The Great Bait-and-Switch
U.S. Senate Malapportionment in Historical Perspective
Introduction: the Strange Feast
Imagine that every night you attend a feast. Guests take their assigned seats at one of a number of tables of various sizes. Some tables are so small that they seat only a single person, whereas others are quite large. At the largest table, sixty-seven people are seated.
At each table, mouth-watering, steaming hot food is served. But strangely, each table receives the exact same amount of food, regardless of the number of people seated at it. As a sort of consolation, each guest is also provided with their own lunchbox containing some basic fare, perhaps a sandwich and a piece of fruit.
Occasionally a guest (usually it is a guest seated at one of the larger tables) will complain of the evident unfairness of the situation. At first this is waved away as silly: how can it be unequal if each table gets the same amount of food?
If a guest persists, pointing out that after all food is consumed by people and not tables, they are told that it makes no real difference; everyone has been provided with a lunchbox, and in the end, everyone gets fed.
If a guest continues to persist, they are told in exasperated tones that they don’t understand, that the feast only exists thanks to decisions made by wise men long since dead, and to tamper with their vision would ruin the feast for everyone. And furthermore, the guests seated at the smaller tables would never allow it.
Finally, if a guest is ever so bold as to suggest that they and the other guests at their table might be better off running their own feast — and in fact could run a much better feast, using widely known recipes to serve tastier food with more choices — they are threatened with violence.
Overview
The feast is, of course, a metaphor for the American system of government. The tables are states, the guests are the states’ population, and the food is representation in the legislative branch. The hot food is representation in the more powerful U.S. Senate, which, among other things, has the sole power to ratify treaties and confirm Supreme Court judges to lifetime appointments. And the lunchboxes are, of course, representation in the House of Representatives.
The way Senate representation is malapportioned (that is to say, that Americans in different states receive wildly different amounts of representation) so flies in the face of modern American democratic norms that it would be literally illegal for any U.S. state to copy it (Matthews, 2015). At the same time, the Senate’s makeup is entrenched in the U.S. Constitution and apparently not subject to change. This presents a challenge for Americans who, like people in any country, would prefer to believe we live under a just and well-designed system of government.
In this article, we examine in depth two of the most common myths about the U.S. Senate, which you will recognize as responses to the complaining guest at the feast.
The first myth is that malapportionment of the Senate, while unfair in an abstract since, does no real harm (“in the end, everyone gets fed”). In “What’s the Harm?”, we examine four ways in which the makeup of the Senate has harmed and continues to harm both Americans who live in particular states and the country as a whole.
The second myth is that the Great Compromise (“decisions made by wise men long since dead”), which resulted in each state receiving two Senators regardless of population, is still alive in any meaningful sense today. In “Whatever Happened to the Great Compromise?”, we examine fourteen qualitative aspects of the Senate as it was envisioned by the Founders during the Constitutional Convention, and find that at most five of those fourteen still hold today. More remarkably, of the six aspects of the Great Compromise that represented points of contention among the Convention delegates, only one, malapportionment itself, still remains. In the end, only one side got what they wanted, leaving it less a Great Compromise than a great bait-and-switch.
In “Malapportionment by the Numbers,” we examine quantitatively how the degree of malapportionment of the Senate has changed over time. We find that by any of several metrics, Senate malapportionment today is significantly higher than anything the Founders contemplated. Residents of the largest state, California, are under-represented to a degree never before seen in American history.
In the final section, “Ways Forward,” we take a hard look at the assertion that while malapportionment of the Senate may be indefensible, nothing can be done to change it. We recommend several ways by which federal elected officials, state governments, and individuals can effectively mitigate if not completely eliminate the harm caused by Senate malapportionment.
The rest of this article is broken into individual Medium stories.
Next: What’s the Harm?
Table of Contents
Links will be added as parts are published.
What’s the Harm?
- For Want of Majority of States
- A Cascade of Inequality
- Piglets at the Trough
- Equal Justice Without Equal Representation?
Whatever Happened to the Great Compromise?
Malapportionment by the Numbers
Ways Forward
- Indefensible, yet Indestructable?
