A proposal on how to impose proportional representation on the US Senate:
The title says it all: "The Path to Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Just One". That's a radical overhaul of the current arrangement of two senators per state, but the proposed reform addresses a radical problem when a state like California has 67 times the population of a state like Wyoming. In 1790, Virginia had a population almost 13 times greater than Delaware, so while there was imbalance in the past, it was not as extreme as today.
Start with the total U.S. population, then divide by 100, since that’s the size of the current, more deliberative upper chamber. Next, allocate senators to each state according to their share of the total; 2/100 equals two senators, 3/100 equals three, etc. Update the apportionment every decade according to the official census.Using 2017 census estimates as a proxy for the official one coming in 2020, the Rule of One Hundred yields the following outcome: 26 states get only one senator (having about 1/100 of the population or less), 12 states stay at two, eight states gain one or two, and the four biggest states gain more than two: California gets 12 total, Texas gets nine, and Florida and New York get six each. This apportionment shows how out of whack the current Senate has become.
The article recognizes the legal obstacles to Senate reform toward proportional representation.
The obvious reply is, “This is impossible! The Constitution plainly says that each state gets two senators. There’s even a provision in the Constitution that says this rule cannot be amended.” Indeed, Article V, in describing the amendment process, stipulates that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”First, consider that Article V applies only to amendments. Congress would adopt the Rule of One Hundred scheme as a statute; let’s call it the Senate Reform Act. Because it’s legislation rather than an amendment, Article V would—arguably—not apply.
Second, the states, through the various voting-rights amendments—the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth—have already given their “consent” by directing Congress to adopt legislation to protect equal voting rights, and this delegated power explicitly applies to “the United States” as well as the states. The Senate Reform Act would simply shift seats according to population. No state or its citizens would lose the franchise.
The article also recognizes the political obstacles to Senate reform when small, rural, conservative states would face the prospect of their political (over-)representation being drastically diminished.
The immediate political likelihood for passage of the Senate Reform Act is not great, in large part because it’s not only more democratic than the status quo, but more Democratic, too. Taking the Trump electoral victory map of 2016 as a template, and applying it to the 110 senators created under the reform, yields a gain of plus-eight senators for Democrats and plus-two for Republicans. From a political point of view, then, Democrats should favor the reform—and one can imagine it passing in some alternative future, even if some Democratic senators from small states would have to vote in favor of fairness and principle rather than parochial and racial privilege. Republicans in large states might also be hard-pressed to vote against their own citizens’ prospects for fairer and broader representation.
If a Democratic wave continues into 2020, then who knows, a Senate Reform Act could make America a democracy again.
A related reform of Congress would involve ending the seniority system which assigns powerful seats to members who have been there the longest.
The obituary of a senator from Mississippi, the poorest state in the USA:
Thad Cochran, a courtly Mississippi Republican who cultivated his constituents for 45 years as a congressman and United States senator with traditional catfish fries, Southern charm and billions of dollars in federal pork-barrel largess, died on Thursday in Oxford, Miss. He was 81.Mr. Cochran derived most of his power from 37 years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over all discretionary government spending, and from several terms as its chairman. Those perches gave him enormous authority to allocate funds and to bring home special projects for his state, often called pork-barrel spending.
In some ways, he seemed like a Cold War liberal.
He occasionally made national headlines. After Donald J. Trump became president in 2017, Mr. Cochran recommended a military spending appropriation of $581 billion for fiscal 2018 — $15 billion more than Mr. Trump’s request — and $65 billion for overseas contingency operations. He also urged action to avert government shutdowns and to provide relief for regions hit by hurricanes and wildfires.
In other ways, he seemed like a typical politician. Indeed, prior to 1967, he was a Democrat, and he had the "aroma" of a stereotypical Irish American politician.
But the appropriations that made news back home were those that counted with the electorate — money that, through his influence, went to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast ports, universities, public schools, agriculture, airports, highways, bridges, health centers, fire and police departments, and more, including catfish research.
In Mr. Cochran’s rarefied world of discretionary spending, billions moved like nickels. It is hard to estimate the vast sums he helped funnel into his state over decades. His Senate biography notes that in 2005 he “spearheaded the effort to provide more than $87 billion in supplemental assistance to Mississippi and Gulf Coast states devastated by Hurricane Katrina.”
In 2010, a Mississippi watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste, called Mr. Cochran the “King of Earmarks,” saying he had pushed $490 billion in pork-barrel projects, the most in the nation. In public finance, earmarks are items in an appropriations bill that direct funds to a specific recipient, circumventing competitive, merit-based allocation processes.
“The longer I’ve been there, the more I appreciate the seniority system,” Mr. Cochran said at a rally in Jackson, the capital, during his last hurrah in 2014. “It has benefited our state in a lot of ways.”
Because of the Senate's distortion of proportional representation, patronage disproportionately goes to poorer, rural, conservative states.
So while Trumpists talks about a "Marshall Plan for rural America", federal policies have already been precisely that.
