When the majority is not really the "majority"...

[kentuck]

It has been written here before but deserves another mention. The US Senate is unique in that it does not elect Senators by population, as does the House of Representative. Each state, small or large, gets two Senators. Wyoming gets two Senators, just as does New York. Wyoming may have less than 1 million voters in the state. New York may have more than 19 million voters. Yet, they are equal in the Senate.

But, it is a legitimate point to make that the "majority" of Republican Senators in the Senate do not represent a "majority" of Americans. Maine may have two Senators that are Republican and California may have two Senators that are Republican, but they are equal in the Senate. It is not about "majority" rule, contrary to what the right-wingers are preaching.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

1. a fact that 52 republicans senators represent just 18% of US population

[CTLawGuy]

3. are you serious?

wow, that's amazing just how flimsy the "majority" is

[ElsewheresDaughter]

5. links here to articles and senators Levin, Byrd & Shummer both stated..

it on the floor of the senate last month

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/26/0254/46189

GOP Senate IS THE MINORITY! Get it STRAIGHT!
by tlh lib
Mon Apr 25th, 2005 at 21:02:54 PDT

Don't let this "majority rules" bullshit live any longer..... get it straight.... the DEMOCRATIC SENATORS REPRESENT THE MAJORITY OF THIS NATION.... point blank.
Time to take a look at who really represents the majority of Americans in the United States Senate......

The numbers are below the fold.... (hint....WE REPRESENT THE MAJORITY OF THE NATION)

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Time to take a look at who really represents the majority of Americans in the United States Senate......

___

if the principle at stake is "majority rule," consider that the Senate is, by its very nature, an affront to majoritarian principles. The 52 senators from the nation's smallest states could command a Senate majority even though they represent only 18 percent of the American population.

According to the Census Bureau's July 2004 population estimates, the 44 Democratic senators represent 148,026,027 people; the 55 Republican senators 144,765,157. Vermont's Jim Jeffords, an independent who usually votes with the Democrats, represents 310,697. (In these calculations, I evenly divided the population of states with split Senate delegations.) What does majority rule really mean in this context? If the Republicans pushing against the filibuster love majority rule so much, they should propose getting rid of the Senate altogether.

www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051205F.shtml

But even if it's not unconstitutional, isn't the filibuster a little undemocratic?

Fair point. If democracy is all about the will of the majority, then the filibuster is undemocratic because it thwarts the majority's will. But the Senate isn't the most Democratic of institutions, and it wasn't meant to be. Senators are like eyeballs; everybody gets two, no matter how big or small you are. New York gets two senators, but so does Wyoming. Thus, as E.J. Dionne Jr. has noted, the 52 senators from the 26 least populous states "could command a Senate majority even though they represent only 18 percent of the American population." If "democratic" vs. "undemocratic" is the test in the Senate, we'll be waiting for Kansas to cough up its seats to California. And aren't the Democrats being just a little hypocritical now? They sure screamed when Republicans were holding up Clinton's judges.

Fair Point No. 2. As the Christian Science Monitor recently put it, there isn't much "partisan consistency in how the filibuster has come to be viewed." You hate the filibuster when you're in the majority; you love it when you're not. Nineteen Democrats tried to kill the filibuster in the mid-1990s, and fact sheets from Republican opposition researchers are overflowing with quotations from this Democrat or that expounding on the evil of the filibuster when it was a tool in the other side's hands. But the hypocrisy game can be played both ways: When Bill Clinton was president, Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist weren't exactly jumping up and down about each nominee's right to an up-or-down vote on the Senate


www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/040419.html

this interesting tidbit from historian Richard N. Rosenfeld’s cover story in the soon-to-be-released May issue of Harpers: A majority of the people in our country are represented by just 18 senators, or 18% of the body . . . while the 52 Senators from the 26 least populous states represent just 18% of the U.S. population. Big surprise, he notes, that “the less populous states have extracted benefits from the nation out of proportion to their populations.”

[Kolesar]

4. It is not as low as 18%, but the gop represents a minority

I think it is around 45%

[CTLawGuy]

6. I checked it out

what I did was I totaled the population (census' 2003 estimate) of each state and distributed it to the two senators. How I did it was I doubled the population of each state and divided it between the two senators. As long as I also doubled the total population when I divided at the end, the percentages would be accurate. I accounted for the fact that DC has no representation and counted Jeffords as a Democrat.


Heres what I got

Republicans 55 Sen; 49.19% of population
Democrats (w/leaning independents) 45 Sen; 50.60%
Unrepresented DC 0.21%

[Pacifist Patriot]

2. A fact that should be continuously shouted from every rooftop.

[No Michael Savage]

7. California has two senators that are republicans?