth ever. a republic is an institution of government, and democracy is a MEANS of government. the two aren't mutually exclusive.

what he said:

There is much grousing on the left about the filibuster, the threat of which has taken such hold that routine bills now need 60 votes. Getting less attention is the undemocratic character of the Senate itself.

Why, for example, have even Democratic senators been resistant on health-care reform? It might be because so many of the key players represent so few of the voters who carried Obama to victory -- and so few of the nation's uninsured. The Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" that is drafting health-care legislation that may shape the final deal -- without a public insurance option -- represents six states that are among the least populous in the country: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Maine, New Mexico and Iowa.

Between them, those six states hold 8.4 million people -- less than New Jersey -- and represent 3 percent of the U.S. population. North Dakota and Wyoming each have fewer than 80,000 uninsured people, in a country where about 47 million lack insurance. In the House, those six states have 13 seats out of 435, 3 percent of the whole. In the Senate, those six members are crafting what may well be the blueprint for reform.

i've been meaning to recalculate the party math in the senate to figure what percentage of the population the gop senators actually represent at the moment. i'm guessing it's somewhere in the 30-35 percent range.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/us/politics/new-yorks-junior-senator-doggedly-refusing-to-play-the-part.html?hp&_r=0

you would think that a deliberative body where everyone's vote is equal in a country that is a democracy would not be all wah wah wah deference wah wah wah structural protocols of seniority, sheesh

gillibrand otm

Supreme Court fight is a chance to revisit my peeve.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/17/3750223/here-are-20776265-reasons-why-the-gop-should-shut-up-and-confirm-obamas-supreme-court-nominee/

The 46 members of the Senate Democratic caucus represent over 170 million people. The 54 Republican senators represent less than 150 million.

Would also be interesting to see that in terms of total votes received in last election -- not sure that would be more or less valid, but another interesting way of looking at it.

Yeah, they looked at that, too:

According to the voting reform group FairVote, “the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.”

Abolish the Senate. https://t.co/rlsyg3kIrS

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 11, 2018

that is not going to happen

It could happen around the time Ornstein’s numbers come true, by various hooks and crooks.

the nerve of residents of 75% of the landmass having a 70% say in the senate

By that logic, the morbidly obese should be allowed to vote twice.

Cool concern troll, Adam.

lol Adam

Constitutional amendments are ratified by supermajorities of states and it’s hard to imagine depopulated states are going to vote to give up their disproportionate federal power

I don't think anyone really thinks you're getting rid of the Senate without an actual revolution.

sounds good to me, let's burn down South Dakota

it's all rocks, what're you gonna burn

frack 'em

By 2040, according to a University of Virginia analysis of Census population projections, about half of the country will live in just eight states — which means 16 senators for one half of America and 84 for the other half. Meanwhile, according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, partisanship closely correlates with population density — “as you go from the center of cities out through the suburbs and into rural areas, you traverse in a linear fashion from Democratic to Republican places.”

So America is fast approaching a tipping point where one party will enjoy a permanent supermajority in the United States Senate — and with it, permanent control over the federal judiciary.

https://thinkprogress.org/how-abraham-lincoln-rigged-the-senate-for-republicans/

(More or less the same statistic as the last time this thread was bumped, but worth a reminder.)