The Debate Over Killing the Filibuster Hides a Much Deeper Dysfunction

Photo courtesy of Britannica.com

With the news that an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6 was blocked by a GOP filibuster, much attention again has turned to this relic of our system, which many point out is found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution and, as I’ve written before, is essentially a historical accident created by Aaron Burr in the early 1800s. It lay essentially dormant for years but was later weaponized by Southern Democrats to block civil rights era legislation.

The idea that a simple majority of Senators ought to be able to pass legislation isn’t a tough one, so it’s easy to target the filibuster for condemnation. But this discussion often shrouds a far deeper issue that got baked into our system at its very founding: The Senate itself is not a democratically representative body. And that is, sadly, by design.

Most of us know that each state in the Union gets two seats in the Senate, and that winds up creating some major distortions, with small, rural states like Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota each getting two votes, the same as big states like California and New York. The voting power of a citizen in Wyoming is around 67 times that of a citizen in California due to the way senators are apportioned by state and not population.

What’s less explored or understood is that this apportionment system also enshrines white rule into our system. That’s an uncomfortable phrase for many, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the ethnic make-up of the Senate does not at all reflect the country and strongly favors whites. This arises because the very small states that each get two senators are also very, very white. Vermont is 94 percent white, and Wyoming is 86 percent white. By giving these small states two seats each, the Senate continues not only to overrepresent rural, conservative views but also white voters.

That the Senate enshrines white rule is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, that was also by design. At the nation’s founding, the Southern slave holding states were fearful that the larger, more populous northern states would have an unequal say in the national Congress and demanded that in the bicameral Congressional system, their own smaller states each retain as much of a say as the large ones. (This was also how we arrived at the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, where a state’s slave population was counted at that ratio for purposes of Congressional seat apportionment, even though slaves could not vote.)

For decades after, the Senate apportionment rules favored Southern slave states over Northern free ones and locked the nation into a state of an uneasy parity, one that would eventually rupture into the Civil War. Around the time of the infamous Missouri Compromise, there were 11 slave-holding states and 11 free states, and thereafter a state would not be admitted into the union unless the other side were also given one. The Senate stood as a final bulwark of “Slave Power” by the Southern bloc, which its critics noted required admissions of slave states in order to preserve the bloc’s strength in the federal government. The practice of admitting one state for each side continued up to the Civil War, all the while further entrenching the power of more rural, open states where slavery and white rule were the law. If you think the admission of D.C. and Puerto Rico are controversial today, they have nothing compared to the rancor around admitting Missouri and Maine.

It’s also not well known that the rapid admission of a number of new states in the last quarter of 1800s led us to a Senate that was lopsidedly GOP, which by then had become the party of industrialists and big business. To blunt surging Democratic popularity, the GOP, which still controlled Congress and the White House, added several sparsely populated states to the Union, among them the two Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Today, those states represent 10 Senate seats, only one of which is held by a Democrat and all of which are represented by white senators, nine of which are men.

This is why when I see votes like the 54-35 tally yesterday, which in any functioning democracy would be a decisive win but for us means we somehow still failed even to form a commission to investigate the most serious attack on our government since the Civil War, I cannot help but be reminded of how long anti-democratic forces actually have been at work. The Senate has never represented the actual will of the majority of Americans, but rather historically has reflected the interest first of white rule then of big business. Killing the filibuster might get us a lot closer to something like majority rule, but let’s not pretend that without it the playing field would be close to a level one.