Should the United States Senate be abolished?

Great Debates
21

No, I do not believe any of the framers had even an inkling of any of that when they qyarreled over the provisions of the constitution.

What I do believe was that they knew enuf that no one knew everything then or what will happen in the future, so they made sure that the constitution wasnt static. It changes, it allows for things unheard of or undreamed of in their times. A 65 MPH national speed limit might have been preposterous in their day but if they see that we have roads that can handle car speeds of 80MPH and have vehicles that can travel at twice the speed limit, they would not rotate one degree in their graves. Theyd look at our govt and say, “well that aint perfect, but then neither were we.”

Perhaps you should look at what the Senate has exclusive powers to. Taken from the Grolier Multimedia Encylopedia:
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/aae/side/senate.html

Congress is notoriously slow in making up its mind, think what a morass it would be if several hundred congressmen had to do what the Senate does.

22

Does not a second house allow for a second check on the Presidency? Assuming the house and senate were dominated by opposite parties the ability of a president to control the agenda would severely curtailed right? Now reduce the house/senate to a single body that coincidentally is controlled by a party affiliated with the White House. Opposition would move down to a state level, fracturing and leading to more regional squabble then you have now.

23

Slayer:

I think you may have missed my point about speed limits. It’s the specific speed limit of 65 (or whatever) it’s the very fact that there would be ANY speed limit mandated by the feds. That the feds could reach that far into the daily lives of people of THE STATES.

I’m not arguing for a static constitution. Just that it be modified byt the process that was built into it. Lest we not forget:

24

Wasn’t that what we had in November 2000?

(Though calling Rehnquist and Scallia “expert bureaucrats” would be an insult to bureaucrats, I would think. :wink: )

25

Let me clue you in. The more populated states try to dominate other states to this very day. Look at how hard the “big” states fight against any sort of law that might make them directly responsible for their own pollution instead of dumping it all onto the “small” states. Without some kind of equalizer, you’d simply see more and worse of that.

26

A couple of months ago the New Yorker published a review of a book (I haven’t read it) by the constitutional scholar Robert Dahl, titled “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?” You can read the review here:

Dahl goes after the Senate pretty forcefully, pointing out that its only real functions are to serve as a graveyard for legislation and as a means to increase the proportional representation of the residents of small states. In Dahl’s view, the Senate has gone too far in both areas, so that good legislation can’t get passed and residents of small states wield too much power over the national legislative agenda. The reason I bring up the review is because I really liked how the author highlighted the problem:

“Imagine, if you can, that African-Americans were represented “fairly” in the Senate. They would then have twelve senators instead of, at present, zero, since black folk make up twelve per cent of the population. Now imagine that the descendants of slaves were afforded the compensatory treatment to which the Constitution entitles the residents of small states. Suppose, in other words, that African-Americans had as many senators to represent them as the Constitution allots to the twelve per cent of Americans who live in the least populous states. There would be forty-four black senators. How’s that for affirmative action?”

Why do conservatives want special rights for small-staters?

27

Oh, John, please don’t bring the 10th Amendment into it! Nobody even knows what it’s supposed to mean! In all our history since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, no important constitutional case has ever been decided based on the 10th Amendment!

Grey, a second house provides a “second check on the presidency” only where it is controlled by a different party – which is not the case right now: The Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. I don’t like that but I see no constitutional problem with it. If the Democrats controlled all three institutions I would be – well, not satisfied, but much more pleased. (If a Green-Socialist coalition controlled all three I would be ecstatic.) The point is, there’s no constitutional guarantee against this kind of one-party dominance, if the voters choose it, and I’m not proposing any. But notice that even under the present situation, Congress is resisting Bush on some points, such as the tax cuts. Regardless of party affiliation, members of Congress still believe they should have an independent role to play in setting policy. Well, I say a one-house Congress would be an even more effective check on the presidency – regardless of party affiliation – simply because only one house would have to reach agreement (and disagreement with the White House) on any point.

X~Slayer(ALE), I was aware of the exclusive constitutional powers of the Senate. So what? My proposal is to devolve all those functions on the House – which is a larger and, therefore, more unwieldy body, but oviously it does get things done. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the Senate makes up its mind any quicker than the House does. Slower, probably – House rules do not allow for filibusters.

28

Dogface, let me clue you in: small states get more money from the federal government than they pay to it. Big states get less from the federal government than they pay to it. By all means, view this table and educate yourself. If there is a clearer indicator of the balance of power between the large and small, I’d like to hear it.

Funny how conservatives constantly complain about federal taxes, when, looked at on a state level, they tend to be the biggest beneficiaries.

