There was some genius as well as some (deliberate?) cognitive dissonance in linking the wish that states have equal representation in Congress to the wish for a non-elected upper house to check the representative house. Those wishes are by no means naturally aligned. #Senate
Hamilton, for one, would have wished to get rid of the states altogether. He also wanted an unelected upper house.
In the Federalist, Madison can barely bring himself to discuss the equal suffrage of the Senate--yet he did want a body that could check the representative body.
The dissonance is even sharper than that, though. In 1787, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, et al, saw the states governmernts as at best weak in the face of (MA), and at worst actively encouraging (PA), demands for the broader representation those framers abominated.
In the contrext of the day, to give the *states,* of all entities, the power of an upper house to "protect the people from transient impressions into which they might be led" must have looked to them like madness, the equal suffrage thing only locking the madness down.
That is: Hamilton's, Madison's and others' recoil from an equal-suffrage Senate doesn't make them, um, democrats.
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