Following the Wednesday defeat of the gun control bill in the Senate, liberal commentators lashed out at the very structure of the Senate itself. In the New Republic, Jon Cohn and Eric Kingsbury lament:

Of course, the idea of creating a legislative chamber with equal representation from all states regardless of population (to go along with a proportional legislative body) was a central compromise in the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Over at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein suggests that somehow the factors that motivated the Founders into reaching the Great Compromise (or Connecticut Compromise) no longer hold, because the population gap between the smallest and largest states is a lot wider than when the Constitution was written. But his point about the expanding population gap is irrelevant, because the decision to balance the interests of smaller and larger states was more fundamental and philosophical. It was about assuaging concerns that a powerful central government would run roughshod over the states.