Is the U.S. Senate really the least democratic legislative
chamber in the world?
IF WE CONSTITUTIONAL fundamentalists ever triumph in the courts, the person to have whispering the reminder that all glory is fleeting would be Hendrik Hertzberg. A former chief speechwriter for President Carter and now a writer for the New Yorker, he is an honest liberal—and a crafty constitutionalist. He is just out with a column on the only remaining feature of the Constitution that the parchment itself says can’t be amended, namely the equal representation in the Senate of each state, no matter what its population.
Hertzberg’s column came up on the scope when I started poking around about the logic of the Senate, which has been creeping into the national conversation. There was the 13-hour filibuster against drones mounted by Rand Paul. There are all of Harry Reid’s threats to use the “nuclear option”—to change the chamber’s rules so that certain filibusters can be ended with just a simple majority, instead of the 60 votes now required. There is the rat-a-tat of the New York Times against the evils of the upper house, the latest being that it is the “least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.”
That phrase is from a dispatch the other day by Adam Liptak, the Times’s Supreme Court reporter and a cagey constitutionalist in his own right. He filed his piece from Rutland, Vermont, where, by his calculation, a voter has 30 times the representation in the Senate of a voter just over the state line in New York. This is owing to the fact that New York has 19 million persons and Vermont 625,000. He reports that the largest gap, between California and Wyoming, is more than twice as big. So in theory, each of Wyoming’s citizens is represented 60 times as much as each of California’s.
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