One of the great ironies of our democracy is that the U.S. Senate was designed to be an undemocratic institution.
The “Great Compromise” of 1787 aka the “Connecticut Compromise,” proposed by Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman, gave each state two senators regardless of its population. (House seats were apportioned by districts of equal population, or at least one House seat per state).
Today this means that the state with the least population, Wyoming (2012 est. 576,412), has the same number of senators as the state with the most population, California (2012 est.: 38,041, 430).
The undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate has had serious repercussions for our politics over the centuries, as senators from sparsely populated states could form a majority of members of the U.S. Senate, while representing only a minority of American citizens.
The most recent manifestation of the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate occurred in the 2014 election. Dylan Matthews reports at Vox.com that the Senate’s 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than it’s 54 Republicans:
[H]ere’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy 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.”
Here’s what that looks like in chart form:
This doesn’t mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn’t that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population.
Matthews’ conclusion: “The Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.”
Whoa! Before you propose something as radical as abolishing the U.S. Senate, you should at least offer some examples for a more democratic institution, Mr. Matthews.
I don’t agree with ter, limits, those just transfer power and institutional memory to lobbyists. Remember too that the current House of Representatives is the result of significant gerrymandering by Republican legislatures.
There were no sparsely populated states in that time. It didn’t hurt anything then.
The Senate being undemocratic is a good thing. Otherwise the small, low population states would have little or no influence in what happens at the Federal level. As originally written, the Constitution made the Senate even MORE undemocratic because the Senators weren’t elected, they were appointed. That changed with an Amendment but it clearly shows the intent of the writers of the Constitution.
It also wasn’t envisioned that Senators would serve 40+ years. I am a believer in three terms maximum for Senators.
The people who wrote the constitution thought government was a necessary evil and the people needed to be protected from a hitler stalin or a reagan. If the is caused some good things not to be done that was the priced to be paid. We did not want a parliamentary system that alows you to do much good ;but also much evil. Better to do nothing then the wrong thing remember the popular based house went republican first. We see here in arizona that elected officials can do evil on a mass scale with only the courts to protect us.