Thread by @jfruh

i'm genuinely wondering how unusual this situation is. is there a straightforward metric that would determine the census cycle where the "most americans were represented by the fewest senators" or something?

https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1360710561017782278

bc i'm a huge fucking nerd, i actually did the math on this and can say that it Has Been Ever Thus. for each census (plus the 2020 estimates) i added up the population of the states, starting w/the smallest, until i got to about 1/3 the US population

then i looked at what % of the states (and therefore the senate) that 1/3 of the population represented. for all of US history, 1/3 of the pop has controlled more or less 2/3 of the senate!

a couple caveats: the numbers don't include DC or the territories, so in fact that bottom third is a slightly smaller portion of the overall us population than indicated here. also i skipped 1800 bc the table on wikipedia is very broken

anyway, my hot take on the senate is that if it can't be abolished, it should be neutered. move advise and consent powers to the house, and require that any bill passed by one house receive an up-or-down vote in the other before the next house election

and to get really radical: if the house passes a bill with a supermajority, or if it passes a bill and then passes the identical bill after a house election, the bill bypasses the senate altogether. basically the equivalent of the UK parliament acts

or you could break up all the states of any size until you have like ~250 states with an average pop of a bit more than a million, with two senators apiece. let's get hyperlocal up in this bitch