This article is part of an ongoing series about democratic reform in the United States. The series is inspired by the realization our country won’t be able to simply pick up where we left off after Trump leaves office, as Trump’s abuse of our constitutional system for his own autocratic ends has exposed that system’s weaknesses and left it ripe for exploitation by future wannabe tyrants. The United States will need to undergo a new round of democratic “statecraft” to recover from Trump. This series offers a number of proposals that can serve as a guide for that period of democratic renovation.
PREVIOUS ARTICLES:
Introduction: “Trump is Breaking the Constitution. We May Not Be Able to Put It Back Together Again.” (3/9/25)
Reform 1: Abolish the Electoral College (3/23/25)
One feature of American democracy that screams for reform is the filibuster, the procedural mechanism that requires all run-of-the-mill legislation in the United States Senate to receive at least 60% support to pass the chamber. The filibuster is anti-majoritarian in that a minority of 41-49% of all senators can essentially veto legislation supported by a 51-59% majority. That’s not how legislative democracies ought to work, as majorities—not minorities—should rule. While some argue the filibuster is useful because it requires legislation to receive a broader level of support before becoming law, in practice the filibuster has become a tool of legislative paralysis. It also obscures who is running the country, since voters tend to hold majorities responsible for legislative outcomes but often don’t notice minorities deploying the filibuster to block action in the Senate. Our government would be more democratic without the filibuster.
But we can dream bigger. Instead of simply abolishing the filibuster, let’s abolish the Senate.
The United States has a bicameral—“two chamber”—national legislature. The reason we have a bicameral legislature is the result of convention and compromise. When James Madison and Edmund Randolph drafted the Virginia Plan (the proposal that would set the table for debate at the Constitutional Convention) they included a bicameral legislature because…well, because the British had one, each of the states had one, and that just seemed to be what legislatures were like in those days. (Notably, under the Articles of Confederation, the United States had a unicameral national legislature.) So we just rolled with a bicameral legislature.
The assumption was that the upper chamber, like the British House of Lords, should somehow check the democratic impulses of the lower chamber. The Virginia Plan sought to accomplish this by granting its members—who would be nominated by the states and approved by the House—six-year terms, all of which meant senators had more freedom to disregard popular passions. That’s fine, whatever, but I think it’s worth pointing out here that this whole Senate thing feels reverse engineered from the start. It wasn’t like Madison identified a need and then filled it by creating the Senate. Instead, Madison had a Senate and then just worked backwards from there. Its existence doesn’t feel very thought out. Did anyone ever wonder if we might be better off with, say, some sort of tricameral legislature? Did anyone ever ask if we could get by with a unicameral legislature?
Actually, the idea of a unicameral legislature did come up, which, ironically, is how we ended up with a bicameral legislature. Less-populous state delegations at the Constitutional Convention did not like the Virginia Plan because representation in the House was apportioned by population. Those delegations feared that would mean states with large populations would dominate the national government. William Paterson submitted the New Jersey Plan as a counterproposal. The New Jersey Plan, like the government established by the Articles of Confederation, featured a unicameral national legislature in which each state regardless of population had equal representation.
Needless to say, the New Jersey Plan was not adopted by the convention, but the proposal did signal how dissatisfied less-populous states were with the Virginia Plan. But this is where Madison’s bicameral proposal came in handy, as a compromise offered by Roger Sherman of Connecticut found a use for the Senate. Sherman’s proposal retained Madison’s vision for the House but altered his plan for the Senate by basing membership in that chamber on Paterson’s model of equal representation by state. The vestigial Senate suddenly had a purpose! Sherman’s “Great Compromise” made it into the Constitution and has served as the structure of the legislative branch ever since.
That compromise may have been critical to the eventual ratification of the Constitution, but it has outlived its usefulness. Citizens in less-populous states in the 1780s may have been legitimately concerned that more-populous states would impose their will onto them. That concern would have been amplified by the fact that Americans at that time identified more strongly as citizens of their state than with the national federation.
But it turns out the large state/small state split has never been a major political divide in American history. This is especially true today. Of the nation’s four most-populous states, two are considered solidly Democratic states (California and New York) while the other two are considered solidly Republican states (Texas and Florida). It sure doesn’t seem like those large states are ganging up on small states. Of the ten least-populous states, four send two senators who caucus with Democrats to the Senate (Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire), one has a split delegation (Maine), while the other five send two Republican senators to the Senate (Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana). It’s hard to spot a sense of small-state solidarity. Consequently, there is no need to protect less-populous states from more-populous states, which in turn undermines a key justification for having a Senate.
