Annie Lowrey in the Washington Post has written an eye-opening piece about how the Senate works, and why the original design was set it up that way. For example, half the population of the U.S. lives in 10 states with 20 Senators; the other half of the population lives in 40 states with 80 Senators.
Lowrey asks the question: what if the Senate were apportioned according to income or race instead of by states?
My only complaint is that in showing the roots of this disastrous imbalance in representation, Lowrey doesn't mention how this was not simply a small states versus big states compromise. If so, the big states were snookered. This was an argument that was principally about slavery.
In the original design, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person in determining the number of seats a state was entitled to. See Garrett Epps wonderful book on the 14th Amendment, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America.
Even after Reconstruction, the segregationists won the right to count black Americans in determining their representation in Congress even though they were not permitted to vote. This lasted until the Great Society and the voting rights and civil rights legislation. And today, voter suppression is a principal tool of the modern Republican party, aimed at poor blacks and more and more poor Latinos who are suspected of being non-citizens until proven otherwise, and until they answer complicated questions about the Constitution that most can't answer.
Should Presidential candidates be submitted to the same test. Would Sarah Palin pass any text on the U.S. on the structure of the U.S. Constitution?
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