The Senate's 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than its 54 Republicans

[Ichingcarpenter]

17. which gave slave owning states

an equal say........ it had nothing to do with California or Wyoming.


The Senate’s “small and unequal” representation discriminates not only on the basis of wealth, sex, and age but also on the basis of race and religion. James Madison recognized in 1787 that an equal vote for each state in the Senate did not properly distinguish states with predominantly white populations from those with large African-American slave populations (whose numbers were counted, though at 60 percent, in apportioning seats for the House of Representatives). He could make a similar observation today. Today, African Americans and Hispanics make up only 11 percent of the population in the twenty-six smallest states constituting a majority in the U.S. Senate, though they are 30 percent of the population in the nine largest states, holding a majority of the people. Similarly, Catholics are only 16 percent and Jews less than 1 percent in the smallest states with a majority in the U.S. Senate, but they are 28 percent and more than 3 percent, respectively, of the largest states with a majority of the people. For Muslims, Asian Americans, the poor, and virtually every other group and category of voter, there may be important differences between the demographics of the smallest states and those of the largest states or of the average state or of the median state, so that an equal vote for every state in the Senate is not only increasingly undemocratic. It is increasingly unrepresentative as well.

The statewide election of senators (as opposed to the election of representatives by small congressional voting districts) works a further discrimination against minorities, denying them the ability to elect “one of their own” and thereby to have a voice in Senate debate. Even if blacks, for example, make up more than a third of a state’s population (as they do in Mississippi), they could still find their voice in the Senate to be someone like Mississippi Republican Senator Trent Lott, who has supported racially segregated schools and opposed a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. To the shame of us all, the Senate’s “small representation” and correlatively large (statewide) voting constituencies mean that it will remain a singularly white institution, even as the House of Representatives continues to reflect changes in the nation’s racial complexion.

The “small and unequal representation” of the U.S. Senate infects the judicial and executive branches as well as the legislative branch. Because the Senate is the only institution whose “consent” is constitutionally required for presidential appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the Senate can skew the bias of the nation’s highest court. In the case of the appointment of the highly controversial, conservative, and arguably sexist Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, the Senate confirmed Thomas’s appointment (by a margin of four votes, 52–48), despite the fact that the senators who voted against him represented 7 million more people than the senators who voted for him. In that case, senators from the nine largest states with a majority of the people voted two-to-one against the Thomas confirmation (their vote was 12–6), while senators from the twenty-six smallest states with a majority in the Senate gave Thomas his four-vote margin of victory (they favored him 28–24).

http://harpers.org/archive/2004/05/what-democracy-the-case-for-abolishing-the-united-states-senate/3/