In "What Democracy?: The case for abolishing the United States Senate" Richard Rosenfeld makes an interesting argument about the undemocratic nature of the Senate. If we were to view true Democracy as each person's vote having an equal say in politics, like Rosenfeld does, then the Senate is not democratic. His argument is that it should be abolished because it gives an unbalanced amount of power to small states; if the power of our government comes from the people, shouldn't a state with more people have more say than one with less? His main point is that the 26 smallest states are able to form a majority in the Senate while only representing 18% of the country's population.
On the surface, Rosenfeld's argument seems logical, and he gives lots of historic background to prove that the system of the "Great Compromise" has always been flawed. However, one may argue to counter Rosenfeld that, though small states are able to form a majority in the Senate, they are much less influential in the House of Representatives, putting a check on their influence. Also, I believe that today there is little rivalry between "small state vs. big state" voting blocs (as during the constitutional convention) with voting instead centering around political parties.
Taking these factors into consideration as well as Professor King's lectures on interest groups, I think abolishing the Senate would be unwise. Doing so would create a sort of "permanent minority" as we saw in King's game theory example, and would cause unrest and ill will in small states, which already have little influence in the House and Electoral College. More important than abolishing the Senate, reforms could be made to address what Rosenfeld sees as a problem: higher per capita federal spending on citizens of small states, than in large states. Getting rid of block grants and changing back to per capita endowments would help resolve that. And though it may be fundamentally undemocratic for these senators to have greater influence in proportion to their constituents, I don't think abolishing the senate is the place to start. Rather, if the United States wanted to move towards direct democracy comprehensive reform would be needed, addressing not only the Senate but also the Electoral College, the influence of lobbies, barriers to voting, the two-party system, etc.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
(I not sure how to post a new blog response, so I'm attaching my response to the reading here.)
Response to Richard N. Rosenfeld’s essay “What Democracy? The case for abolishing the United States Senate”
Rosenfeld’s essay, apart from suggesting a plan that would never be passed, is written to take advantage of an ill-informed readership and is too idealistic.
One technique Rosenfeld uses to take advantage of (what he must assume to be) an uniformed public is to combine his opinion with a retelling of history. Because he does not qualify his opinions with statements like “I think” or “in my opinion” and does not provide any clear distinction between his retelling of historic events and his opinion, he attempts to dupe people into taking his opinions as fact. For example, he states matter-of-factly that the “Great Compromise” was erroneously named because the compromise forced “larger states to an undemocratic demand by smaller states” (36). One could argue that “one vote per state” is democratic in a convention of states.
Moreover, his choice of language in many passages showed extreme biases. For example, he satirizes and undermines James Madison’s statements by saying Madison “performed a lawyerlike pirouette in The Federalist Papers, as he propagandized” (37). This could be stated differently to give Madison his due. In another example, on the first page of his essay, he says “our leaders must necessarily pursue their unpopular aims by means of increasingly desperate stratagems of deceit and persuasion” (35). In this statement he deliberately casts politicians in a negative light but fails to qualify his opinion with more facts. He then uses this negative view of politicians to further his argument later in the essay.
In his conclusion, Rosenfeld accepts the idea that not all states would agree to take away their equal vote in the senate. How then would his plan be put into action? He states that the citizens in small states would accept a plan to decrease the power of the senate because “all American’s believe in ‘one person, one vote’” (44). If the states would not agree to decrease their power, the average American would not be willing to either. Perhaps Rosenfeld is arguing that the people are more sacrificing or more “American” than state legislatures.
Rosenfeld’s plan to eliminate or diminish the power of the senate is just as idealistic and unattainable as his hazy concept of democracy. In his essay, he does not explain his definition of democracy, which makes his essay that much harder to follow. Does his believe in complete democracy in which each person can do as he likes? Does he want a representative (republican) form of government? What kind of voting system does he deem fair? Majority rule? Rosenfeld does not address these basic questions and, instead, jumps to making broad, general statements about how the minority is victimized by the Senate and our current political process. As we discussed in class, different voting systems yield very different results. Instead of attacking the Senate, perhaps he would have done better to discuss voting methods. Even his proposal of having the majority of power invested in the House of Representatives would lead to certain biases in the system.
Another concept Rosenfeld failed to discuss is the idea that the Senate holds institutional memory due to the length of the term of office, as well as other factors. The framers of the constitution knew that the Senate would be departing from idealized democracy, but the body would be an important check on the whims of the people. The Senate would be way to control the temporary surges of popular thought in favor of more well reasoned, long-term thinking.
In this critique, I have attempted to address a few complaints I have regarding Rosenfeld’s defects in both writing styles and logic.
Post a Comment