User:Superb Owl/sandbox/Senate

= U.S. Senate =

History
The drafters of the Constitution struggled and debated more in how to award representation in the Senate than in any other part of the Constitution. While bicameralism and the idea of a proportional "people's house" were widely popular, the representation discussion in the Senate proved to be a massive fight. In the end, small states using their equal power from the Articles of Confederation, including Delaware's threat that small states would find a foreign ally instead and a poorly written alternative in the Virginia Plan have been credited with helping smaller states to have the same power as larger states.

"You dare not dissolve the confederation! If you do, the small states will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith who will take them by the hand and do them justice."

- Gunning Bedford Jr.

Design flaws
While many of the founders' anti-democratic designs have been corrected over the years (enfranchisement oversights, direct elections of senators and the president), the existence of the Senate is to Senate Historian Daniel Wirls finds it is likely the biggest outstanding issue to be addressed. 

"But if not the main flaw in the American system, the Senate is certainly one of its central defects."

- Daniel Wirls

While the more exclusive (smaller) Senate with 3x longer terms (6 years) holds a lot of prestige in the mind of American politicians and the public, the House of Representatives, which was the most direct form of proportional representation at its conception, was forced to contend with the legacy system of representing states (the 2 Senators elected indirectly from each state) because small states had wielded more power than their population had warranted and some threatened to secede if the transition towards a more democratic arrangement wasn't tempered by allocating Senators by state. This legacy power arrangement from the Articles of Confederation has been chosen less often by modern-day democratic countries, with unicameral, highly proportional legislatures seen as generally more popular, democratic and effective. When upper houses do exist, they have significantly less power and influence than the U.S. Senate, especially if they also forgo proportional representation. The Warren Court insisted that proportional representation in the Senate would not affect the benefits of checks and balances given the current staggered 6-year term lengths and the possibility of introducing multi-member districts that preserve the one person, one vote ideal while checking the House of Representatives. Senate historian Daniel Wirls thinks it is highly unlikely the U.S. Senate would exist if a constitutional convention was being held in the 21st century.

"From the beginning, a strong majority of delegates favored a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in at least one chamber."

Its passage has also been attributed to the fact that the design of Madison's more representative Virginia Plan was poorly written or that the inertia of the status quo (the Articles of Confederation) awarding equal power to states and not citizens was too great. Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin  were among the most prominent critics of this most controversial aspect of the compromise. 

"They who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives do not enjoy liberty but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes."

- Benjamin Franklin

In the end, a few big state delegates were swayed by the argument that a smaller senate foster more productive debate among other expected qualities (a broadly shared idea at the convention) and the largely shared desire to for a bicameral legislature outweighed the concern for equal representation.  The malapportionment also led to more power being given from the legislature to the Executive Branch, such as the power to nominate justices.

Structural racism debate
Unlike the Senate which was nearly evenly-divided for the first half of the 19th century, the House of Representatives consistently passed bills opposing slavery. As a result, the mythology of the Senate as a bastion for minority rights (including the use and abuse of the filibuster) grew out of the pro-slavery movement and its southern senators who, thanks to the lack of proportional representation in the senate, vetoed any attempt to free enslaved Americans for decades.

Due in part because smaller states are disproportionately white, one 2017 analysis found African Americans have roughly 75% of the representation as the average white American in the Senate, Asian Americans 72%, and Hispanic Americans 55%. This analysis calculated how many senators there were per million people (citizens or residents?) of each race and...

Legitimacy crisis
This geographic and representational bias in the Senate undermines the legitimacy of the institution, but by extension the courts whose nominees it does or doesn't confirm.

Role of federalism
Legislative bodies that began as federations (the European Union, United Nations, Canada, and United States) have varying degrees of malapportionment in their legislatures because each sovereign at the time of founding tended to have equal power, which they used to hold onto equal power at the expense of the more proportional representation where every citizen has equal power.