In my constant kvetching about minority rule in the United States, I have pointed out how Republicans control the executive branch despite having been outpolled in the land (antidemocratic tool is the electoral college) and have a near lock on control of the House of Representatives, winning a majority of the seats even when their candidates are outpolled by a significant margin in the land (antidemocratic tool is gerrymandered congressional districts). That the Senate is presumably poised to confirm for the Supreme Court the selection of a president who lost the popular vote by about three million, after the same body refused to grant a hearing to the last Democratic president's nominee, raises the question of the source of the Republicans' control of the Senate. Once again, it's not based on the votes of Americans.
The culprit is in this case the fact that each state, no matter its size, has two senators. California, with a population of 40 million, has two, as does Wyoming, which has a population of 580,000. The combined population of the five smallest states is about 3.6 million. So compared to the five least populated states (Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North and South Dakota), California has more than ten times the population and one-fifth the number of senators. Suppose a vote in the US Senate breaks along party lines. Then in these six states, senators representing about 41 out of 44 million citizens are Democrats, but the Republicans carry the vote, 7-5.
It might be objected, with some justification, that California, being by far and away the biggest state, gives a false flavor to the calculations. One way to gauge the effect, across all fifty states, might be to note that in the last presidential election the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, won the national popular vote by a margin of more than two percent despite losing in thirty of the fifty states. Thus if we nationalize the most recent presidential vote, and give to the Clinton states two Democratic senators and to the Trump states two Republican senators, the result is a filibuster-proof majority for the party that received three million fewer votes!
Since one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years, Paul Waldman, of the Washington Post's Plum Line Blog, has tallied the aggregate vote for US Senate in the congressional elections of 2012, 2014, and 2016. The theory would be that the partisan alignment of the current Senate, with its Republican majority, was formed by the results of those three elections. As he points out, it's not strictly speaking true: for example, Republican Jeff Sessions left the Senate to become Attorney General and was replaced by a Democrat, Doug Jones, who won a special election that occurred just last year. Still, a worthwhile and illustrative exercise. In those three congressional elections, Democratic candidates for the US Senate received 117.4 million votes, to 102.3 million votes for Republican candidates. So Trump, who lost the popular vote by about three million, is going to have his Supreme Court nominee confirmed by a Senate whose Republican majority was attained despite a roughly 15 million vote deficit in the land.
Of course it will be pointed out that it's the Constitution that allots two senators to each state without respect to population. And that's true, though it's hardly proof that it was a good idea. Why did the founders do it? Well, the proposed Constitution had to be ratified by the states, which included ones with large populations (Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania) and those with small populations (Rhode Island, Delaware, New Hampshire, Georgia, South Carolina). There were more smaller states, the principle of self-interest was born before 1787, and the smaller states were able to extract a devil's bargain--notwithstanding the merits of the case, which were expressed by Alexander Hamilton in the twenty-second Federalist Paper:
Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of federated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.
We're trained to think everything the Founding Fathers did was a stroke of genius, which is a pious falsehood, but, in their defense, at least some of them understood very clearly when they were about to shit the bed.
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