Designed to be undemocratic

My friend and debate partner was in debate mode this morning. He objected to a recent post that mentioned population weighted voting for the US Senate. This is an idea that votes by senators in populous states, such as California, should be proportionally worth more than votes by senators from low population states, such as Wyoming. My friend said we should leave the Senate as the Founding Fathers designed it. He agreed we should get rid of the filibuster, which is not a product of our founding documents. Our Founding Fathers discussed and rejected the need for supermajorities, which the filibuster enables. I note the filibuster has a much better chance of being removed than weighted voting has of being enacted (leaving aside whether weighted voting is constitutional or not). However, my friend brought up a bigger point, which I’ll turn into a question. Is the Senate, as designed by our Founding Fathers, undemocratic? That, of course, depends on who you ask. I did a search for “senate is undemocratic” and got a variety of answers (I tend to use duckduckgo these days rather than Google). Conservatives say yes it is democratic. Progressives say no it isn’t. I didn’t read any further than the descriptive blurb that came with each link. Since I am a progressive and have been writing this blog from the progressive viewpoint – and since I highly distrust conservative arguments – I’ll mention a couple reasons why progressives believe the design of the Senate is inherently undemocratic. I’ll start with the basic one. I heard it today, though I didn’t catch where. In a democracy (or representative republic) is Congress supposed to represent the states – or the people? This is important when the Constitution, the founding document, begins “We the People.” I’ve heard (but don’t have sources) that say the Senate was designed to represent states to make sure the number of slave states and free states were evenly matched. That would prevent abolitionists from overturning slavery. This seems likely after all the discussion I’ve heard about the Electoral College being designed to prevent overturning slavery. Though it’s related I’ll leave the EC out of this discussion. Whether or not the Senate was designed to maintain slavery, it was certainly used that way, starting with the Missouri Compromise in 1820. States were loosely entered in pairs, one slave, one free. Representing states equally was likely important when the original thirteen states were separate entities and had little to hold them together. That is no longer important in a country as woven together as this one is – I’m an American who happens to have been born in Ohio and currently lives in Michigan with siblings in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Texas. Also, in the last half century the phrase “state’s rights” has been code for states wanting to maintain racist policies. Back in January Laura Clawson of Daily Kos discussed political scientist Douglas Amy and his website Second Rate Democracy. One item in Amy’s list of undemocratic processes in America is that no other western democracy has a body like our Senate where the 40 million voters in 22 states get 44 Senate seats while the 40 million Californians get two seats. I checked census numbers. The 25 least populous states have about 52 million people. Should they be able to control the laws that govern the other 279 million people in the country? There are several other sources that discuss the imbalance in the Senate. My answer to the question I posed is yes, indeed, the Senate was designed in a way that is undemocratic. Many of those who disagree (certainly not including my friend) benefit from its undemocratic nature and will strive to maintain it.