Increasingly, no one seems to understand that our country is a collection of states and not a federal government with inferior state departments. This is never more clear than in discussions on the Senate.
Complaining about the Senate has become a staple of Vox “analysis.” CNN was among the many left-wing outlets complaining about small states having too much say in Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Most recently, a FiveThirtyEight analysis of the Senate argued that “Republicans now hold a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.”
It bears repeating that it doesn’t actually matter if the majority party in the Senate “represents” a minority of people. The purpose of the Senate never was to represent the public, it was to represent the interests of the states and allow them a say in the federal government. It turns out that’s why the Senate exists alongside the House of Representatives, where congressmen do represent the people.
The complaint that populous states such as California get the same representation as small states such as Wyoming is completely irrelevant. The population of California gets its advantage in the House, where it sends 53 congressmen to Wyoming’s one. California and Wyoming are both states that entered into the shared American experiment, and as such, they are each treated as one state.
Democrats hate the Senate because they think their ideas are held by a majority of the country, and the Senate defies their “might makes right” view of politics. Of course, they have similar complaints about every institution when they don’t control it: The House is gerrymandered against them, the Supreme Court is illegitimate and must be stacked, the Electoral College is rigged. And so on.
Much like Democrats were able to win the gerrymandered House, they’ll win the Senate and the Electoral College at some point, and possibly even this year. They’ve decided that they must actually try to rig the Senate in their favor while they have the chance; eliminating the Senate filibuster and gifting themselves seats by making Washington, D.C., a state are at the top of the to-do list.
Conservatives would do best to argue for a return to state-orientated governance rather than fueling the Democratic fabrication of centralized federal power. Our civic illiteracy about the Senate has been exasperated by the tit-for-tat escalation of the power of the presidency and federal bureaucrats, and it’s past time this is remedied.
