How To Reform The Senate
At the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, the American revolutionary generation came together to revise the Articles of Confederation and ultimately, write a new constitution. Caught between the New Jersey plan, which gave each state one vote, and the population-weighted Virginia plan, the framers famously agreed to the Connecticut Compromise, with the House of Representatives elected according to a state’s population and the Senate comprised of two members from each state selected by the states’ legislatures.
The idea of an unelected Senate was the brainchild of James Madison, popularly remembered as the “Father of the Constitution,” who had written most of the Virginia Plan himself. Students are often told that the point of the Virginia Plan was to maximize Virginia’s power in the new federal government, and this is undoubtedly true, but it isn’t the whole story. At the Philadelphia Convention, Madison laid out his vision of the Senate as a bulwark of the landed gentry against commoners and the nascent mercantile class:
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
Madison’s position was inherently reactionary. Accordingly, so is the Senate he designed. It wasn’t until 1913 that the Senate became a body directly elected by the citizens, and the distinction between the houses remains. By virtue of a less-populated chamber, a senator is more powerful and demands a higher profile than a mere representative. This power and prestige enables them to command larger donations from lobbyists, and their six-year term allows them independence from voters and more time to raise funds for reelection. As with presidential elections, the all-or nothing nature of statewide election often results in senate delegations that don’t represent the views of a significant number of their constituents. Finally, the two-per-state system over-represents the interests of voters from less populous states. It’s hardly fair that a senator from Texas bears the burden of representing nearly 14 million people, while their counterpart from Delaware has just 473 thousand.
The easy answer to Senate reform is abolition, but there is still a case to be made for a body that considers the needs of the nation as a whole over local issues. If it were a truly democratic institution, the Senate would not serve as a lifelong gig for well-paid servants of powerful private interests. It should be accountable to the people and to the issues. In that spirit, the following measures would allow for an improved version of upper house:
1. Shorten Term Length and Introduce Term Limits — There’s no good reason why senators need an unlimited number of six-year terms while the president only gets two four-year terms. Since the Senate is elected in thirds, with only 33 or 34 up for election every year, turnover is painfully low, and incumbents are often protected in times of deep unpopularity. After the 2016 election — noted for its anti-establishment bent — 98 of the 100 senators from the 114th Congress returned for the 115th. Shorten the term to four years and place a three-term cap on senate membership. Depending on the voting method used, senators could be elected all at once in presidential election years (using a proportional system) or elected in two classes, with half elected during midterms (using ranked-choice voting).
2. Expand The Senate— Senate votes are pretty powerful. There’s only 100 of them, and no party has had the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster since Jimmy Carter’s Democrats lost three seats in the 1978 midterms. For a lobbyist to push a bill through the Senate, it takes the support of one party and a maybe handful from the other side— a dozen at most — to pass. Doubling the legislative body’s size would make it more difficult and expensive for lobbyists to corral favorable votes, and lower the barrier to entry for smaller parties in a proportional voting system.
3. Change The Voting System — First-past-the-post is a terrible, unrepresentative system of voting. At its very worst, FPTP leaves almost half of voters unhappy; it severely limits third parties and thus, stifles debate and alternative visions of how the country should be run. A quick fix would be a switch to a ranked-choice voting platform, so third party candidates could be taken seriously without threat of the spoiler system, but a better measure in the instance of the Senate might be national proportional voting. In a proportional system, every party has a list of potential members, and are awarded seats based on their vote share. This would make Senate elections into national elections instead of strictly state affairs, and limit the small-state bias from congressional representation.
Here’s how a hypothetical proportional system might work in the United States:
We’ll start by assuming that House of Representatives elections are changed from FPTP to ranked choice, opening the scope of debate to smaller parties but still allowing voters to choose their local representatives. Any party winning at least one House seat would be given an electoral grant to run for the 200-member Senate, the same amount of money as every other qualifying party. Each party would submit a list of nominees, chosen by voters in ranked-choice state primaries. Depending on their performance in the general election, each party would be awarded a number of seats in accordance with their vote share. The lists would be then be ranked depending on party performance in each state, then by which candidates had the highest vote shares in their primaries.
Using the votes from the 2016 presidential election, here’s how an example of how a proportional vote might turn out:
The divisor is 1/200 of the total number of votes cast. For each time a party gets that many votes, they get a seat. The leftover seats go to the parties with the largest remainders. The Democrats would be the largest party in this system, but they (along with the two Green Party senators) would be at a slight disadvantage against a conservative coalition.
Of course, in a proportional system, people wouldn’t be taking the spoiler effect and tactical voting into consideration, and we’d probably end up with a number of viable parties. This would likely include a socialist party unshackled from the Democrats and a split between pro-business and moral conservative Republicans. A multiparty system would encourage coalitions and issue-by-issue cooperation between like-minded parties without some of the polarizing us-against-them mentality fostered by the two-party system. It would make it harder for capitalists and corporate lobbyists to impose their will against the public interest. It would be less Democratic and more democratic.
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