How Undemocratic is the Senate?

Hendrik Hertzberg has, as usual, a terrific column in the latest New Yorker and it's a must read if you want to know just how undemocratic the Senate is. The numbers are devastating.

The filibuster allows a minority within a legislative body to thwart the will of a majority. But that is hardly the worst of the Senate’s democratic imperfections, most of which spring from the arithmetical disparity among state populations. Fifty-one senators—a majority—can represent states with as little as seventeen per cent of the American people. Sixty senators—enough to stop a filibuster—can represent as little as twenty-four per cent. That’s theory. What about reality? Well, if each of every state’s two senators is taken to represent half that state’s population, then the Senate’s fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority—a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time.

In an ideal system, there'd be no Senate. But I wouldn't be for eliminating it - as if that's even a possibility - given the undemocratic nature of how the House and the presidency are currently elected (i.e., first-past-the-post districts and the Electoral College, respectively).

The trickier question is the filibuster, since it could realistically be abolished. It, too, is undemocratic and, as Hertzberg points out, has been used for ill more than for good. But when a legislative minority actually represents a popular majority, it might be a good way to restore some balance. In the current circumstances, think of it as a device for protecting majority rights.