The left seems to be gearing up for an attack on the Senate, spurred in part by Sen. Joe Manchin’s ability to stop Biden’s big spending bill. (See, for example, Liberals irked by Manchin call for new Senate apportioned by population.)
They have a point. If each state gets two senators, regardless of its population, that means a person in a low-population state gets more representation than a person in a high-population state. For example, California has 68 times more people than Wyoming, which means that each vote in Wyoming is 68 times more significant than each vote in California. (When it comes to choosing a senator.)
While that’s true, to some extent it begs the question. Is the point of the vote to represent the individual voter, or is the point of the vote to represent other interests?
To illustrate the need to represent other interests, independent of popularity, let’s say somebody is building an athletic facility. They have to decide where to put their resources. Do they divide resources equally among activities — basketball, track and field, weight training, swimming, martial arts, hockey, yoga — or do they divide them by the popularity of each sport? In that case, if 90 percent of the people who use the facility want to play basketball, the other sports would only get 10 percent of the resources.
If you did that, you’d have a big basketball court with an extra room on the side that didn’t meet the needs of any of the other activities (except maybe yoga).
IOW, a purely democratic approach would all but eliminate the interests of the less-popular activities. Generally speaking, we don’t think that’s a good thing. We don’t go too far in the popularity direction, but we also don’t go too far in the “represent each activity equally” direction. Otherwise we’d spend just as much on curling and fencing as we spend on basketball and football. We take popularity into account, but we also want to support the less popular activities.
You can run the same sort of thought experiment with disciplines in a college or books in a library. The solution is almost always not to divide up resources by popularity. The result is that the less-popular disciplines / books get represented more than mere numbers would suggest.
In fact, the opposite phenomenon is a common complaint about big box stores. They only carry the most popular items. If you want something special, you need to order it online, or go to a specialty shop. That works okay with Walmart, since the long tail gets handled online. But it doesn’t work for libraries or sports complexes or governments.
I’m looking at this from a purely organizational perspective, because the historical argument isn’t going to persuade some modern people. (Briefly, it would have been impossible to form a government in the U.S.A. that did not give disproportionate representation to the smaller states.)
The point of all this is that proportional representation is not always a good thing, and we can see that in many ways. Our system gives disproportional representation to the states, but even if we were to abandon that (states don’t seem quite as important today as they were in the past), it would be a mistake to turn the Senate into a smaller version of the House.
Every source of power needs a check. The popularly voted House of Representatives needs to be counter-balanced by a less representative power, and no matter how you organize that, you’re still going to have Joe Manchins — people who have power out of proportion to the number of people they represent.