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Dec 17, 2019 · In a new memo, co-founder Colin McAuliffe writes that “the Senate is an irredeemable institution” that’s biased 3 percentage points in the GOP’s favor and systematically underweights the...
- Matthew Yglesias
Nov 17, 2023 · The result of the country’s evolution has been a Senate that suffers from three fundamental imbalances, according to a Washington Post data analysis of population growth, demographic changes and...
Nov 12, 2021 · The Senate needs to be abolished and replaced with a democratic institution of government. “One person, one vote” makes sense; “one state, two votes” never did.
- An Eroding Democracy
- A Hardwired Imbalance
- A Compounding Risk
- End The Filibuster
- Add New States
- A Path Toward Bipartisanship
While the economy and pandemic may be getting better, the sustained attack on our democratic institutions that started under the last administration is, if anything, intensifying. As the GOP’s authoritarian turn becomes ever sharper, Republican-controlled statehouses across the country are ramming throughdraconian, Jim Crow-style voting restriction...
It will help to look a bit at how the U.S. Senate works. Republicans are counting on blocking the For the People Act with the filibuster, which requires supporters of a bill to come up with 60 votes to pass it — a nearly impossible order in today’s Senate. Because it’s not a “spending” bill, Democrats can’t use reconciliation, which worked for COVI...
Awarding two Senate votes per state,Ian Milhiser recounts at Vox, might have made sense in the 18th century, when the U.S. was being cobbled together by 13 independent nation-states desperate to avoid more armed conflict. But “whatever the wisdom of this devil’s bargain in 1787,” he writes, “America is a very different place today. There is little ...
Clearly, these practices are unsustainable for any remotely democratic system. But dauntingly, the road to fix them goes through the Senate. There are all kinds of proposals for fixing the Senate. In The Atlantic, Wharton professor Eric Orts outlineda plan to reapportion it — giving big states like California as many as 12 votes and tiny states lik...
In my view, the real trouble with eliminating the filibuster is the Senate’s underlying imbalance — particularly in the current climate. With the Senate’s makeup so tilted toward Republicans, there’s a real danger that Republicans would weaponize the filibuster’s absence to pass more laws restricting voting rights and consolidating their own contro...
With democracy under threat today, expanding it this way would be an elegantly straightforward way to protect it, at least for a while. In one sense, these would be overtly partisan moves — no Republican in Washington today would back them. But in another, moving us toward a political system where politicians actually have to compete for voters, an...
[The New York Times] According to one metric, the voting power of a senator from Wyoming is 66 times greater than a senator from California — one of the highest such disparities in the developed...
Jun 27, 2006 · Encouraged by an alliance of liberal interest groups, the now minority Senate Democrats – no longer able to block the most controversial nominees in committee – resorted to the filibuster.
People also ask
Is the Senate an irredeemable institution?
Is the US Senate undemocratic?
Was the Senate designed to be a democratic body?
Why is the US Senate so partisan?
For one thing, the senators from the twenty-six smallest states hold the most Senate seats even though they represent only 17 percent of the U.S. population. They can refuse to pass legislation desired by the majority of the population, the House, and the president.