Furthermore, the need to protect states’ special political status has faded significantly over time, which has turned the Senate and its state-based allocation of power into an anachronism. When the Founders were drafting the Constitution, there was a much stronger sense that the states themselves were sovereign sources of power with distinct identities that set them apart from one another. Many argued it was the states—rather than “we the people”—that constituted the union. For that reason, the Founders granted states a place of prominence in the constitutional framework.
Today, however, American politics is not driven by the pursuit or defense of state-centered interests. While state interests certainly pop up in national debates (as the ongoing tussle over SALT deductions demonstrates) and some issues can unify state delegations across party lines in defense of a state interest, most political conflict is driven by ideology, values, culture, economics, interest group competition, and the urban-rural divide. State solidarity—the sense that the inhabitants of a state have unique, shared, state-based interests that unify them politically and that take priority over other political issues—isn’t a major factor in contemporary American politics. That in turn makes it rather ridiculous today to have a chamber of Congress organized around state units.
As it turns out, because that chamber is organized around state units, that chamber ends up distorting our democracy. The nine most-populous states contain over half of the United States’ population. That means over 50% of the American population is only represented by 18% of the United States Senate. Meanwhile, the twenty-five least-populous states contain less than one-sixth of the United States population. That means 50% of senators represent around 16% of the population. California, the most-populous state in the nation, has over 39.4 million people, while Wyoming, the least-populous state, is just shy of 590,000 people, but both states still get two senators. That means there is one senator in California for every 19.7 million people (a total on its own that would make such a state the nation’s fifth-largest and barely smaller than New York) while there is one senator in Wyoming for every 295,000 people.1 When it comes to proportional representation, none of that comes close to the bedrock democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”
(BTW, you want to know who else thought state-based representation in the national legislature wasn’t a good idea? The Father of the Constitution himself, James Madison. He defended the Senate’s structure as a “necessary compromise” in Federalist 62 but argued against it at the Constitutional Convention. Kind of makes it hard for originalists to defend the structure of the Senate when the Founder most frequently cited as an authority on the Constitution believed its design was an error.)
You may argue none of this matters since I’ve already made the argument that large states and small states don’t vote together as blocs. But there’s a possibility here that the Senate could end up favoring low-population predominantly-rural states over higher-population predominantly-urban states. That matters because the urban-rural divide is a major contemporary political divide, and granting a disproportionate amount of power to lower-population rural states can deny or siphon away resources from the places where most Americans live. For example, because senators are accountable to state-based constituencies rather than constituencies of roughly equal size, the formulas used to allocate money in senate appropriations bills tend to treat states more equally than people. That means funding for everything from road construction to health care to homeland security measures tends to be directed to places with lower demand for that funding. (For example, three years after 9/11, Alaska was receiving on a per resident basis nearly three times the amount of federal homeland security funding as New York, the state targeted by the 9/11 terrorists. As that article points out, “Money is so readily available [in Alaska] that the Northwest Arctic Borough, a desolate area of 7,300 people that straddles the Arctic Circle, recently stocked up on $233,000 worth of emergency radio equipment, decontamination tents, headlamps, night vision goggles, bullhorns -- even rubber boots.”) Rural state residents may like this arrangement, as it keeps them from being overlooked by Washington, but they should try convincing the 50%+ of Americans represented by only 18% of all senators that this set-up is somehow fair. It turns out the Senate does more to suppress than check the power of high-population states. And it does that even before we get to the filibuster.
Some reformers argue the Senate could be fixed by replacing the chamber’s state-based representative scheme with a population-based one. This could be achieved by (for instance) increasing membership in the House to 500 members and then forming 100 senate districts out of combinations of five House districts. (For example, based on current House maps, a senate seat might consist of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which together have five House seats. Another seat might consist of Florida’s 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, and 27th congressional districts, which contain most of the Miami metropolitan area.) That would solve the proportionality problem.
That doesn’t get at the main problem with the Senate, however, which is its very existence. When it comes down to it, we should abolish the Senate because bicameralism is dumb.
