Copy Link Share Comment

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

In one important way, the modern Senate is more democratic than the legislative upper houses of some peer nations. In France and Germany, members of the upper house are still selected by other elected officials rather than by the people—just as American senators were before the 17th Amendment in 1913. Still, in almost every other democratic respect, our Senate is one of the world’s worst deliberative bodies.

The Senate’s most egregious flaws are actually aspects of its basic design, but as with the House, the rules and procedures the chamber has adopted for itself also matter. One particularly important rule has attracted renewed attention in recent years. While the Senate ostensibly runs by majority rule, it takes the support of a supermajority—since 1975, three-fifths of the chamber, or 60 senators—to bring debates to a close, or cloture. Functionally, that means that a bill can be held in limbo unless 60 senators support it enough to end debate and bring it to a vote. Without that supermajority, the minority in opposition to a bill can keep debates going in an attempt to wear down its supporters—a tactic known as the filibuster. The mere threat of a filibuster today is enough to torpedo legislation without 60 votes—a situation that means most bills can’t pass Congress without a Senate supermajority.

Beyond the countermajoritarian nature of the filibuster, the Senate is inegalitarian by design, thanks to the equal apportionment of senators to all states, regardless of population—a feature founders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton vociferously opposed before small states forced a compromise at the Constitutional Convention. The disparities that made equal representation such a bitter pill for them to swallow have only deepened since the Constitution was written. In theory, states that account for less than 20 percent of the country’s population can hold a Senate majority, while states representing as little as 11 percent of the population can block legislation through the filibuster. Back in 1787, Virginia, then the largest state, had a population 12 or 13 times larger than Delaware, the smallest state, which had done so much to push equal representation through at the convention. But our largest state today, California—which, on its own, would be among the 40 largest countries in the world—has a population more than 67 times larger than our smallest state today, Wyoming. Mathematically, because both have an equal two seats in the Senate, each resident of Wyoming thus has 67 times more representation........

© Slate