A Senate Minority Hijacks Health Care - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A Senate Minority Hijacks Health Care - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

According to the U.S. Constitution, each state is represented by two senators, regardless of population. This arrangement is the legacy of a deal struck in 1787 at the nation's founding, partly to keep the slave-owning states from exiting the then-fledgling nation. As a result, California, with more than 36 million people, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, with a half-million people.

That disproportional allocation has only gotten worse over time. When the Senate was created, the most populous state had 12 times more people than the least populous state; now it has 70 times more people. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court established the groundbreaking principle of majority rule based on 'one person, one vote,' meaning that all legislative jurisdictions must be equal in population. This applied to the U.S. House of Representatives, yet the U.S. Senate completely violates this fundamental principle.

As a result, the 40 Republican senators represent a mere third of the nation, meaning Republican voters have more representation than everyone else. That overrepresentation is bad enough, but it gets even worse. For the United States has added an arcane layer of parliamentary procedure known as the 'filibuster' that takes us out of the frying pan and into the fryer.

The Senate's use of the 'filibuster' means you need not a majority of 51 votes, but 60 votes to stop unlimited debate on a bill and move to a vote. So a mere 41 senators can kill any legislation. The 40 Republican senators representing only a third of the nation need to peel away only a single conservative Democratic or independent representing a low-population state like Montana, Nebraska or Connecticut to torpedo what the senators representing two-thirds of the nation want.

Given such a vastly mal-apportioned and unrepresentative Senate wielding its anti-majoritarian filibuster, it is hardly surprising that minority rule in the Senate consistently undermines majoritarian policy. Besides health care, senators representing a small segment of the nation have thwarted renewable-energy policy, sensible automobile mileage standards, cuts in subsidies for oil companies, tougher campaign-finance reform, congressional oversight of national security and war, and more.

Minority rule in the Senate has been with the nation for a long time; in fact, it is widely blamed for perpetuating slavery for decades (between 1800 and 1860, eight antislavery measures passed the House, only to be killed in the Senate). For all these reasons, two of America's most revered founders, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, opposed the creation of the Senate, with Hamilton warning in Federalist Paper no. 22 that representation in the Senate "contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.

This was written by Steven Hill, "director of the Political Reform Program for the New America Foundation and author of "Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age," which will be published in January."

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