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Idea To Level The Senate Powers Among The States [1]

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Date: 2023-02-25  

The US Senate

There have been plenty of articles about how the US Senate is not very democratic with Wyoming (population 577,000) and California (population 39,500,000) each having the same two votes. This means that one person in Wyoming has the same senatorial power as 68 people in California. One strength of the arrangement is that gerrymandering the Senate is impossible since all senators are elected at large. And do we really want to give all the legislative power to the House of Representatives?



Some of the talk is about eliminating the Senate but that, in my opinion, is impossible — people won’t vote for such a radical change. So how do we level the Senate power among the states without big changes to the US Constitution? We can do so by assigning a number of votes to each senator in proportion to that state’s population of the nations population. The state with the smallest population has senators assigned one vote each. The remaining states are assigned one or more votes depending on the population as shown in this chart.

The exact column is the population of each state divided by the smallest population state (currently Wyoming). The Votes per Senator figure is a rounded exact number.

So, for example, when the Senate votes on a bill each senator from California actually casts 69 yeas or nays (vote splitting is not allowed). Since the total is always an even number the Vice President would still cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie.



This requires the most minimal change to the US Constitution and doesn’t rearrange any of the powers, duties, and responsibilities of each chamber, or the number of members of the Senate. But it accomplishes the goal of leveling the power in accordance to the state’s populations.



OK, what do you think about this idea?

Edit to Add

I may not have been clear but this would require a constitutional amendment. It is, to me, the smallest functional change that would make the Senate more representative of the population. It does eliminate equal representation of the states — that is the point. I’m also aware that this will never happen but neither will any other change to the Senate.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/25/2154858/-Idea-To-Level-The-Senate-Powers-Among-The-States

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