Due to the United States’ system of separated powers, bills face numerous “veto points”—moments when legislation can be stopped—on their way to becoming permanently established law. That makes it exceptionally hard for the American government to legislate, which in turn means public problems often go unaddressed. This is true even when the American people support a specific government action. Thanks to bicameralism, there are numerous veto points in Congress alone, as bills must pass both chambers; the differences between the bills must be ironed out via a conference committee composed of members of both houses; and then identical final bills must (again) pass both chambers. That’s a very cumbersome process that contributes more to government dysfunction and paralysis than good governance.
There’s really no need to have two legislative bodies approve legislation. One would do just fine. I doubt you live in a school district with a bicameral school board, reside in a city with a bicameral city council, or attend a church with a bicameral church council. No one is demanding those unicameral legislative bodies become bicameral legislative bodies. My guess is they function quite well as unicameral institutions, and if they don’t, I doubt the problem is their unicameral nature. This is why I think it makes more sense to just get rid of the Senate rather than simply alter it so that its membership is based on equally proportioned districts: It just isn’t necessary for two different sets of legislators to approve the same bill before it becomes a law. That’s especially true when one of those legislatures contains hundreds of members.
Today, two-thirds of the world’s parliaments are unicameral. Following World War II, nations such as New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden eliminated their undemocratic upper chambers all together. Those nations are strong democracies. Many nations that have not eliminated their upper chambers have instead significantly weakened them. One such nation is the United Kingdom, whose parliament served as the model for our legislature. Since the early twentieth century, the UK’s House of Lords has only been able to delay legislation passed by the House of Commons. While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has introduced legislation to further reform the House of Lords, he had earlier pledged to eliminate the House of Lords entirely. So far, the only thing the United States has done along these lines is weaken the filibuster. We could do far more.
Some will insist we should keep the Senate because its longer terms, smaller size, and unique rules encourage greater deliberation, collegiality, and cooperation. The Senate, which fashions itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” is often characterized as an august body of wise statesmen, the saucer that cools the House’s hot tea.
Yet the Senate’s record isn’t as esteemed as its mythmakers suggest. The minoritarian Senate served as the main political bulwark for slavery and frequently blocked civil rights legislation. The same year it took the Senate over fifty days to overcome a filibuster of a bill that ended public racial discrimination in the United States, the Senate needed only eight days for eighty-eight senators to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which dramatically ramped up the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The “cooling saucer” also voted 77-23 to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002 despite plenty of evidence the operation was based on false pretenses. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster—which some consider the defining feature of the Senate—ends rather than encourages deliberation. Finally, there isn’t anything inherent to the nature of the Senate that turns its members into statesmen, as evidenced by Joseph McCarthy. More recently the Senate has been (dis)graced by the likes of Robert Menendez (currently in jail on corruption charges for accepting bribes—some in the form of gold bars—to work on behalf of the Egyptian government), Josh Hawley (who rallied a mob before it stormed the Capitol and breached the Senate chambers on 1/6), and Ron Johnson and Tommy Tuberville (who are constantly trying to out-dumb one another.) Also: Ted Cruz.
If we wanted to insulate legislators from popular passions, we could fiddle with the length of terms in the House: Perhaps House members could serve four-year terms, with half the members up for re-election every two years, or maybe the House could be redesigned so that members served for different lengths of time. What we no longer need, however, is an inert bicameral legislature. I therefore recommend an inverse Great Compromise: Let’s combine William Paterson’s call for a unicameral legislature with James Madison’s disdain for state-based representation to create a new legislative branch that contains a House but not a Senate.
Signals and Noise
From Substack:
From The Atlantic:
“Feudalism is Our Future” by Cullen Murphy
“No One Can Offer Any Hope” by George Packer
“Ukraine’s Warning to the World’s Other Military Forces” by Phillips Payson O’Brien
From the New York Times:
“A Missouri Town Was Solidly Behind Trump. Then Carol Was Detained.” by Jack Healy
“Now the President is an Art Critic” by Jamelle Bouie
“Our Regression on Gender Is a Tragedy, Not Just a Political Problem” by David Wallace-Wells
“Selfishness is Not a Virtue” by David French
“The Vertiginous Novelty of America’s Debt Pile” by Adam Tooze
“Should Republicans Have Won in a Landslide?” by Nate Cohn
From the Washington Post:
“Ukraine Just Rewrote the Rules of War” by Max Boot
Exit Music: “Straight On” by Heart (1978, Dog and Butterfly)
At the founding, the nation’s most-populous state (Virginia) had twelve times the number of people as the least-populous state (Delaware); today, California has roughly 67 times the number of people as Wyoming.