“The Senate Never Should Have Existed in the First Place”

Politics Let’s Abolish the Senate! A center-left pundit and the DSA actually agree on this. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Andres Kudacki/Getty Images and Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images. Democratic socialists have been riding a wave of recent successes: Their party defeated a pair of incumbent House Democrats in New York. There have been primary wins in Philadelphia and in Denver. In the wake of these achievements, Jonathan Chait, a staff writer at the Atlantic, has turned in a series of articles that characterize the Democratic Socialists of America as antidemocratic, against the Democratic Party, and even a hindrance to policy goals like universal healthcare. Chait, safe to say, is not a fan of the DSA. But when the organization released its official platform recently, tucked away among the calls to defund the Pentagon and enact reparations was another mandate: to abolish the Senate. There, Chait is in firm agreement. “The Senate never should have existed in the first place,” he said. Chait points to the Senate’s creation—a compromise between bigger and smaller states to enact the Constitution. “If you listen to what the founders, like Madison and Hamilton, were saying at the time, they weren’t saying, ‘We’ve seen the wisdom of the small states’ point, and they were right to insist on this institution that gives residents of small states massively exaggerated political power vis-à-vis residents of large states,’ ” he said. “They were telling us that the Senate was bad, and the Senate, in many ways, has gotten even worse since that time.” On a recent episode of What Next, guest host Rob Gunther spoke to Chait about what it is about the Senate that could get two sides of a fractured Democratic Party to see eye to eye. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Rob Gunther: We should be clear before we start this conversation: Abolishing the Senate has very little chance of happening right now, right? We’d have to nuke Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution. Jonathan Chait: This is an abstract theoretical point that’s unlikely to happen any time soon, but you never know. Countries do change their constitutions. It’s worth thinking about because it illuminates the principles that we should be applying to questions of governance in this country. The value shouldn’t be keeping the system in place; it should be democratic norms. And the Senate is an antidemocratic norm. We’re talking about this two and a half centuries after the creation of the Senate. How has this problem gotten worse over time? At the time that they enacted the Constitution, the ratio between the largest state and the smallest state was something about 13-to-1 or 14-to-1. People like Madison and Hamilton were saying it would be ridiculous to give a resident of Delaware 13 times the political representation of a resident of Virginia, which was then the largest state. Well, today the ratio is about 67-to-1, so what seemed absurd then has gotten dramatically worse. Also, when they designed the Constitution, they considered whether they should put a supermajority requirement into the Senate, and they decided against it. A supermajority requirement would apply only to constitutional amendments and ratifying treaties. Everything else would be decided on a majority-rule basis. But over time, a supermajority requirement has crept into the Senate and is now a routine legislative barrier. Fiscal bills can be done on a majority basis, judges, executive branch appointments, but just keeping the lights on in the government and preventing a shutdown, that takes 60 votes. You could put a judge on the bench for life with absolute power to rule on the law with 50 votes. But if you want to keep the government open, you need 60. You mentioned that other countries have done similar enactments. I’m thinking about your piece about Great Britain. The U.K. has an upper chamber called the House of Lords, which looked a lot different in the past. The House of Lords used to be an equal power. It used to be a bicameral legislature, and it gave these upper class of states veto power over legislation. It was antidemocratic, and conservatives at the time insisted that it was necessary to rein in the temporary passions of the hoi polloi. They didn’t eliminate it per se, but they turned it into a pro forma, symbolic chamber. When Americans envision how they could abolish the Senate, they can think about a kind of process where the Senate would still exist, but it would just be these rich old guys who show up and debate and everyone pats them on the back but they don’t do anything. This conversation about the Senate and the unfair political advantages it gives to smaller states, it comes up pretty often. What I don’t hear as much, though, and what I wish were part of this conversation, is that the House also gives smaller states an edge. And this is because in 1920, Congress permanently stopped growing the size of the House, which up until then had added seats every decade. If you do the math, Wyoming is the smallest state—it has something like 600,000 residents. It gets one representative. If you use that as the benchmark, states like California, Texas, and New York are really underrepresented there. Absolutely true. That’s also true of the Electoral College. To me, the most unjust aspect of the Senate is race. Black people, Latinos, and Asian Americans have much less representation in the Senate than they do in the House. And now, after Callais, the House will reduce African American representation as Southern districts gerrymander completely without allowing any Black seats. The white South is going to return to the Senate and the House. If we play this idea out, though, how do you imagine a single-chamber Congress operating today? This is Mike Johnson’s Republican Party. They’ve passed things like the SAVE Act already. Is that a better solution? If Republicans were in power, they would be able to do things more easily than they can now. You’d have a representative system where, instead of parties saying, “If you elect us, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z” and then they get elected and say, “It turns out we can’t actually do X, Y, and Z,” they would do those things. Voters would have to decide whether they liked those things and wanted to throw those people out of power. Now, the catch to that becomes: What if they’re doing things that aren’t just public policy goals but are designed to entrench themselves in power? And the SAVE Act is the perfect example of that. It’s an attempt by Republicans to rewrite the voting rules so their party has an advantage. Donald Trump has said that if he passed this act, Republicans would never lose an election. I don’t think that’s correct, though. In fact, I’m not even sure that the act would help the Republican Party. I think it reflects a time when Democrats tended to do well with low-propensity voters. The theory is that if you made it harder to vote, you could keep away the low-propensity voters and Republicans would win. But I think that dynamic has flipped under Trump, and now the low-prepensity voters are more Republican. So the SAVE Act would possibly backfire on them if they did that. But I agree that that is a concern. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Congress Democrats History Senate Democracy