Thomas Pendergast Vladeck home

Make the Senate matter less

On Politics Twitter there has been a lot of chatter about how undemocratic the Senate is as an institution — e.g. that a person in Wyoming has 68x more influence on the Senate via their vote as someone in California.

The Senate is not going to change any time soon. Even if other things may even out the partisan imbalance like DC or Puerto Rican statehood:

Currently, the *average* Senate seat is about 6 points more Republican than the country overall (because smaller-population states happen to be more Republican right now). Adding DC and PR as states would reduce that advantage to about 2 points instead. https://t.co/kkP6zSFK50
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 7, 2018

And there is at least one straightforward way to make the presidential election by popular vote.

But there is another way to address this issue: make the Senate matter less.

I continue to see the intractability of agreement at the federal level something that could be more providentially solved by moving more domestic policy to the state level.

This is not an argument for less government, or more government, just a shift in the locus of government from the federal level to the state level. Theoretically, this should not be a partisan issue: let liberals in California and New York have the government they want and conservatives in Utah and Kansas have their style of government.