Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

I’ve been thinking about the very lopsided balance of power in America, specifically the outsized power held by a few small or sparsly-populated states. Did you know that 16 percent of the U.S. population controls 50 percent of the votes cast each year in the U.S. Senate? I understand that the authors of the Constitution wanted to establish a regional counterweight to the population-based House of Represenatatives, but that was in the mid 1700s when we were comprised of 13 separate and very different entities trying to live in a loose framework of association. There was a logical need to protect the smaller states from the over-reaching tendencies of the large ones.

But that was before the Civil War established once and for all our identity as a single nation–a house undivided, as it were. The notion of states’ rights lives on in both our national conscience and our legal structure, but pretty much every U.S. citizen now sees him or herself as an American first and a “Virginian” or a “South Dakotan” second.

We’re not the same country we were in 1776. We are a nation of 300 million people who are not equally represented. We need to fix that, so let’s dump the Senate. Just erase it from the Constitution. It would not only make our democracy more representative but would also greatly reduce legislative gridlock in Washington. Two birds with one stone. No brainer. Let’s do it. Seriously.