Traditional Republicans lament government largess as a "socialist" policy of redistributing income, but more than any other faction of government it is the Republican Party in rural areas that is redistributing the USA's resources to poor rural areas (prior to the 1970s, these same Republicans were Democrats). Perhaps the biggest pork-barrel, socialist program of them all is the US military (e.g., all those military bases down South).
And maybe that is a good thing. Political patronage is all that rural states have, aside from catfish farming (Mississippi) and chicken farming (Arkansas).
In all societies, the primary purpose of government is to dampen social conflict. This often involves channeling huge amounts of money into things that are economically dysfunctional, but the alternative to such policies is not rational, productive investment but rather civil strife or even societal collapse.
The so-called Yellow vests movement in France is a warning. The uprising was triggered when the Macron government raised taxes on diesel fuel, and after a speed limit reduction on country roads was enacted. From a strictly technical point of view in terms of reducing green house gases and traffic accidents, this was the right thing to do, but it makes life unbearable for those who are wedded to a quasi-rural life that involves long commutes to work. From an economic point of view, their lifestyle is irrational, but the reality is that people are quite irrational and will not change.
Radically reforming the Senate in terms of proportionality and the seniority system is therefore a terrible idea in terms of the crushing impacts it would have on already distressed rural areas and the political backlash that would ensue.
Revoking the disproportionate political power that rural America has through the political system might only channel frustration into more dangerous forms of expression. The USA has a very limited history of terrorism compared to Europe. In fact, in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, the journalist Jimmy Breslin wrongly claimed that it must be the work of foreign terrorists because Americans don't do these kinds of things to each other. But if rural America falls apart even faster than it is currently eroding, it might be surprising how bad things could get.
Almost a thousand years ago, the Chinese government paid Mongol nomads a huge annual ransom to avoid conflict. Ultimately, the Chinese could not bear the insult of paying off nomads as their price kept rising because the Chinese saw China as the center of the world and their emperor as the "son of heaven". Going to war with the Mongols restored Chinese pride, but from a practical point of view, it was one of the greatest mistakes in human history. Sometimes you just gotta pay, no matter the cost.
Mild reforms
Reforming the Senate mildly toward greater proportional representation would involve keeping the current system of two senators per state, but would add a few further senators -- ten senators, to be exact. The senators would represent overlapping regions that would have the same population size -- sixty million voters, to be precise. For example, California would have two new senators, one representing the region of the southwest and one representing the west coast (including Alaska and Hawaii). This added system of regional senators would be modeled on at-large representation.
Legally, this system would not challenge current Constitutional arrangements because it would simply tag on a new, smaller system. This would be much the way that new amendments can be added to the Bill of Rights without overhauling the Constitution. Politically, this would be a mild reform to promote somewhat greater fairness that would not make smaller states feel threatened. (California would get two new regional senators, but so would Wyoming.)
Reforming the seniority system in the Senate mildly would only slightly alter the current system, but it would hopefully be a rejuvenating force.
United States senators are conventionally ranked by the length of their tenure in the Senate. The senator in each U.S. state with the longer time in office is known as the senior senator; the other is the junior senator. This convention has no official standing, though seniority confers several benefits, including preference in the choice of committee assignmentsand physical offices.The United States Constitution does not mandate differences in rights or power, but Senate rules give more power to senators with more seniority. Generally, senior senators will have more power, especially within their own caucuses. In addition, by custom, senior senators from the president's party control federal patronage appointments in their states.
Seniority is a conventional arrangement that has no official standing, but it lessens conflict between politicians by having an established system of selecting leadership that will eventually benefit currently marginalized junior legislators (if they can survive in the meantime). The pragmatic aspect of the system should be recognized and not undermined.
The mild reform of the seniority system would entail that, as a principle, every third year power would be invested (for that year) in the second most senior leader at hand. For example, every third year, the post of president pro tempore would pass to the second most senior member of the majority party.
The president pro tempore of the Senate is traditionally the most senior member of the majority party.
Likewise, every third year, seniority on a committee would pass to the second most senior member of the committee in the majority party.
Senators are given preferential treatment in choosing committee assignments based on seniority. Seniority on a committee is based on length of time serving on that committee, which means a senator may rank above another in committee seniority but be more junior in the full Senate. Although the committee chairmanship is an elected position, it is traditionally given to the most senior senator of the majority party serving on the committee, and not already holding a conflicting position such as chairmanship of another committee. The ranking member of a committee (called the vice-chairman in some select committees) is elected in the same way.
Some things should remain as they are now.
- Greater seniority enables a senator to choose a desk closer to the front of the Senate Chamber.
- Senators with higher seniority may choose to move into better office space as those offices are vacated.
- Seniority determines the ranking in the United States order of precedence although other factors, such as being a former president or First Lady, can place an individual higher in the order of precedence.
This might help to break the monopoly on patronage and address the tendency for elites to gradually fall out of touch with reality. (In the case of the seniority system discouraging retirement, senior senators like Strom Thurmond sometimes literally become out of touch with reality.)
