Why each state has two senators

Got us throu a lot of stuff. Kinda like conventional war and weaponry. Now howerver we must take the lead. Animals adapt. Weve gotta change. Take the initiative or get lost in someones dust. So for these and other reasons we should look at the constitution as an old car in the garage.

Do we keep it maybe fix it up? This is the reason immigrants from all over the world want to move here!! Changing the Constitution like changing the rules in the middle of a game would ruin the US economy, taxes would go thru the roof, nobody could afford anything including food and clothes, and we would be the next Venezuela which was one of the richest countries in the world 30 years ago.

I would argue a lot has to do with terms and election cycles. In particular election cycle, the majority of the state may lean one way liberal or conservative , but by the time their second senator is up for re election, ideologies may change. Interesting phenominon to say the least. Click here to cancel reply. Facebook Facebook. Why do some states elect two Senators from different parties? In trying to stop a potential tyranny of the majority, this arrangement succeeds in enshrining a tyranny of the minority.

Majority rule is far from perfect, but minority rule is clearly worse. But in fact, most of the framers of the Constitution originally opposed this system, with only five of the thirteen states strongly supporting it. Alexander Hamilton was particularly incensed with the idea that all states should have equal legislative representation.

Writing in Federalist 22 , he complained:. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina.

Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. In the end, the two-senator rule was adopted — primarily because the small states threatened to drop out of the whole process if they did not get their way.

It was more a matter of political extortion than of reasoned compromise. Before , many state senates were also misrepresentative — giving sparsely populated rural districts the same representation as densely populated urban districts. But that year, the Supreme Court declared that arrangement unconstitutional.

The justices ruled that it clearly violated the rights of citizens to equal representation and equally weighted votes. This decision has not proved to be an unpopular one and has not generated any organized political effort to overturn it — in contrast to some controversial Court decisions in areas like abortion and campaign financing. Interestingly, most constitutional scholars agree that if the two-senator clause was not in the constitution, it would have been declared unconstitutional decades ago for the very same reasons it was ruled illegal in the states.

Solutions to the problem of a grossly misrepresentative Senate are many and obvious — at least in theory. We could simply follow the example of many European democracies and just abolish the Senate. Senate-less democracies seem to get along fine without this extra legislative institution. This solution might make the most sense to Americans concerned about this problem.

Another alternative would be to keep the Senate and simply try to reduce or eliminate the conservative small state bias. We could go the way of the states and simply make senate representation proportional to population. So, like the House, larger states would have more senators than smaller states.

Seems redundant. There are some more creative suggestions. One is to give state senators different numbers of votes on legislation depending on the population of their state.

Senators from small states would get one vote each, but Senators from larger states would get 20, 30, or 40 votes. It has also been suggested that we might break bigger states up into several smaller states to increase the number of Senators representing its citizens. California, for instance, might agree to be broken up into three or six separate states. Solving the problem of the egregious misrepresentation in the Senate is unlikely to happen soon. The main obstacle is the Constitution.

Since the representation of states in the Senate is stipulated by the Constitution, any attempt to change it would necessarily require a constitutional amendment. But of course this is a very difficult process, requiring the approval of three-quarters of the states and two-thirds of the House and Senate.

Ironically, then, an effort to remedy the minority rule built into the Senate would probably run afoul of the minority rule built into the amending process. It would take only 13 of the small states to block such an amendment. But the barrier to reform for the Senate is actually higher than that. Talk about minority rule! Under the Articles of Confederation the loose national governing doctrine that existed before the Constitution all states were equal on all matters. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, the population difference between the biggest state Virginia and the smallest Georgia was only about to-1, compared to to-1 today.

To preserve and strengthen the union, the framers needed every state to join. The method of awarding seats in Congress — favoring big states in the House but small states in the Senate — reeks of this political problem, or, to put it more generously, it was the solution to this problem. When it came to appeasing the small states, the drafters had to go one step further to ensure them that they would not be overwhelmed by the big states.

The framers agreed to make the guarantee of equal power in the Senate beyond even the reach of the amendment process. To modern eyes, this reassurance to the small states looks pretty undemocratic.

Why should the weight of the 42 smaller states be so very, very much greater in the Senate than the weight of the eight biggest? The answer is or was : To get the deal done. All products are Made-in-the-USA, and many are created exclusively for our store. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.

In the United States Senate all states are represented equally. Regardless of size or population, each state has two senators, who serve six-year terms.