Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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National Correcting an Imbalance by Gerry Krownstein October 31, 2009 A situation not anticipated by the founding fathers threatens to disrupt our democracy. The Constitution is a masterful balancing act, playing powers off against each other so that no one group can assume total power. The legislature is juxtaposed to the executive and judicial branches; each is powerful, but not powerful enough to swamp any of the other branches - certainly not powerful enough to ride roughshod over a combination of the other two. Within the legislative branch, power is split between the local representatives in the House of Representatives and the statewide Senators. The House is charged with initiating all fiscal legislation; the Senate controls treaties and confirmations. Both are required for any piece of legislation to become law. The House is the voice of the majority. The Senate is the protector of the interests of the small states. It was a brilliant compromise in 1787, but changes in the distribution of our population has led to a tyranny of the minority.
Two facts are key: each state is entitled to two Senators, regardless of population, and 60 Senators are needed in situations requiring a super majority, such as cloture. This means that 41 Senators can prevent the majority from acting. Until the latter part of he 20th Century, 41 Senators represented a substantial portion of our population. Today, the smallest 21 states represent only 12.5% of the nation’s citizens, or about the same population as the single state of California. Thus, the small states have acquired a veto power over the wishes of the majority that is completely out of proportion. (See New York Stringer Magazine’s 2005 article The US Senate for another take on this problem.)
Given the fact that a Constitutional amendment would be required to alter the composition of the Senate, and that such an amendment would certainly be blocked by the small states, what is to be done? The only practical remedy, difficult nevertheless, is for the Senate, which controls its own rules, to redefine the supermajority downward, so that it would take a larger proportion of the Senate to veto the majority. Requiring only 55 votes for cloture would raise the minimum population required to sustain a filibuster to 14.5% of the population, a slightly more reasonable number. A better solution would require, not a fixed number of Senators, but that cloture could be sustained either by a vote of 51 Senators or that the population represented by Senators voting against cloture equal at least 40% of the total population .
The fact that each Senator from Wyoming represents only 532,000 people, while each Senator from California represents 36,000,000, a sixty-sevenfold difference, is unavoidable but intolerable, and certainly not something foreseen by the framers of the Constitution. Until the Constitution can be fixed, any tool that might work should be brought to bear to correct the situation.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com