From what I see of American TV, that not many people pay attention to the mid-term elections. Why is this? Shouldn’t you be taking elections for the senate seriously? It’s my impression that in the US, the senate does something. Was I <ghast> wrong?
The Senate’s important is indeed equal to, if not greater than, the President’s. However, the importance of any one senator is diluted by the fact that there are 100 of them. Any given election can only turn over 34 seats, and of these most will be incumbents winning another term. It’s easy to think that it’s not very important.
The Presidency has been the most powerful office in American politics for the last 100 years or so, so most people really don’t care as much about the Senate.
You’d be hard pressed to find the average person who can name both of his/her state’s Senators. (SDMB members need not apply.)
You also forget about the House, which has pretty much the same amount of power as the Senate, but operates much differently.
First off, U.S. voters don’t take the Presidential elections all that seriously, compared to other countries. Recent presidential elections have attracted only about 50% of registered voters.
The power and influence of the three branches of government have waxed and waned over the past 200 years in the U.S. Since the mid-1930s, the President has primarily set the agenda for the country, while our Congress has been limited to approving or modifying his proposals.
Plus, the framers of the Constitution directed that only 1/3 of the Senate would be elected at a single election. That means people from a great many states had no Senate race at all this election.
Finally, there are 435 U.S. Representatives, 100 U.S. Senators and 1 U.S. President. It’s natural that we will focus more attention on the race for President.
In theory, the Senate is more powerful that the President, as the Senate has the power to remove the President from office, but not vice-versa.
Not to mention override his vetos (with a 2/3 vote) and theoretically pass anything it wants against the President’s wishes. Of course, it would need the help of the House of Representatives.
On the other hand, the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the army, navy, air force, and marines.
Only until he gets impeached for trying to blow up the capitol. 
5 Supreme Court justices (i.e. a majority of them) can over-ride an over-ridden veto by stamping it “unconstitutional”.
The American system is amusing with this perpetual game of rock-paper-scissors, but if anyone in the U.S. has ULTIMATE authority, it would be a two-thirds vote in three-fourths of the state legislatures, who could rewrite the contitution at will. According to this page, there are a total of 5411 state congressman and 1971 state senators. So the states average about 108 congressmen and 39 senators each. 38 states (a three fourths majority) would be about 4104 congressmen and 1482 senators, and you’d only need two-thirds of them.
So (very roughly speaking) if you could get 2736 state congressmen and 988 state senators, a mere 3724 people or 0.0012% of the total population, they could legally abolish the Unites States at will. Since conspracy freaks regularly postulate conspiracies much larger than just 3724 people, I’m surprised they haven’t sounded the alarm about this already.
Anyhoo, the more complicated the preposition, the harder it is to get people (and the sound-bite media) to focus on it. Two guys fighting it out for the Presidency is about as straightforward as you can get.
The House of Representatives would like to be informed about this quirk in the Constitution you’ve discovered.
The Senate cannot unilaterally remove the President from office.
As for ameding the constitution through the use of state legislatures, so far, that has never happened.
Hasn’t it already happened some 29 times? At teh very least, the states had to ratify each amendment.
Here’s what my constitution says, in Article I, Section 3:
Sounds like unilaterally to me.
However, the Senate cannot sit as a Court for the Trial of Impeachments until an impeachment (= indictment in criminal court) has been passed by the Hosue of Representatives. Hence what you’re talking about is the relative power of Congress – two houses operating together – vs. the President.
As for the constitutional amendment issue, the “normal” procedure for Constitutional amendments requires a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress to propose an amendment, which is then ratified by state legislatures, it requiring three-fourths of the legislatures to vote affirmatively to make the proposed amendment a part of the Constitution. (Congress may at its discretion require special bodies to be elected by each state for the purpose of considering such an amendment; the only time this has ever been done was with the 21st [Repeal] Amendment.)
The alternate procedure, which has never been used, is for two-thirds of the state legislatures, presumably by separate resolutions with the same or similar wording, to call on Congress to call a Constitutional Convention, which would be free to propose revisions to the Constitution which would then be ratified in one of the two ways mentioned above.
When there’s an impeachment, the House has to bring up the case to the Senate. The Seante can’t impeach anyone. It just tries the case. 2/3 of the Senators could say “George Bush must go”, but if the House doesn’t bring an impeachment case before them, they might as well be cursing the darkness.
You know we had one of these cases a few years back … I think the guy’s name was something like Clinton.