29

I suppose you could delegate their duties into one Congress but you’d end up with a special committee to do treaties, presidential nominations and impeachments anyway. Wouldnt that be the US senate now? I think the current make up of the Cingress (House and Senate) balances the needs of the many with the needs of the states. Abolishing the Senate does not improve the congress nor does it make it better for the american people.

That list was depressing. It shows that my state is not only the biggest tax contributor but also the one that gets the biggest shaft from the feds. BOO frikkem HOO New York!

30

X~Slayer(AME): “**alances the needs of the many with the needs of the states”? Huh? Care to expand on that? What needs do the states have, that are different from the needs of “the many”?

31

Conservation for one. If states with smaller populations but bigger lands wanted to conserve its resources, forests and other things within their state while the urban areas of other states wanted their stuff, the states rights are upheld above the majority.

The greater population of one state must not be used to the detriment of another state who may be smaller or have less people. There is an equality of states as well as equility of the peoples rights.

32

X~Slayer, the scenario you’re describing only plays out in reality with respect to water rights. All other resources of a state – forests, etc. – tend to stay where they are. Two states can argue over rights to a given river’s water, and have. Usually they settle it by bargaining among themselves. The Law of the Colorado River is a compact among seven western states (including California, Nevada and Arizona) which was negotiated in 1922; it provides for distributing the water among them according to percentages deriving from a formula drawn up by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. This leads to tension between California and the rest because CA gets the most water.

The point is, whether the arrangement is a good one or a bad one, it wasn’t the existence of the Senate that made it possible. It was the existence of the states, as going concerns and political entities. The abolition of the Senate would not threaten that.

And where do you get this idea about “an equality of states”? The “equality” they get in the Senate is merely a result of a poltical compromise worked out in 1787, which I am proposing be revised. Other than that – the only equality the states have is that they are all equally states, with equal constitutional status, and an equal degree of internal autonomy. But why should that translate into any equality of influence over the national government?

You raise the specter of a big state using its bigger population to the detriment of a smaller state. But that is NO DIFFERENT from an urban area within a state using its clout in the legislature to put its own priorities ahead of the priorities of underpopulated rural areas – and that is a PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE exercise of democratic power, the more so as the political marginalization of the hinterlands affects many fewer people than would the marginalization of the cities. What’s wrong with any of that? A lot of states used to have an upper house that overrepresented the rural areas, presumably to balance their power against the cities’. The Supreme Court ruled that practice was undemocratic and had to go; and rightly so.

33

Abolishing the Senate would fundamentally change the way our government works. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of checks and balances. Populace states such as California and Texas end up with way more Representatives in the House then states like Wyoming or Alaska. To maintain a balance of power in the legislative process we have the Senate which is represented by two people from each state. This acts as a check against the power of the House.

I don’t think congress needs to be any more efficent then it already is. Our bi-cameral system has bee pretty successful for the past two centuries and you’ve offered no compelling reason to change it now.

Marc

34

I’d like to see a cite that shows the Supreme Court ruled that anything was undemocrated. If they rule on something they rule on whether it is unconstitutional or not. Of course given that the Constitution was set up to include the Senate and the House of Representatives it is unlikely that our current system is unconstitutional.

Marc

35

I agree with MGibson, altho there is no denying that there are merits to having a unicameral legislation within states and their cities or rural areas, the separation of Senate and House has shown no glaring defect, no visible signs of failure or deficiency, no real compelling reason to warrant a change.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/uni_bicam.htm

This link shows the pros and cons to both sides. If both are equally good, I’d stick to what we already have.

36

Actually, Brain Glutton is correct in the “undemocratic” comment – though it’s rarely used, the provision of Article IV that guarantees to each state a democratic form of government and authorizes the federal government to ensure that it does, was among the justifications cited in the one man-one vote cases. The court has used it over the years, though very rarely. Effectively, he made a synecdoche for “unconstitutional because it was undemocratic” in that comment.

37

the separation of Senate and House has shown no glaring defect, no visible signs of failure or deficiency, no real compelling reason to warrant a change.

