July 15, 2020,
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 3, clause 1.
Forged in fire and feather quills, this line of text, allocating two senators to each state, represents the resolution of a bitter debate that threatened to derail the Constitutional Convention of 1787. (Notably, it was only following the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 that the election of senators was entrusted to the people rather than the state legislatures).
The dispute began when Edmond Randolph, the Governor of Virginia, proposed a bicameral legislature in which representation in both houses would be allocated according to each state’s free population. The plan also sought to separate powers among three branches—executive, judicial, and legislative. The members of the first house were to be elected by the people, while the members of the second house were to be nominated by state legislatures and elected by the members of the first house. Drafted by James Madison, Randolph’s proposed plan came to be known as the Virginia Plan. While its tripartite structure of government made it into the U.S. Constitution, the plan for electing the legislature was met with immediate opposition.
The New Jersey Plan, an alternative proposed by William Patterson, later the Governor of New Jersey, advocated a unicameral legislature, in which each state would hold equal voting power, as under the Articles of Confederation.
Championing the Virginia Plan, delegates from large states, such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, argued that, to support a fundamental element of an American republic—protecting the will of the people—representatives should be allocated in proportion to population. Moreover, large states argued that the division of powers between two legislative bodies, bicameralism, allowed each body to check the actions of the other. As Madison later expressed in Federalist 63, “the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act.” This notion brought sharp criticism from delegates of then smaller states, including Georgia, Delaware, and New Jersey, who feared the effects of majoritarianism. John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware, speaking on behalf of small states, warned, “we would sooner submit to a foreign power than...be deprived of equality of suffrage in both branches of the legislature, and thereby be thrown under the domination of the large states.” What small states sought was more of the same: the assurance granted to them by the Articles of Confederation that maintained the same level of influence over the resulting government. Delegates from small states refused to sign the U.S. Constitution if it allocated seats in proportion to population.
Rufus King, a delegate from Massachusetts, viewed the issue of representation as one that was moral in its very nature. He expressed “astonishment that if we were convinced that every man in America was secured in all his rights, we should be willing to sacrifice this substantial good to the phantom of State sovereignty.” Here, King elucidates the primary motivation for representation in proportion to population: upholding the inalienable rights of the people—which he believed to be fundamental, in contrast with the arbitrary construction of the state.
Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, presented a compromise: the House would be allocated representatives according to population, while the Senate would have equal representation in each state. (Sound familiar?) This proposal only inflamed tensions between the large and small states, and the mounting hostility led to fierce debates between representatives from both sides.
And so, this constitutional conundrum almost broke the camel’s back—until it didn’t.
Eventually, delegates saw Sherman’s compromise, which came to be known as the Connecticut Compromise, as the only means to satiate the demands of the large and small states, while still permitting the passage of the very Constitution the compromise would be enshrined in.
So, as the illustrious narrative has it, on the day of the vote on the compromise, Benjamin Franklin, uncharacteristically, called for a prayer and—godspeed—representation as we know it today was adopted by a margin of one vote.
The touted success of the “Great Compromise” looks more today like a lapse in judgement, as the population disparities among states have become more pronounced. At the time of the Convention, the largest state, Virginia, was about 13 times as populous as the smallest, Delaware. Today, in contrast, the largest state, California (more than 39 million people), is 68 times as populous as the smallest, Wyoming (less than 600,000).
The profound disparity that prevails today ensures that small states maintain an unfair advantage in the Senate, known as the small state bias, diminishing the notion of “one person one vote” and unequally distributing benefits to certain states over others. Consider constituent needs: in a large state like New York, with nearly 10 million people per Senator, there is no reasonable way for senators to fully consider the diversity of desires of their constituents. Moreover, constituents in large states possess limited access to their senators with whom they can voice concerns. In small states, the case is the opposite. Senators are not only more accessible to constituents, but the senators themselves can more adequately consider the multiplicity of interests within their state.
This systemic problem creates glaring inequities. Because small states are over-represented, the federal government consistently redistributes income from large states to small ones. And because small states tend to be less racially diverse than small states, it suppresses the power of racial minorities in the federal government as well.
This unequal representation also frequently produces the anomaly we currently face, in which one party receives a majority of votes in the relevant senatorial elections, and the other party receives the majority of seats in the Senate.
What has come to be understood as an immutable guarantee of the U.S. Constitution—two Senators from each State—was a sticking point that almost prevented the Constitution from coming into being. While the framers of the Constitution could not have imagined the immensity of the U.S. population, or the complexity of politics as they exist today, the inequities produced by the antiquated agreement are indisputable. Fortunately, the founding fathers did understand that, when the rule of law no longer serves us, we the people hold the authority to change it.
We hold the power to ensure equal and fair representation in Congress and to ensure that every vote counts. Sign the petition in support of the The Democracy Decree.
[Updated to correct an error as to the direction of redistribution between small states and large.]