For the good of democracy, abolish the Senate

American democracy is looking increasingly like a failed experiment. Congress is perpetually gridlocked, plunging the nation into repeated debt-limit crises and paralyzing shutdowns. Legislation that's supported by huge majorities of the population can't get passed. The legislative branch's failure to act has allowed the executive branch to wield more and more unchecked power over time, making us less like a democracy and more like a monarchy.

The awkward compromises, the frustrating obstacles and the outright mistakes that the founders built into our constitutional system are making the nation almost ungovernable. What could we do to fix this?

While there are many reforms the United States needs, one should be near the top of the list. The Senate has consistently been a roadblock to democracy. More than any other branch of government, it prevents the party that wins elections from being able to pass legislation and to govern as it chooses.

The problems with the Senate are legion. The entire House of Representatives is up for election every cycle, but senators serve a six-year term, with elections for one-third of the chamber every two years. This means that most senators are shielded from voter anger in any given cycle, which makes it harder to oust them when they break campaign promises or take unpopular stances.

Eighty times more representation

However, the biggest problem with the Senate is its electoral malapportionment. Each state gets two votes, regardless of size. The most populous American state, California, has almost 40 million residents; and those 40 million people get the same two votes in the Senate as the least populous state, Wyoming, which has a bit over half a million people. In other words, every resident of Wyoming enjoys almost eighty times as much representation at the federal level as every Californian.

To highlight the absurdity, consider that Los Angeles County alone has more inhabitants than forty U.S. states. But Angelenos still get just two votes in the Senate, and they don't even have those two votes all to themselves; they have to share them with the rest of California.

In theory, the 26 smallest states—which together account for less than 18% of the U.S. population—could control a majority of votes in the Senate. They could veto legislation supported by the other 82% of Americans.

To be sure, this is just a thought experiment. Some of the smaller states are blue states (Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island), while others are red (Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas). It's unlikely that they'd all vote together as a bloc. But the fact that this is even hypothetically possible shows how poorly designed the American constitutional system is.

To make matters even worse, on top of the Senate's inherently undemocratic apportionment, there's the filibuster. This tactic allows just two-fifths of senators—a minority of a minority—to stall most legislation forever by demanding endless debate, so the bill in question never gets the chance for a final vote.

This isn't how a democracy is supposed to work. Democracy means the will of the majority should generally prevail. If it's possible for a minority of people to control the process and decide the outcome, that's not democracy but oligarchy. The Senate in its current form gives disproportionate power to the few and stymies the will of the many. It's as offensive to democracy as if residents of one state could cast ten votes each and people living in the next state over could only cast one.

It's a core tenet of the American system that every person should have equal rights. So why should the degree of representation, and therefore the amount of political power, that a person has depend on where they happen to live?

A little democracy, but not too much

The malapportionment of the Senate isn't an unfortunate oversight or an accident. It was intentional.

Ironically, despite how much the founders fought and sacrificed for the sake of democracy, they didn't actually trust the American people to decide for themselves. They were fearful of what voters might do, if given the chance. That's why the Constitution enacted multiple barriers to the popular will.

The Senate was always intended to be one of these. Allegedly, George Washington compared it to a saucer that cools down hot tea. This is a cutely metaphorical way of saying that the common people can't be trusted to know what's in their own best interests, so they need to be reined in whenever the elites decide otherwise.

In fact, until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators weren't even elected; they were chosen by state legislatures. This put yet another layer of insulation between the popular will and the legislative result.

Fortunately, the Seventeenth Amendment gives us a proof of concept. Subsequent generations have fixed some of the founders' mistakes, making the United States more democratic than it once was. What was changed once can be changed again. Why can't we force more reform on the Senate?

There are many fixes that could be made. The most straightforward one would be to abolish the Senate entirely, turning Congress into a unicameral legislature. If you believe bicameralism is important, an alternative would be to make it so that senators are allocated based on population. This would make the Senate more like the House of Representatives, except that senators would be at-large elected officials, each representing their entire state rather than just one district.

The unamendable Constitution

There's another obstacle to potential progress. Article V of the Constitution explains the process of amendment, and it places one relevant condition on what kinds of amendments can be passed:

...no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Taken at face value, this language implies that the two-senators-per-state scheme can't be altered by any means, not even a constitutional amendment. If an amendment were passed that reapportions or abolishes the Senate, it could spur a constitutional crisis, as courts split over whether an amendment can override parts of the Constitution that say they can't be overridden.

However, there's a way to sidestep these problems. We could imagine an amendment that doesn't touch the two-senators-per-state scheme, but takes away the Senate's ability to block legislation, making its votes purely advisory. This would make the Senate similar to the British House of Lords, which can hold committee hearings, recommend revisions, or delay legislation for a time, but can't outright prevent it from passing.

Of course, the obvious problem with all of this is that a constitutional change requires the consent of three-fourths of the states. This means small states would have to relinquish the disproportionate power they currently benefit from. That seems unlikely to happen in the near future.

But just because Senate reform seems implausible, that's no reason to write it off as a fantasy. The twists and turns of contingency always surprise us, and the roll of history has brought about many changes for the better that seemed inconceivable when they were first proposed. America has won democratic reforms before, despite all the conservative forces arrayed against them, and we can do it again. But the essential first step is daring to believe that it's possible.