It appears you overlooked the New Yorker article I linked to, X-Slayer, which levels at least five criticisms toward the Senate. I will attempt to reproduce them, since no one seems to want to read it.
1) The Senate is no longer a source of meaningful legislation, only a graveyard for it. Defenders of the Senate point out that it serves a useful purpose as a check, but the problem is that it ONLY acts as a check these days. What about its positive functions? Did the founders intend the Senate only to be a graveyard of legislation, and not a wellspring of it? From the article:

“A partial list of the measures that—despite being favored by the sitting President, an apparent majority of the people, and, in most cases, the House of Representatives to boot—have been done to death in the Senate would include bills to authorize federal action against the disenfranchisement of blacks, to ban violence against strikers by private police forces, to punish lynching, to lower tariffs, to extend relief to the unemployed, to outlaw the poll tax, to provide aid to education, and (under Presidents Truman, Nixon, and Carter as well as Clinton) to provide something like the kind of health coverage that is standard in the rest of the developed world. The rejection of the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations after the First World War and then of preparedness on the eve of the Second are only the best known of the Senate’s many acts of foreign-policy sabotage, which have continued down to the present, with its refusal to ratify international instruments on genocide, nuclear testing, and human rights.”
2) Gives too much power to small states, it actively hurts big states, and diminishes the democratic representation of citizens who live in them. Remember that the 12 percent of Americans who live in the bottom 24 states are given 44 Senators – this is clearly overcompensating for the weaknesses of small states. Also refer to the above tables on state-fed balance of payments. If the Senate only leveled the playing field for small states, as some assert, then these accounts would be equal, or the big states would only run small surpluses given their influence in the House. But the Senate throws things off so utterly, that small states uniformly run surpuses and big states like CA, NY, TX are bled dry. For those who defend this function, please consider the questions: How much power should the small states have, and how would we know if they had too much?
**3) States’ rights are not more important than citizens’ rights. When the residents of say, Iowa, are routinely priveliged over millions of Californians and New Yorkers, you must have a very compelling reason to abridge the democratic process. ** Alexander Hamilton: “As states are a collection of individual men, which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition? Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter.”
4) The two-Senators-to-a-state rule was a result of threat, was not a guiding principle of the founders, and should not be defended as such. Once again, from the article: “Dahl notes that Gunning Bedford, Jr., of Delaware, told his fellow-delegates to the Constitutional Convention that, unless the big states yielded, “the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.” The Senate was formed less by rational argument than by threats of treason and war.”
5) Empirically, other countries are reluctant to use our system as a model. With our global influence, you would think there would be more countries with similar constitutional setups. But most democracies are parliamentary (anyone want to look this up?) Countries that have adpoted it, like Brazil, find the legislative process to be incredibly conservative. Their Senate, like ours, gives tiny, rural conservative states great power over the hugely populated big three states. The result – small states bleed the big states dry, and useful reform always dies in the Senate. Another result is that the executive branch has to pass most laws by executive decree that go immediately into effect, which then come before the legislature in 90 days. A further rule is required that the entire legislative process shuts down if the Congress does not vote on the decrees. All because the Brazilian Congress, modeled on ours,can’t get positive legislation enacted, serving much better as a killer of it.

38

**

To repeat X-Slayer there is no “glaring defect, no visible signs of failure or deficiency, no real compelling reason to warrant change.” The five crticism don’t provide a compelling reason to change.

**

So far as I know the Senate has never been in the business of introducing new bills. That job has always been delegated to the House. Maybe the founders did intend the Senate to be a graveyard of legislation.
2) Gives too much power to small states, it actively hurts big states, and diminishes the democratic representation of citizens who live in them. Remember that the 12 percent of Americans who live in the bottom 24 states are given 44 Senators – this is clearly overcompensating for the weaknesses of small states.

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**

I don’t really see that it is clearly overcompensation.

**

I think you’ll find other examples of compromises that made it into our Constitution. The Bill of Rights for one.

**

Keep in mind that these people just fought a war for their independence a few years back. I imagine they were a bit worried about being at the mercy of the larger states. Especially since they had already agreed to the Articles of Confederation and now people wanted to make a new government with a strong federal power.

5) Empirically, other countries are reluctant to use our system as a model. With our global influence, you would think there would be more countries with similar constitutional setups. But most democracies are parliamentary (anyone want to look this up?) **
[/QUOTE]

I can’t say this is something that concerns me. A system that works well for us might not work as well for other countries.

Marc

39

You are wrong, MGibson. Senators have the same power as House members to introduce new bills. If they don’t make as much constructive use of that power as the Representatives do, that should tell us something about the Senate.

The Bill of Rights was not one of the compromises made by the members of the Constitutional Convention. It was added in 1791, when the Constitution had already been in force for two years.

The “Great Compromise” was a combination of the Virginia Plan for the Constittuion (two-house Congress, representation in each house apportioned to the states by population) and the New Jersey Plan (two-house Congress, each based on equal representation for each state). For some reason, nobody talks much about a third alternative, the Hamilton Plan.

