By George Wilson | The U.S. Senate is the least representative legislative and worst branch of a government body in the democratic world. An ever shrinking minority of voters has the power to obstruct policies favored by the majority of the American people.
From the 18th century to the present, the ratio of large- to small-state populations has grown from 19-to-1 to 66-to-1. Today, half of the Senate can be elected by 15 percent of the American people—and the problem is only getting worse. Most of the population growth in the United States in the foreseeable future will be concentrated in a few populous states (chiefly California). By the middle of this century, as few as five percent of the population, or even one percent, may have majority power in the Senate.
Most of the Founding Fathers hated the Senate, which they created to satisfy small states, like Rhode Island, which demanded equal representation in the new federal government. In “The Federalist No. 22,” Alexander Hamilton, criticizing the Senate by implication, identified equal representation of the states in the national government as one of the worst defects of the Articles of Confederation. Allotting representatives based on statehood rather than population, he wrote, “Contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
However, something can be done to reform the Senate, even though delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 managed to booby-trap the Constitution to protect them. Article V states that the American people cannot amend the Constitution to get rid of equal suffrage for the states: “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” And Article IV, Section 3, provides that no state can “be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” So there is not one, but two, poison pill provisions.
Moreover the way to reform is in Article IV, Section 3, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
Finally, this means that new states could be formed within the jurisdictions of the existing mega states? We could create eight new states in California; five in Texas; four in New York and Florida; three in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, two in Michigan and New Jersey without changing the Constitution.
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