The Republican Party and its allied media organs have been blasting out messaging highlighting the radical views of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose views conservatives wish to associate with the Democratic Party. The particular extreme DSA stance they have chosen to highlight over the past week is the abolition of the U.S. Senate. The right-wing media is aflame with headlines such as “DSA Co-Chairman Defends Plan to Abolish Senate: ‘We Don’t Think That’s Extreme’” and “‘It’s Not Extreme’: Guess What the DSA Wants to Abolish Now.” (Answer: the Senate.)
The odd thing about this choice is that, although the DSA’s platform is indeed chock-full of maniacal proposals, on this particular idea, the maniacs have a point. The Senate is a vestigial deformity upon the Constitution whose elimination, unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history.
The Senate’s many admirers, chief among them senators themselves, tend to defend it as the product of ingenious design. Ben Sasse, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, offered up a typical tribute in a Wall Street Journal column on Sunday. He wrote, “The upper house is built for the long view, with six-year terms that encourage a deliberative trustee model of representation. Senators owe their states both judgment and conscience.”
The truth is that James Madison and his allies did not want to create a Senate that represented states rather than people. The Constitution’s architects, despite notoriously excluding many Americans from the political community, wished those who were granted the right of self-determination to be able to do so on an equal basis. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in “Federalist No. 22,” “Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York.” The idea that people who lived in small states should enjoy more power than people who lived in large states offended Madison and Hamilton’s sense of justice.
[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]
However, those Founders lived in the real world, and in that world, they had to cut deals with less-remembered Founders such as Gunning Bedford Jr. of Delaware, who threatened to walk away from the newly founded republic unless the citizens of small states were granted disproportionate rights. Madison and Hamilton recognized they had no choice but to submit.
This deal is known to history as the Great Compromise. It was great not because it was perfect, but because it was politically necessary. As Madison explained, “A government founded on principles more consonant to the wishes of the larger States, is not likely to be obtained from the smaller States. The only option, then, for the former, lies between the proposed government and a government still more objectionable. Under this alternative, the advice of prudence must be to embrace the lesser evil.” This is an elegant way of saying: It stinks, but what are you gonna do?
Merely because the Founders had to cut a deal to achieve an imperfect outcome does not bind the citizenry to abide by it for eternity. Other compromises the Founders made—such as protecting slavery—have long since fallen by the wayside. But the Senate, rather than viewed by posterity as the necessary evil that Madison recognized it to be, has been sacralized.
In some ways, the Senate has evolved in a more democratic direction. Prior to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were appointed by state legislatures, in many cases with the help of hefty bribes, rather than elected. In other ways, however, the body has grown even more undemocratic. When the Constitution was ratified, the most populous state had fewer than 13 times as many residents as the least populous state. Today, that ratio has ballooned to nearly 67 to 1.
This malapportionment occurred only in part because of the natural growth of mega-states such as California, Texas, and New York. It was also the product of deliberate manipulation. In the late 19th century, Republicans, seeking to maintain their electoral advantage in the chamber, admitted a series of states that would not have met the customary qualifications for statehood. Most comically, they split the lightly settled Dakota territory into two states, giving them an extra pair of senators.
[Eric W. Orts: The path to give California 12 senators, and Vermont just one]
The upper chamber’s undemocratic character has been warped further by the filibuster. The Constitution specified only limited uses (such as approving treaties and proposing constitutional amendments) for a supermajority, but it has evolved into a routine requirement for legislation. In theory, a Senate bloc representing less than 11 percent of the public could prevent the passage of a law.
This imbalance has been made all the more noxious by yet another distortion. Small states (many of them located in the sparsely populated Great Plains and Mountain West) tend to be rural and overwhelmingly white, which means that the Senate systematically under-weights racial minorities, who tend to live in states with the lowest per-capita voting clout. One 2025 paper calculated that, compared with a legislative body that represents all racial groups equally, in the U.S. Senate, white people functionally enjoy 1.14 votes per person while Black people have 0.84 votes, Asian Americans 0.75, and Latinos 0.67.
This form of affirmative action for white people draws little notice but has an important effect. Studies have found that the Senate has a persistent tilt in favor of Republican candidates and conservative-policy outcomes. The tilt may be worse than it appears, given that Republicans have often squandered their structural advantage by nominating extreme candidates who have lost winnable races.
The DSA’s platform sets out an ambition to reduce the Senate to a symbolic institution like the House of Lords, which once exerted counter-majoritarian influence over the United Kingdom but now simply affirms policies enacted by the democratically elected Parliament. That is obviously an ambitious goal with no prospect of fulfillment anytime soon. Even the more modest goal of admitting Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states, which would reduce but not eliminate the Senate’s conservative tilt, is probably not in reach for the next Democratic majority.
But advocating for morally just, utopian policies is the sort of thing that democratic socialists ought to be doing. Republicans want to scare voters into thinking that if Democrats win the midterm elections, the United States will be on the road to a future in which the Senate is no more—or is, at best, an impotent debate club for elderly statesmen. If only!
The post The DSA Isn’t Wrong About Everything appeared first on The Atlantic.
