Injudicious
The Republicans in the Senate are in the midst now of a 30-hour whine-a-thon because the Democrats have the temerity to not roll over on every single one of the President’s judicial appointments. If we lived in a historical vacuum, there may be some justification to their narrow procedural complaint about the kind of tactics being used by the minority in the course of the Senate exercising a Constitutional function. But in the current polarized climate, it’s shockingly stupid that they expect anyone to take this kind of thing seriously – especially when we have bigger things like war and impending federal bankruptcy to worry about.
The fact is, the Republican majority in the Senate is separated from the minority Democrats by one vote. That reflects the extremely evenly divided nature of the country right now. For all their talk about how conservatism is mainstream and liberals are these odd marginal characters standing in the way of their great and glorious plans for the Republic, numbers tell a different story: the country is split nearly half and half. A truly responsible politics would reflect that division with moderate policies, comity, and bi-partisanship. Unfortunately, those are quaint and old-fashioned terms, coined back before money, media and the fundamentalist fetish of absolutism made compromise a dirty word.
Another interesting thing is to look at the current composition of the Senate in terms of representation. As anyone who’s ever taken an American civics class can tell you, the House of Representatives is apportioned by population, but every state gets two Senators, regardless of size. This was the “big state/small state” compromise reached at the Constitutional convention in 1787, back when there were 13 states along the seaboard and a national population of something less than 15 million. Since the number of Senators is added to the number of Congressional representatives of each state to determine its Presidential electors in the Electoral College, the small state advantage also applies to Presidential politics.
By the nature of this system, there has always been some distortion in the representative quality of American government. The Founders set the government up this way because they sought desperately to prevent a “tyranny of the majority.” As the population and number of states has grown, and current-day political patterns have taken shape, however, what they ended up creating was a “tyranny of the minority.”
Consider this. In the current Senate, there are 19 states represented by two Republican senators, 18 states represented by two Democratic senators, and 13 states with one each. Pretty even, right? But here’s the problem (numbers according to census data):
- The states with two Republican senators have a combined population of 97,703,336, or 34.65% of the total US population. On average, each Republican senator represents 2.556 million people.
- The states with two Democratic senators have a total population of 123,093,090, or 43.56%, with each Democratic senator representing an average of 3.419 million people.
- The swing states are in the middle, with the remaining 21.7% of the population represented at a rate of nearly 3 million per Senator.
I don’t have all the data, but I would venture that the gap between the representation of majority-Democratic states and majority-Republican states has never been wider, at least since Reconstruction. Even if you split the population of the contested states 2/3 Republican – 1/3 Democrat, you still get a minority of 138M people in Republican-majority states enjoying a representative majority over 143M people in Democratic-majority states.
In light of this, and the fact that the Republican Vice-President who casts the tie-breaking vote in the Senate was also elected by a popular minority, it’s hard to view Bill Frist’s little tantrum as anything but a shabby and unwarranted power-grab. Democratic Senators, even though they are in the minority by one in the body, are absolutely right to not allow right-wing fanatic judges to be crammed down the throats of their constituents under these circumstances. Republicans are simply not entitled to get their way on everything, given the close nature of the division and their de-facto status as a representative minority. It’s not only un-Democratic, it’s undemocratic.
8:48:07 AM 
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