As you know, the U.S. Senate only needs 41 senators to successfully bar an end to debate on any bill before the body.
Let's consider a "back of the napkin," worst case scenario application of this logic.
41 senators = 41 U.S. Senate elections. If we consider only the 21 smallest states that elected them, they have a combined population of only 34.1 million people [1]. 34.1 million people to ruin healthcare, the economy, and anything else in this supposed democracy.
But it gets worse.
Of this group, let's say that only about 230/305 = 75% of people are actually of voting age [2]. In the last presidential election, 131/230 = 56% of adults were actually registered and came out to vote [3]. And of course a senator only needs 51% of the vote to win. This comes out to:
34.1 million people x 0.75% voting age x 0.56% voting x 51% winning share = 7.3 million people
A whopping 7.3 million people, in the worst case, can deny 296 million people access to their government. This is a democracy?
(Join me after the jump for discussion and sources.)
My sources:
[1]: Wolframalpha.com provided me the population numbers by searching for "Smallest states by population" and clicking "More" until I got the bottom 25. I imported it to Excel, removed DC, and took the first 21 in Excel.
[2]: Census - I subtracted "persons under 18" from 100% and multiplied it by the total population to get the voting age.
[3]: DailyKos.com electoral scoreboard. I took the total numbers of D and R voters and divided it by the adult age population which I took from [2] to be 230 million.
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Now, this is of course not a precise calculation at all. I didn't consider all sorts of things like individual state party politics, what party the senator belonged to, etc. But I wanted to provide a picture of how horrible this filibuster rule really is.
Technically, these 7.3 million people are the most powerful people in the world, but of course most of them have no idea how powerful their vote is, and they're not organized in any kind of way (besides the fact that both the DSCC and NRSC probably know how powerful they actually are).
Something fun to do is to consider the alternative. If we really wanted to make this fair we'd want to:
- Get rid of the Senate filibuster: 50 senators + VP is a majority on everything.
- Incentivize people to vote (like the Australians do) to maybe bring up the voting percentage to something like 75% instead of 56%.
- Either add more senators to weight by population, or weight senate votes by population.
And while #1 and #2 are right now too psycho-revolutionary for the country to make law, #3 is so far out of the mainstream that it won't even be considered. But this must be considered! The population distribution of people in small sections of the United States will always be highly skewed toward cities, and cities are randomly distributed among the states. The 36 million people in California should absolutely have more of a say in federal politics than the 500K people in Wyoming. And it is my opinion that if even one person from Wyoming thinks that's fair, then what we are facing effectively is an Oligarchy that must be resisted and abolished.
If this country had common sense, the FIRST THING it would focus on is changing the filibuster rule. Before healthcare, before the economy, and before everything else. This rule ruins our democracy on a daily basis, and my fear is that a few of the rich and powerful could easily target this 7.3 million and carve out a nice block of senators who are reliable votes against anything important to the rest of the country.
And keep in mind, 60 senators is down from what was once 67 senators needed to overcome the filibuster!!!
I'll work on compiling a list of the senators from these small states. Maybe there is already a pattern among them that deserves to be noticed. Are they majority conservative or liberal? Is it randomly distributed among the parties? I might find this out for the next diary.