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The interminable debate over health care reform has revived one of the common complaints about our legislative branch: it provides for equal representation of states in the Senate. Under our system, citizens of my home state of Rhode Island (population: 1 million and shrinking) carry the same weight as those in my current state of North Carolina (population: 9 million and growing). To add insult to injury, the size of the House has not been updated for almost a century, allowing it to devolve from a proportional representation of the nation's will into some form of Senate-lite, where smaller states still enjoy a far better politician-to-constituent ratio (3:1 in the case of Rhode Island versus North Carolina). All of this is enough to leave voters in larger, bluer states shaking with rage as they watch senators from Montana and Maine decide how to fix health care for the 99.993% of the population that has no say in their re-election. Talk of abolishing the Senate has become almost as popular as talk of banning the filibuster.
The refusal to increase the size of the House is clearly an example of the powerful trying to retain power at all costs, but the belief that the Senate is a scam that tears at the very fabric of democracy is simply wrong. Such a belief is flawed because it assumes that we live in a democracy, which is only partially true. The U.S. is not a democracy - it is a democratic republic. Each state is currently a representative democracy, using the popular vote as a means of electing representatives to a larger federal government. The states come together as a republic, having agreed to join based on the laws that were in place at the time.
So while Rhode Island and North Carolina have been democracies for quite some time, the U.S. as a whole has never had such a distinction, and claims that we are being robbed of our political will by the Senate's continued existence betray an ignorance of basic civics. Would the Founding Fathers have drafted the same model of governance if they knew how the geographic, social, and financial aspects of the country would change? Perhaps. But that is neither here nor there - the fact is that the country would not have come together and survived if it had tried to be a full-fledged democracy instead of a republic. And since it never was such a democracy, it is silly to complain about how growth and inertia have ruined it.
Consider the following historical anecdote:
From the signing of the Constitution through the end of the Civil War, the nature of the republic was demonstrated in writing and in speech by the use of plural conjugation. A journalist might say, The United States are negotiating a trade pact with France; the plural are indicating that the states - not the union - were the ones making the final decision(s).
Post-Civil War, the story changes: having brought the rebel states back into the fold, the federal government flexes its muscle, enacting laws that guarantee more uniformity in state laws and using the financial crisis of Reconstruction to keep states in check. Soon journalists drop the plural and start referring to the union rather than the states: The United States is negotiating a trade pact with France. This is how we think of the country today, but is not how it was designed. The expansion of federal power in the last century has caused modern citizens to think that their state is simply a convenient subdivision of the federal government, when in fact it is a full partner in a contract between sovereign states, a contract predicated on the existence of the Senate (among other things).
All of this means that we are getting the exact type of government that we are supposed to get, which is good, because in this particular case, there is nothing we can do to change it (short of revolution). In addition to outlining the process for constitutional amendments, Article V also makes one very important restriction: it prohibits the removal of equal representation in the Senate unless every single state in the union ratifies the decision.
Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
That's right - our Founding Fathers, while woefully ignorant of all the amazing changes that would occur in subsequent centuries, were able to foresee that fluctuations in people and power could result in a super majority with the power to nullify an essential building block of inter-state peace. They explicitly denied any amendment related to Senate representation unless it had the blessing of all states, something that is all but impossible. Even the sacred First Amendment does not enjoy such protection.
The Senate may be a frustrating obstacle to larger states looking to influence policy decisions, but understanding the historical precedent for it can help us understand why things like health care reform may require opt-in clauses and other seemingly-inefficient mechanisms in order to pass muster. Senators have a reputation for being academic and procedural, and they are certain to enforce their state's role in the process even if half of America writes it off as an unexplainable mistake.
Labels: culture, law, narcissism
posted by Dan at
1:46 PM
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