Thread by @TheValuesVoter

We all know that a 60 vote supermajority is needed in the US Senate in order to break the threat of a filibuster.

The thing is, this likely requires Senators who represent even MORE than 60% of the population to agree in order to get anything done.

If you view every US Senator as representing half of their state's population (since every state has two Senators), this means that the 50 Dem Senators represent 56.3% of the US population. And the 50 GOP Senators represent 43.7% of the US population.

This is just the way it is.

Our Founding Fathers constructed the Constitution to ensure that every state, regardless of population, had an equal voice in the upper chamber of Congress and had a voice in Presidential elections. The percentages here are weird but they're not wrong. It's the Constitution.

HOWEVER, when you implement the filibuster rule (something that is NOT in the Constitution) that says that 60% of the Senate has to agree in order to get anything done (combined with the fact that one of the two parties in the Senate has publicly promised to cooperate on nothing)

the net effect of this is that a collection of Senators representing an extremely large percentage of the population is required to get anything done.

Look at the ideology rankings of the GOP Senators, as assessed by GovTrack.
govtrack.us/congress/membe…

We can debate about whether the ideological rankings for 2020 computed by GovTrack reflect what we think of each Senator's position or not. But if 0.50 represents the ideological center, and you took the 10 GOP Senators closest to the center, they represent 23.59 million people.

And when you put it together mathematically, 50 Senators plus the 10 most ideologically centrist Republicans equals a group of Senators that represent 63.54% of the US Population.

Even MORE than the 60% of the Senate required to break the filibuster.

To get ANYTHING done.