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Revising The Senate Essay

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Revising the US Senate...

The US 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 the next century, as few as 5 percent of the population, or even 1 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, that 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 on the basis of statehood rather than population, he wrote, "Contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the …show more content…

Even through delegations 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." Not one, but two poison pill

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