Fixing the Senate: Equitable and Full Representation for the 21st Century

To many Americans in 2019, US politics seem fundamentally broken. The government gives tax cuts to millionaires but does not avoid disastrous shutdowns. Supreme Court justices are confirmed on party-line votes and make business-friendly rulings at odds with the interests of most working people. Politicians are bought and paid for by private companies through a culture of corruption. And the US Senate regularly fails to act on legislation approved by the House of Representatives. The Roosevelt Institute has released a number of publications that argue for interventions to change the structure of US politics so that both policies and the overall economy are more democratically responsive. This latest paper looks at one facet of this problem: a US Senate that entrenches multiple types of inequality. First, the United States’ second chamber fails to represent the American people on a one-person, one-vote basis. Second, it gives outsized representation to rich and to white Americans while comprising senators who are disproportionately richer, whiter, and more male than the population as a whole. Third, the Senate completely fails to represent the nearly 5 million Americans who live in Washington DC and US territories. Fourth, the Senate’s representational structure contributes to policy inaction on existential threats to American democracy and livelihoods, such as rising inequality and climate change. One of the main findings in this paper is that the outsized representative weight of America’s smallest, whitest states (which are least endangered by rising sea levels) is projected to more than double in the coming century, jumping from the internationally unprecedented 67-to-1 ratio at present to an even more startling 154-to-1 ratio in 2100. This representational inequality will be rising at precisely the time that America’s leaders must take decisive action to address climate change and other existential threats to the majority of its population, yet the Senate’s representational structure will insulate elected officials from having to respond to those most at risk. The pressing challenges of our time—inequality and climate change—require bold proposals to set the country and world on a new trajectory. Recognizing that senatorial inequality is a problem that will be difficult to address in the immediate term but necessary to address in the medium to long term, this paper does not balk at blue-sky proposals. It reviews several options for structural reform that could better align our politics with our policy needs. These options include abolishing the Senate, reforming the filibuster, segmenting the most populous state (California) into multiple states, and granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. We add to these oft-discussed options a fifth original idea: expanding the types of units represented in the Senate to include more than just states, including the federal district, the United States’ overseas territories, and Native American tribes. These units’ and groups’ lack of power in the Senate harms their interests; the woefully inadequate federal response to recent extreme hurricanes and typhoons is but one example. But these groups’ absence from the Senate also tilts the priorities of the body in a way that harms all Americans’ interests by foreclosing a channel whereby representatives of poorer and more climateexposed areas could press for robust solutions to inequality and global warming. Moreover, full representation would better serve the Founding Fathers’ goals of deepening federalism and inspiring trust in the US among the community of nations. The paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 describes the Senate’s unrepresentative structure. Section 2 examines the purported federalist rationale of this arrangement and how the modern Senate fails on its own terms. Section 3 scrutinizes some of the Senate’s present and projected deleterious effects on democracy and sound public policy. Section 4 outlines five options for reforming the Senate. Section 5 concludes. (An Appendix examines in detail the particular constitutional challenges involved in overhauling the Senate’s structure.)