I have seen lots of energy around the idea of “packing” or “expanding” the Supreme Court in recent months. It seems reasonable to me to re-evaluate some of the fundamentals of our political institutions, especially considering how different today’s social, economic, and political landscape is compared that that of the mid 1700s.
My big idea: expand the Senate from 100 to 150. At first blush this might sound radical, but I hope that below I’ll show that it’s actually quite a modest change.
As many of us know, each US State is represented by two Senators. Such a setup was based on compromises among the original colonies surrounding the distribution of political power, to ensure that populace states didn’t overwhelm less populace ones (my very stepped-back understanding of the issue, the real history is of course much more complex). I believe the generous interpretation was to provide a balance between big and small states. Balance seems to be an important word.
My general concern is that a two-senator per state makes absolutely no sense when considered against the contemporary distribution of the US population. My go to question: should the Spokane, WA metropolitan statistical area be able to elect as many senators for itself as the entire state of California? This feels like a very silly question. But it is essentially what we do for the state of Wyoming. If you’d like to make alternative partisan comparisons, I think it makes about as little sense to have Vermont’s population have the same undue representation as Texas. For both comparisons, I ask the same question: Should Spokane, WA receive two senators? It’d be completely wild and inappropriate to begin such unnecessarily distorted representation today, despite the fact that Spokane is my hometown and many people I know would become much more powerful politically. But what if people made the terrible decision to do so 100 years ago? In such a world, Spokane’s representation is tradition, and news people travel to Manito Park every four years to see how Spokanites are feeling. I think my argument becomes more compelling the further back into history we venture, but let’s stay roughly in the last seven decades, when we had 96 - 100 Senators, to make comparisons easy. I don’t think we lose too much.
I don’t think it’s appreciated how vastly different US states are in their populations (at least by me).
Big states, especially California (the most populous state in this time), have just SO MANY MORE people today than do small states. There has been significant population growth in smaller states over this period too, but moving from 15 million people to 40 million people is such a massive, revolutionary population shift. That GROWTH is more than 4 times the population of the United States in 1800, which I believe in total had 32 Senators at the time.
You can see the horizontal line which indicates the total population of the United States in 1800. This era had 16 states, so I’m guessing 32 senators. Look at the number of states since 1990 that are above this horizontal line. If we want to make arguments about the traditional US governmental arrangement, I think it’s at least as fair to consider metrics like “Senator per resident” as much as the ancient formula: “Sum 2*IsAState=TotalSenator”. Focusing on the former metric, I think we’re growing increasingly under-Senator’d.
What does the Senator-per-resident trend look like? I transformed state populations to create an indicator of “Senator per 1,000,000 residents” for each state with Senatorial representation between 1950 and 2019. Below is the fit average over time.
Unsurprisingly, Senatorial representation is declining as the number of states remained stable and population increased. In 1950, the typical representation was 1.8 senators per million US residents. Today, it is at about 0.8. There’s somewhat of a counterintuitive trend overtime in the spread of per million Senator representation:
If you think there is substantially unequal representation today, then it’s a tad surprising to see that some massive outliers, like Nevada in 1950 and Alaska in 1960, have come back towards the middle of the distribution. It KIND of looks like the shrinking Senatorial representation has pulled states towards one another. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Remember, those values near zero are those states with massive population growth. The above figure might not best represent changes.
I think a better way to visualize the Senate problem is this: what would the Senate size be if every state received the year-specific median Senator-per-1,000,000 resident rate, the minimum Senator-per-1,000,000 rate, or the maximum rate, applied to its state population size? These values give us a spread of potential Senate sizes and let us contextualize the constant 100 Senators in relation to shifts in unequal Senatorial representation.
YOWZA!! The red line presents the current Senate size, 100 Senators. If all states were as underrepresented as the state of California, I predict that there would be 44 senators today instead of 100. If everyone were as represented as the most over-represented states, such as Vermont or Wyoming, we would have over 4,000 senators! If everyone only received the TYPICAL Senatorial representation, We would have about 290 Senators today, an increase from about 130 in 1950. Wyoming would have 1/2 Senator, the typical state would have 4, and California would have 34.
My basic point: let’s say that it’s important to balance the whims of the humans of the United States with the whims of the dirt of the United States. But the point is to balance population and dirt representation. Just due to the dynamics of population growth over the last 70 years, dirt is really, really winning out against humans. Senate representation is pretty out of whack with what the distribution of people looks like right now. It’s worse when you look at policies passed by the House to cap its size, but that’s a different story for a different day.
When you consider the upper bound of representation at 1,800 to 4,000 and a more modest readjustment to about 300 senators, I think a modest expansion of Senatorial representation to 150 could be argued as, if anything, unduly conservative!
My plan: the 15 states with the lowest populations receive 2 senators. The 20 middle populated states receive 3 senators. The 15 most populated states receive 4 senators. These would update every 10 years with the Census. If you lose a Senator, then the public votes for which 2 or 3 to keep in the next election. Perfect? No? Am I missing many potential institutional and bureaucratic problems associated with changing the political system? Absolutely. But it takes our ancient, sacred formula, “Sum 2*IsAState=TotalSenator”, and updates it to three simple formulas. This is hopefully not too much of a radical overhaul, as it still allows very unequal representation among states—2 Senators instead of .5 and 4 Senators instead of 34—and it would not totally shift the balance of power towards California and Texas, thus ensuring that the very important dirt in Vermont and Wyoming retain their important powers. I hope, too, that this might not be viewed as too partisan (although can anything political NOT be considered partisan)? Texas, Florida, and California would all benefit. Vermont, Rhode Island, and Wyoming would all suffer.
Overall, though, if we might be in an era of entrepreneurial thinking about how our political institutions represent both humans and our dirt, I hope such a spirit is applied to the Senate as well as the Supreme Court.