It now appears that a health reform bill will soon be debated on the floor of the U.S. Senate. What will be in it? Will any Republicans support it? Can it pass with only Democrats voting in favor? Would that be a bad thing if it happened?
Any close consideration of these kinds of questions shows what an undemocratic body is the U.S. Senate. There are of course 100 members, and 60 votes are required to shut down debate and force a final vote. Since the Republicans hold 40 seats, they cannot themselves sustain a filibuster, but if united in opposition they would need just one Democrat to join them. It would be regarded as a landslide, an unambiguous mandate, if a candidate for president got 59% of the vote--but it will take more than that to get health care reform through the Senate.
Join a bit of arithmetic to political science and things look even worse. By my rough-and-ready calculations, the 40 Republicans in the Senate represent only 35% of the population. This is because each state, no matter how small, gets two seats in the Senate, and Republicans, whose constituency lives in rural and small-town America, tend to win seats from sparsely populated states. Or work it the other way around. The Democrats tend to come from the under represented big states. Of the ten seats from the five largest states, seven are held by Democrats. Of the ten seats from the next five biggest, seven are held by Democrats. Of the ten seats from the next five biggest, eight are held by Democrats. These "top fifteen" do not of course include Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Mississippi, or Alabama--all of which are represented by two Republican senators.
Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, number 40 in population, has been much in the news lately: she is the Republican most apt to vote for some kind of reform. I worry about the role of Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, number 44 in population, and of Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, number 38 in population. And then there is Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, 49th in population. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
The rules of the Senate, together with the more or less random relationship between state boundary lines and population centers, will make it very difficult to pass health care reform that includes a public option. It seems that the support of 55-60 percent of the population doesn't matter.
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