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John Dingell knows a thing or two about how Congress works. First elected to the US House of Representatives at age 29 in a 1955 special election, Dingell left office in January 2015, nearly 60 years later. The last president he served with, Barack Obama, was born six years after Dingell entered office. His tenure was the longest in the history of the House or Senate, outlasting stalwarts like Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy by more than a decade.
So his call to abolish the Senate, announced in an Atlantic excerpt from his new memoir, is pretty notable.
He pairs the proposal with a set of more familiar, often vague good-government suggestions, like “the elimination of money in campaigns,” automatic voter registration, and “protection of an independent press.” Abolishing the Senate is far more specific and dramatic than the rest of his list. His argument is familiar, rooted in the institution’s failure to equally represent Americans regardless of where they live:
The Great Compromise, as it was called when it was adopted by the Constitution’s Framers, required that all states, big and small, have two senators. The idea that Rhode Island needed two U.S. senators to protect itself from being bullied by Massachusetts emerged under a system that governed only 4 million Americans.
Today, in a nation of more than 325 million and 37 additional states, not only is that structure antiquated, it’s downright dangerous. California has almost 40 million people, while the 20 smallest states have a combined population totaling less than that. Yet because of an 18th-century political deal, those 20 states have 40 senators, while California has just two. These sparsely populated, usually conservative states can block legislation supported by a majority of the American people. That’s just plain crazy.
Dingell is right: The Senate’s malapportionment is absurd and bad. And given how America’s political geography has developed in the past two centuries, it’s now a body in which white rural interests are privileged over those of black and Latino city dwellers, given how much whiter the median state is than the median American voter:
The senate considerably dilutes the voting power of African-Americans and Latinos and Asians to a degree that should be unacceptable in polite company pic.twitter.com/gCzR7g46FR
— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) January 29, 2018
The Senate also introduces an unnecessary veto point blocking the passage of ordinary legislation. That’s bad for basically any party that gains the presidency, as presidents now typically enjoy only two years of control of both the House and Senate, in which they must attempt to pass their entire legislative agenda. Then the president’s party typically loses one or both houses of Congress during the midterms, and the result is gridlock until the next president takes office.
Even during the two years where a “trifecta” of one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, the Senate filibuster makes passing that party’s agenda extraordinarily difficult. Big changes are increasingly confined to reconciliation bills just to avoid this hurdle.
That’s bad if you’re Donald Trump in 2017–2018, or Barack Obama in 2009–2010. But it’s also just bad for democratic accountability. People elect presidents with the understanding that they will actually accomplish what they’ve promised. A surfeit of veto points, many supplied by the Senate, makes that impossible.
How abolishing the Senate would work
Dingell has stayed more active than your typical retired member of Congress, maintaining a popular Twitter account full of anti-Trump zingers. That means his call for Senate abolition is likely to get more attention than if, say, former Rep. Ralph Hall called for the same.
Dingell is aware of how challenging abolishing the Senate would be. Article V of the US Constitution, which specifies how the Constitution can be amended, states that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” You could, in theory, amend the Constitution to remove that clause in the same amendment you use to abolish the Senate (or in a preceding amendment), but you’d still need 67 senators and 38 state legislatures to approve such an amendment, which is difficult to imagine given the disproportionate power that the Senate gives to small states.
Dingell’s proposed solution is an all-out, decades-long persuasion campaign:
How do we fix this? Practically speaking, it will be very difficult, given the specific constitutional protection granted these small states to veto any threat to their outsize influence.
There is a solution, however, that could gain immediate popular support: Abolish the Senate. At a minimum, combine the two chambers into one, and the problem will be solved. It will take a national movement, starting at the grassroots level, and will require massive organizing, strategic voting, and strong leadership over the course of a generation. But it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Abolish the Senate.” I’m having blue caps printed up with that slogan right now. They will be made in America.
Even that, most likely, wouldn’t be enough. There’s some precedent for the Senate and states buckling and supporting a change to the Senate’s design in the face of overwhelming public pressure — state legislatures voluntarily gave up their right to appoint US senators in 1912 and 1913 by ratifying the 17th Amendment — but that was a far cry from abolishing the body entirely. The senators voting for the 17th Amendment at least held out some hope that they could be directly elected to the seats to which they had been appointed by their state legislature; senators voting to abolish their own body would have no such hope.
Article V also states that if two-thirds of the states call for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. That convention can then propose amendments, which three-quarters of the states can ratify if they desire. That would allow a Senate abolition amendment to (mostly) bypass the Senate. But some legal experts argue that there is no way to control ahead of time what amendments such a convention could propose. So even if 34 states were somehow persuaded to pass a resolution calling for a convention to propose an amendment abolishing the Senate, the convention could wind up proposing, say, a balanced budget amendment or a flag-burning amendment instead.
Much likelier than formal abolition of the Senate would be a gradual loss of prestige for the institution, weakening it and rendering it less eager to exercise its powers when the House and president disagree with it. This sounds vague, but it’s the reason why upper houses are de facto less powerful than lower houses in many other developed countries.
In Canada, for instance, the House of Commons and the Senate are formally very similar in their powers; both must pass a bill for it to become law. But in practice, the House of Commons is by far the dominant branch. Between 1948 and 1988, the Senate did not reject a single bill passed by the Commons; while rejections have become more common in the past three decades, they’re still quite rare by American standards.
You could imagine a similar norm developing in the US, where the Senate is expected, as a matter of custom, to approve all legislation passed by the US House. Such a custom would only be developed if many or most political leaders, preferably of both parties, affirmed that the Senate is democratically illegitimate and cannot be treated as a coequal house of Congress. John Dingell’s argument can be understood as a kind of lobbying to create that custom, to push the Democratic Party’s leaders toward devaluing the Senate and treating the House as the locus of policymaking.
Convincing one party won’t be enough. So long as Republicans view the Senate as legitimate, it’s hard to imagine Democrats unilaterally disarming and, say, having a Democrat-controlled Senate approve legislation from a Republican-controlled House as a matter of course. But if dissatisfaction with the Senate spreads broadly enough and seeps into both parties, you could see an evolution of norms in the direction of a more Canadian model.
