The United States Senate is an inherently undemocratic body that needs to be abolished. It is really that simple. Before I explain why this is the case, we need to get something out of the way: some of you may be feeling anger towards the suggestion to abolish half of Congress. Why? First, patriotic sentiments have the ability to obstruct constitutional change. Because a patriot personally identifies with their country by definition, many patriots will tacitly assume that their country is fine the way it is, out of an instinct of self-preservation. This assumption makes convincing many American patriots difficult — especially true with long-lasting, constitutional institutions like the Senate. Second, your race, political party, political views, and other groups that you identify with can impact your opinion on this issue, as debates about the Senate often center on how much power various groups should have.
My simple request is this: try to release all connections with any group you happen to identify with. Once we get our tribalist instincts, predispositions, and biases out of the way, we can discuss how an ideal government should be formed.
Why should the Senate be abolished? I previously used the word “undemocratic”, but for the sake of getting rid of labels, let's identify the actual problem at hand: the US Senate allows some people to have more representation than other people.
A challenge with presenting this issue is that some people, especially those who benefit from this system, actually want this unbalanced representation. They argue that it is necessary to overrepresent some populations in order to allow smaller populations to have their opinions heard and represented in laws. If not, the smaller populations will constantly have their interests overridden to favor the interests of larger populations. This weakness is often called “the tyranny of the majority.”
However, the big problem with this line of thought is this principle can be flipped on its head. If the minority of the population has a majority of the representation, you have the same issue but in reverse: larger populations will constantly have their interests overridden to favor the interests of smaller populations. You could call this weakness the “tyranny of the minority.”
If you were forced to choose between a government plagued with the tyranny of the minority or with the tyranny of the majority, which would you choose? I would choose the latter, to preserve the interests of the maximum number of people. This is the whole premise of democracy.
Now, if we were to look at the Senate, does the tyranny of the minority ever appear? Let's look at the 2019 Senate as an example. And once again, please ignore which political party you may be a part of for the meantime. Republicans had 53 seats, while Democrats had 47 seats. Although Democrats had a minority of the seats in the Senate [47%], they represented the majority [52%] of the American people. Even though it may seem like only a few percentage points, when you are talking about a country of 300 million people, percentage points add up. In 2019, Democratic senators represented over 12 million more people than Republican senators, yet had virtually no control over laws that were being passed or which laws would even be allowed to be voted on, due to being in the minority in the Senate.
As you can see, if there is any tyranny today, it is the majority of voters who are being tyrannized by the minority. But perhaps, you may argue, the minority of voters do need some sort of protection. And to be fair, different places have different needs. A program that may work for a big city like New York City might not work as effectively for a small town in Kansas. We don't want to provide small towns unfair representation; as we saw previously, this just shifts the “tyranny” problem onto a different population. What we could do is let these regions have some level of control over their own local affairs--not enough control so that the whole concept of a country becomes useless, but enough to allow regions some level of flexibility. Do you know what I just described? I described local governments, something the United States already has.
In our current era, there is much discussion about gerrymandering in the House of Representatives, where state officials can draw district lines to give specific groups more power. In the past, gerrymandering was used to give white people greater power. However, racial gerrymandering was made (explicitly) illegal with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent Supreme Court cases, so gerrymandering is now used to give specific political parties more power. However, hardly anyone talks about the gerrymandering of the Senate, which gives both the Republican Party and white voters significantly more representation per capita than the Democratic Party and minority voters. This effect is engrained in the Senate through multitudes of scarcely populated rural states, and unless more Democratic and non-white states are formed, it will never self-correct.
But you might say that Republicans in Montana and Republicans in New York are just too different to be compared, and state boundaries are more important in categorizing voters' wants. Let's ignore the validity of this argument for a moment. If you want to compare representation by state instead of using nationwide demographics, the problem gets much, much worse. Let's compare Wyoming, the least populous state, to California, the most populous state. Each state gets 2 senators, but Wyoming has 600,000 people, while California has almost 40 million people. This means that a California senator represents over 60 times the people that a Wyoming senator does. Why does a citizen in Wyoming deserve that much more power than a citizen in California? Aren't all Americans supposed to be equal?
Perhaps one might argue that the purpose of the Senate is to represent the states and not the people in those states, and in this regard it is succeeding at its goal. But why would we want a government like that, especially today? First, I would argue that many state borders today are practically arbitrarily drawn. A person from New York City would probably have interests more in common with a person from Los Angeles than with someone from rural New York. But second, shouldn't a national government represent its citizens equally, rather than representing some vague idea of the “states"? It isn't like Senators aren't elected by the state governments, they are elected by citizens. The Senate just represents citizens unequally, giving some citizens more power than others solely based on where they happen to live.
So the natural solution is to abolish the Senate. There is no defense for the Senate that doesn't rely on inequality, and if I have to convince you that equal representation is a good thing — I'm sorry, but you're just completely lost.
But is abolishing the Senate politically feasible? Well at this point, no. The groups that benefit from it resist like their lives depend on it, and even some people who are actively harmed by the Senate still defend it. Why? Once again, blind patriotism presents an obstacle to constitutional change, and many of these patriotic sentiments are ingrained into Americans since childhood. American citizens think that holding on to the current version of the Constitution is their patriotic duty, even when it is deeply, deeply flawed. Thirdly, the requirements needed to change the Constitution render it practically impossible. To even propose a constitutional amendment, you need a two-thirds vote from either both the House and the Senate (yes I know), or two-thirds of the states.
If we cannot abolish the Senate, is there anything we can do? Yes, we can make more states, ones specifically designed to align the Senate with the national population as much as possible. As stated in Article IV of the Constitution, all that is required to make a new state is the consent of Congress, and in the case of splitting states, the additional consent of the state legislature of the states impacted.
We can start by making Washington DC a state, since its 700,000 citizens currently don't have representation in Congress at all and are strongly in favor of becoming a state. We could also make Puerto Rico a state, but we first need to make sure that its three million citizens would be in favor of such a change; the same goes for other territories.
We can also split some states up. For example, we could split up California into multiple states. Not all of these states would have to be Democratic, but the state is so reliably blue that we could split it up and end up with more reliably blue states at the end. We could also split up more conservative states with liberal regions, like Florida. All we would need is the support of Florida's state legislature and the support of Congress. Ideally, we could also combine multiple smaller states — like combining North and South Dakota to make one larger Mega-Dakota — but the chance that their state legislatures would agree is slim to none.
Of course, these proposed measures would have larger consequences than just changing the Senate. State governments would be altered in the most fundamental of ways. That's why these measures would need to be completed both with caution and with the consent of the people living in those regions. We also don't want this to turn into a power grab. The goal of creating new states is to provide equal representation to American citizens. In fact, even though more liberal states would have to be created, places like Northern California, conservative regions of large liberal states, could have states of their own as well.
Making new states won't solve all the problems with the Senate. No matter what, there will always be discrepancies between the national population and the representation in the Senate. And because state populations change and demographics shift, borders drawn today will likely grow more unrepresentative as time progresses. But if we do decide to make more states, not only could Americans have state governments they are happier with, we could partially balance power in our government without even needing a constitutional amendment.
I'm not promising these sweeping changes are going to be easy to accomplish, or even that they will be an easy sell to American citizens. Looking at the road ahead, you might ask why it's worth all the trouble just to give the Blue Team more power. But this isn't about whether you like the Blue Team, or the Red Team, or the Green Team, or no team at all. It's about allowing every citizen to have an equal voice in forming the laws that they have to follow. Because that is what democracies and republics are for.