Alexander Hamilton proposed a two-house legislature, each house based on population; members of the lower house or Assembly to be elected by the people for three-year terms; members of the upper house or Senate to be elected for life, or “during good behavior,” by elected electors (the way the President is now technically elected by a College of Electors). The national chief executive or “Governour” also would be elected by electors and serve during good behavior. The national legislature would “have power to institute Courts in each State for the determination of all matters of general concern.” Every state governor would be appointed by the national government (like the system they used to have in France, where every department was governed by a “prefect” who was a career civil servant sent out from Paris). Each state governor would have a veto power over any action of the state legislature. In sum, Hamilton wanted a consolidated, not a federal government. He was very much a minority at the Convention and left shortly after his plan was rejected. But it’s worth taking notice of the fact that these ideas could even be seriously broached at the time, and that Hamilton was not discredited by this episode, but remained a national leader and served as George Washington’s treasury secretary and de facto prime minister.

“Hamiltonianism” is used today to mean three very different, but compatible, things:

  1. Elitism. Hamilton was not a temperamental democrat and believed society would best be ruled by an educated meritocratic elite. (Not a hereditary-prescriptive elite, like they had in the United Kingdom, and in the American South.) As you can see from reading “The Federalist Papers,” Hamilton feared the possibility that the common people would use their votes to attack the interests of the solid, responsible, propertied classes, and introduce all sorts of wild, utopian schemes, like paper money. Hence, in his plan the Governour and senators, like senior judges, should serve for life. Hamilton wanted to (never did) found a national academy to train a professional class of civil servants, like the Chinese Mandarins.

  2. Nationalism or federalism, as opposed to states’ rights. (Nowadays “federalism” is used to mean the same thing as “states’ rights,” but originally they were antonyms.) As we have seen above, Hamilton believed in a national society and state.

  3. Industrialism, as opposed to agrarianism. Jefferson wanted America to remain a society of smallholding yeoman farmers, forever. Hamilton had more imagination. In his lifetime he didn’t get his way. But, for better or for worse, we have been following the Hamiltonian-industrial path for a long time now, and it has made us the mightiest country in world history.

Just some points to think about, and generally relevant to this discussion.

40

Thanks for explaining why you dismissed the article, MGibson. I feel that this discussion would benefit if we actually explained how the Senate is useful, instead of just appealing to the opinion that it is not defective, therefore it should be retained by default. I know how the OP is phrased, but I’d like to understand more clearly what you think the Senate’s unique contribution to the Republic is.

On point 1, I’m glad to see we both agree that the Senate acts primarily as a graveyard. There are any number of institutions that could serve as a graveyard; what’s so special about this one? Chile has senators for life. If we had senators for life, I’m sure they could do a much better job of this function you seem so attached to. Why shouldn’t we go back to having our senators elected by congress – that would probably also do a better job of the functions you assign the Senate.

What I don’t understand is: when legislation which is supported by a majority of the country, its congressmen, and the president is blocked by the Senate, exactly what interest is served, and why is it so compelling to you who support it?

On point 2, the reasoning behind my argument that small states have too much power is that the best barometer for the imbalance of power between small and large states is their balance of payments with the federal government. Do you have reasoning to support why you see it differently, or is just an impression? Your claim that 12% of the population should have 44 senators in order to be adequately represented is similarly asserted. Is there reasoning behind it? Do you concede that it is an unusual amount of power to be given to this specific special interest? What if they had 60 senators? How much would be too much? What would it take – massive deficits on the part of big states and surpluses for little states? We already have that. I feel certain that if any other group of citizens were singled out for such privileges, it would be hugely controversial. Why are the interests of small states so important in a country where federal power is so dominant? Once again, I think that once the balance of payments starts to shift so heavily in favor of small states, it is clear that things are out of whack, and it is incumbent upon you to show that it is not.

Point 3, that in a democratic society, in contests between the rights of states and the rights of citizens, citizens should win out – this point is ignored. I would hope conservatives and democrats alike could agree on this point, and I think that there must be very compelling reasons – positive, not negative – to abridge people’s rights in such a way. I have not heard any reasons for why state rights are so crucial either theoretically or practically, especially in a nation where state powers have been so thoroughly weakened vis-a-vis the federal government.

Point 4 - you dismiss this by saying that the two-senators rule was a compromise. So was slavery. Your response gets us nowhere. My point is that this was a compromise grounded in pure power politics that are irrelevant to us today. This compromise is harmful to democracy, and presents no clear benefits to the republic. Obviously it is justified in your mind, but again I don’t see the reasoning.

Point 5 - you don’t care that other countries are reluctant to adopt our model. This surprises me – most of our founding documents are presented as being universally applicable to all of humanity. Why is the system that emerges from these documents seen as inferior to a parliamentary one if it is not because it is, in fact, less democratic and inferior. I know you are unconcerned about the democracies of foreigners; I’m glad our founders were more curious.