our political system is truly defective when the gop majority

[drray23]

in the senate only represents one third of the us population. Its even more dismal if you factor in how many voters that actually is..

The Republicans’ new talking point, unveiled yesterday by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, in an appearance on ABC News’ This Week, is that a bipartisan approach to enacting the stimulus package is important because Republican senators “represent half the American population.”

Now, that didn’t sound right, given that most of America’s big states have two Democratic senators. So I did a quick-and-dirty calculation of how many Americans the senators in each party represent, assuming that each senator represents all of the people in his or her state and that the currently open Senate seats (like Delaware, Illinois, and New York) will be filled by someone from the same party. And what you find, if you do the math, is that Republican senators actually represent about thirty-seven per cent of Americans.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/james-surowiecki/how-many-voters-do-senators-represent

[Glorfindel]

1. The United States Senate is less democratic than the United Kingdom's House of Lords

and far, far more corrupt. It's an absurd system when the 50 million people of California are represented by the same number of senators as Wyoming's one-half million people.

[greeny2323]

2. Constitutional compromise

As the Framers argued back and forth about how to distribute votes among the states, they ended up with this compromise in the Senate. Those representing small states were convinced that big states would gang up on them if the distribution was based on population. There was no way the Framers would have been able to successfully agree on a Constitution (which was not guaranteed!) unless the fears of the smaller states could be assuaged.

Compounding the problem in the last few decades is wealthy people creating their own fake news networks (Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.) whose purpose is to scare rural people into voting for the Republican party, even though that makes no sense since Republican policies are detrimental to them. So today we have large tracts of empty land getting votes more than people.