What type of representation is the senate based on

Across a wide range of measures, he shows that Americans see themselves as Americans first, citizens of their states second. What is more, the content of state-level identities is typically divorced from politics.

And citizens, politicians and parties have all long realized that. Political strategies for all national offices involve coordination across geography. If you live in a deep red state, you can donate to a candidate running in a purple one. If your district is safe for the Democrats, you can travel to canvass for a candidate in a swing district.

It is illegal for foreign nationals to contribute money to a US electoral campaign. It is neither illegal nor uncommon for citizens to contribute to electoral campaigns in other states. Some candidates receive sizable portions of their resources from out of their own state. When Americans are hacking the Constitution to get around the geographic nature of our representation, that should be a red flag.

Of course, the Constitution does not only allow for the representation of states. The central debate at the constitutional convention was over precisely this balance. For one, because every state must have at least one member in the House, there are still distortions. These districts are almost impossible to draw so that the politicians elected reflect the balance of preferences across the entire country.

Right now, that means a bias toward Republicans. Democratic candidates could outpoll Republicans by up to five points and still not be favored to take control of the House. The problem is single-member districts in the first place. Even the president, for whom at least citizens across the country can vote, is elected through the Electoral College, which in turn filters votes through the states.

Some Framers observed exactly that at the time. And as the country has evolved, the value of having such strong representation for geography seems to have only waned.

The Convention determined that a Census of the population conducted every 10 years would enable the House to adjust the distribution of its Membership on a regular basis. The method, however, proved controversial. Southern delegates argued that their slaves counted in the population, yielding them more Representatives. Northern delegates countered that slaves were property and should not be counted at all.

Before federal income taxes or tariffs, the states contributed to the national government with local taxes, often flat poll taxes on each citizen. Since constitutional framers had to provide for the funding of the new government, they debated the proper relationship between representation and taxation. Several delegates argued that geographic size or useable farmland were better measures of state wealth than mere population. Delegates, however, settled on proportional contributions based on population and, by extension, the number of Members in the House of Representatives.

Large states, with more human capital, should contribute more revenue to the national government and also have more seats in the legislature as a result. This fulfilled the promise of the American Revolution: taxation with representation. The latter amendments, however, did not alter congressional apportionment. Congress has capped the number of Representatives at since the Apportionment Act of except for a temporary increase to during the admission of Hawaii and Alaska as states in As a result, over the last century, congressional districts have more than tripled in size—from an average of roughly , inhabitants after the Census to about , inhabitants following the Census.

While they share legislative responsibilities, each house also has special constitutional duties and powers. To balance the interests of both the small and large states, the Framers of the Constitution divided the power of Congress between the two houses.

Known as the Great or Connecticut Compromise, this plan for representation in Congress was introduced by Connecticut delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth. Skip to main navigation Skip to main content. Remember also that even if one takes original intent as definitive, the intentions informing Article V at the founding must be balanced against those behind the voting-rights amendments adopted a century or more later.

Unequal Senate apportionment abridges the voting rights of citizens in large states, including nonwhite citizens in those states. This kind of inequality is within the delegated power of Congress to address. There are therefore two strong constitutional arguments in favor of a Senate Reform Act.

It protects the equal right of every American citizen to a rough mathematical equality of voting weight and power in their national government—with a constraint, recognizing the virtue in federalism, of allocating one senator to every state at a minimum. And it corrects a heavy, unjustified bias favoring white citizens in the Senate.

Read: Voter suppression is warping democracy. An additional argument supporting the plausibility of a Senate Reform Act is that the Supreme Court might see fit to stay out of the mix. Several other structural benefits would follow from a Senate Reform Act. It would automatically mitigate the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College, which allocates presidential electors to each state equal to the number of its congressional delegation—that is, the total number of representatives and senators.

I should point out also that if this reapportionment had, hypothetically, occurred prior to the most recent presidential election, the result would not have changed. Red gains in Texas and Florida would have offset a blue gain in California, and blue losses in New England would have balanced red losses in lightly populated western states.