Today's upper chamber has completed its transformation into a smaller version of its more populist sibling, the House—except this one does not come close to reflecting the actual population, or for that matter, the actual population's actual interests. The Senate's once-celebrated hallmarks of comity are history. Blue-slipping is on the way out. For judicial and executive branch appointees, the filibuster is gone, and I believe that once a party that holds the White House, the House, and a slim Senate majority feels so moved, it will abolish it for legislation, too. This Republican-controlled Senate's efforts to pass the tax bill and repeal the Affordable Care Act—its two most important policy goals—proceeded under a process that is not subject to filibuster, because Mitch McConnell knew he'd be unable to earn 60 votes for either one, and therefore didn't bother trying.

The Senate's transformation into a funhouse-mirror version of the House is a quiet emergency for democracy, because its members are still allocated equally among states. And since there now are a greater number of sparsely-populated, mostly-white, right-leaning states than there are heavily-populated, racially-diverse, left-leaning states, the Senate acts to preserve power for people and groups who would otherwise have failed to earn it. A voter in Wyoming (population 579,000) enjoys roughly 70 times more influence in the Senate than a voter in California (population 39.5 million), which sounds like the most unfair statistic in American politics, until you remember that taxpaying U.S. citizens in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico still have no influence in the Senate at all.

An undemocratic body yields undemocratic results. The 50 senators who voted to confirm the wildly-unpopular Brett Kavanaugh represent only 44 percent of the population; the 51 senators who passed a widely-reviled $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, about the same. In this year's midterms, across-the-board enthusiasm for Democrats is likely to flip the House but not the Senate, since so many Democrats face built-in partisan disadvantages—the accidental byproducts of border-drawing history. In presidential elections, the Senate guarantees at least three electors to seven states whose populations merit only one seat in the House: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Vermont, Wyoming, and both Dakotas. This scheme basically guarantees a net of six electoral votes to the Republican candidate, every single time; it is one of many absurd anachronisms that lead to America, say, spending four years under a president who earned a full 3 million votes fewer than his closest competitor.

Read More: https://www.gq.com/story/the-case-for-abolishing-the-senate