POLITICS
Make the Senate Democratic — and democratic
Both the big “D” and the little “d” are important.
By Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens
The effort by Senate Republicans to reduce urgently needed coronavirus relief is a stark reminder of why we need to elect a Democratic majority to the Senate in November.
Without such a majority, a newly elected Biden administration would be hobbled from the start, unable to pass major legislation. Only a fair election and a landslide outcome can ensure Democratic control of the Senate. So anyone who has been distressed by the disasters of the Trump years should put a high priority on registering and mobilizing voters, making sure that they are allowed to vote, and seeing that the votes are counted accurately.
It would definitely help the country to Democratize the Senate with a capital “D.” But the Senate needs small-d democratizing as well
These days, majority-party “control” of the Senate is not enough to get things done. Routine partisan use of the filibuster has made it impossible to pass major legislation without a super-majority of 60 of the 100 senators. By merely threatening to filibuster, a determined minority of 41 senators can stop most legislation. That is how Mitch McConnell was able to pursue his scorched-earth, stop-almost-everything policy against the Obama administration even during the years when Democrats held the Presidency and had majorities in both the House and Senate. The same thing could happen in 2021.
Such misuse of the filibuster could be ended by some relatively simple changes in rules and practices. Threats should not be enough: opponents of legislation should have to actually get up and talk. And they should have to talk “germanely” about the legislation at hand, not read children’s stories or telephone books. A filibustering senator should not be allowed to take comfort breaks by temporarily “yielding” to a colleague. If necessary, the number of votes needed to limit debate could be lowered a bit.
Calls by ex-President Obama and others to abolish the filibuster altogether should be taken seriously. But total abolition may not be necessary. Despite some shameful uses in the past, unlimited debate in the Senate can — in principle — protect intense minorities. Or even national majorities. Given that our elections are not fully democratic and that the parties are sharply polarized, only the Senate filibuster may sometimes prevent a party that holds the Presidency and temporarily has narrow majorities in both the House and Senate from ramming through harmful and unpopular legislation. This was true early in the Trump administration.
In thinking about the filibuster it is important to make a distinction between a Senate that is democratic in the sense of following majority rule among senators, and a Senate that is democratic in the more important sense of being responsive to the American people. Unfortunately, the two are often very different. Our Senate is profoundly undemocratic, unresponsive to the American citizenry as a whole.
Under the Constitution each state, whether large or small, gets two and only two senators. This means that people who live in sparsely populated rural areas get much more voice in the Senate than do people who live in densely populated cities and suburbs. The imbalance has grown worse and worse as our population has become more and more geographically concentrated.
Today, just eight states with major metropolitan areas together have more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. But they get only 16 percent of the senators. Each citizen of small-population Wyoming gets about sixty eight (68) times as much voice in the Senate as each citizen of densely populated California.
This rural, small-state bias has real consequences. It has made the Senate the graveyard for gun-safety legislation, no matter how horrific the most recent mass shooting. It starves cities of money for mass transit, while generously funding “bridges to nowhere” in thinly populated states. Urban public schools get much less money than they need. Relief for the urban poor — through food stamps, income supplements, or community health centers — is pinched.
The malapportionment of the Senate means that the Republican Party wins more senators than it has voters. But the problem is bipartisan. Red state Democratic senators tend to put a higher value on rural interests and rural values than blue-state Democrats do. They must do so in order to get elected.
Even when he briefly enjoyed a Democratic majority in the Senate, President Obama was thwarted by red-state Democratic senators who opposed a vigorous economic stimulus; rejected help for recession-hit homeowners; turned down labor unions’ top priority of “check-off” representation; and (with key help from Joe Lieberman) deprived us of a “public option” under the Affordable Care Act — a void that haunts us today, as laid-off workers lose their employer-based health insurance.
Some traditionalists may object that our hallowed Constitution mandates the present arrangement. But recall that many leading Founders of the United States, including Madison and Hamilton, opposed having two senators from each state. They went along with that provision only as a distasteful compromise that was necessary in order to get small states to ratify the Constitution. Should we be bound today by a political deal made long ago for reasons of expediency, when the harm is great and keeps growing? When the Constitution was adopted the biggest state had about 11 times the number of voters as the smallest state; today that figure is sixty-eight times. And the needs for federal legislation are now much more pressing.
No coherent principle that we are aware of actually favors a small-state bias. Not protection of minorities: why that particular minority? Why not (say) ethnic or racial minorities who have actually suffered harm in the past and who are disadvantaged by the present malapportionment of the Senate?
Some may say that — regardless of the merits — it is just not practical to amend the Constitution. We should focus instead on action that is feasible now.
One answer is that there are, in fact, practical steps that can be pursued right away without need for a Constitutional amendment. Statehood could be granted (by simple congressional legislation) to the District of Columbia (omitting a small cluster of federal buildings); to Puerto Rico; and perhaps to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Maybe even to parts of existing states (Northern and Southern California?), so as to increase representation of urban and suburban Americans and racial minorities who are presently under-represented.
Eventually, however, we will need to amend the Constitution to allocate more senators — and/or more votes per senator — to the more populous states. Every state should keep at least one senator; and realistically, no state should probably get 68 senators or 68 votes. So representativeness would remain imperfect. But a moderate change in the formula could make a big difference.
The provision in Article V of the Constitution saying that no state will be deprived without its consent of equal suffrage in the Senate would have to be amended along with the first part of Article I Section 3. Both things could probably be done with a single amendment.
History makes clear that the Constitution can be amended. It has been amended several times to make our system more democratic: freeing slaves and entitling ex-slaves to vote; electing senators directly rather than through corrupt state legislatures; and granting the right to vote to women, to District of Columbia residents (who get to vote for president only), and to young adults.
True, it is not easy to amend the Constitution. Some pro-democratic amendments were achieved only as the result of the strong social movements of the Populist and Progressive periods around the beginning of the twentieth century. But today’s social movement for justice and democracy may be precisely the sort of force that can, over time, lead to major institutional changes, including moving toward a more democratic Senate.
We urge Americans to pause briefly amidst the urgent concerns of the moment, and think a bit about long-term plans and long-term strategies for making American politics more democratic. Two obviously high priorities are to curtail the role of money in politics and to ensure that all eligible citizens can vote. We would add a third: to work, over time, toward a more democratic Senate.
Benjamin I. Page is Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University.
Martin Gilens is Professor and Chair, Department of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Page and Gilens are authors of Democracy in America?, from the University of Chicago Press, which analyses undemocratic features of American politics, outlines reforms that would help, and suggests how such reforms might be achieved. In the 2020 paperback edition a new chapter deals with the disasters of the Trump presidency.
