The United States Constitution provides that the Senate shall be composed of two Senators from each state. This composition was agreed on as a compromise in 1787 between large and small states. Large states wanted Congressional representation to be based either on population or wealth (or some combination). Small states wanted equal representation in Congress. The Philadelphia Convention agreed that states would receive their seats in the House of Representatives based on relative population, but that states would be equal in the Senate. The result was that as of 1790, states with 19 percent of the American population had 46 percent of the votes in the Senate. [Note 1]
Many Founders knew when they agreed to the 1787 compromise on state voting power in the Senate that it was flatly inconsistent with the republican principle of majority rule that was the basis of government legitimacy under the new Constitution. For that reason, leading delegates such as James Madison and James Wilson originally strongly opposed it. They realized after a bitter fight that they had no choice but to accept this distortion of the popular will to get enough states to agree peacefully to the Constitution. Unfortunately, the limited distortion they accepted has now been transformed into a far larger distortion than they intended as the nation has grown.
In 1787, the largest state was about 12 times as large as the smallest state. As of 2000, California was about 50 times larger than North Dakota. But California’s two Senators, who represented about 34 million people in 2000, still had the same number of votes as the Senators from North Dakota, who represented 2 percent as many people. This sharply increased distortion of the popular will has major effects on national policy. Senators from small rural states often do not vote the same way on national issues as Senators who represent major cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Here’s a way to see the negative effects this serious failure to follow popular will creates.
Suppose we did an experiment in which we reconfigured the current (“Old”) Senate to make a “New” Senate that more directly reflects the popular will. Then let’s look at a series of actual Senate votes over about twenty years from the late 1960s to the 1980s and see the likely results if the New Senate had voted on them instead. (See Note 2 for details). On a number of issues, national policy would have changed under the New Senate, often reaching the opposite result from the Old Senate.
For example, the New Senate would have adopted national “no fault” auto insurance standards to cut consumer insurance costs. (Voting Study, 4). And it would have refused to provide a federal loan guarantee to bail out defense contractor Lockheed Corporation. (Voting Study, 4). The New Senate would also have adopted fundamentally different positions on several major foreign policy and environmental issues than the Old Senate did. The New Senate might well have supported a constitutional amendment for direct election of the President in 1970 (Voting Study, 6-7). In short, the New Senate experiment shows that national policy is strongly affected by state voting strength in the Senate, often in unfortunate ways that do not represent the national popular will.
Here’s an example from the Voting Study: Federal No Fault Auto Insurance (Senate vote, May 31, 1976). On motion to recommit and thus kill bill to establish federal standards for no-fault motor vehicle insurance, results: Old Senate: Yeas: 49 Nays: 45. Motion adopted; bill killed. New Senate: Yeas: 68 Nays: 75. Motion failed. Bill would have been adopted.
Should Americans today accept the very large distortion of popular will that results from the Constitution’s two hundred year-old compromise on Senate voting? Should we do so even though it adversely affects national policy and badly weakens the democratic legitimacy of the entire Congress? Or is it time to create a New Senate that will actually make decisions in the national interest? Such a reform would sharply dilute the power of special interest groups (or “factions”) by balancing their interests against many others in the larger states and by lessening the power of smaller states where their influence might be strong enough to be politically dominant.
- Notes
Note 1. For an excellent account of the struggle over representation at the 1787 Convention, see Richard Beeman, Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009). For additional discussion of the consequences of this compromise, see George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 119-121.
Note 2. First, the old Senate would be expanded somewhat. Then the formula for allocating Senate votes for states would be changed. In the “New” Senate, each state’s number of votes would be increased so that it was mid-way between the Old Senate and a full population system like that used for the existing House of Representatives. The New Senate Voting Study (pdf attached
to this post) shows how this would work (pages 1-2). In our experiment, the actual Old Senate votes are adjusted to show the likely results if the New Senate had voted on them instead; the results are shown in the Voting Study.
NOTE: THE TEXT OF THE NEW SENATE VOTING STUDY IS CONTAINED IN THE PDF DOCUMENT BELOW:
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