- Adam Lee suggests abolishing the US Senate (as others have before him)
America has always considered itself an experiment, on the world stage, and in fact it has developed into the most powerful nation on Earth. But has the experiment been entirely successful? Is America perfect? The test of any experiment and its conclusions is whether they can stand up to later discoveries and experiments and their conclusions. Things change.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, today: For the good of democracy, abolish the Senate, subtitled “It’s an oligarchic institution designed to thwart the popular will.”
American democracy is looking increasingly like a failed experiment. Congress is perpetually gridlocked, plunging the nation into repeated debt-limit crises and paralyzing shutdowns. Legislation that’s supported by huge majorities of the population can’t get passed. The legislative branch’s failure to act has allowed the executive branch to wield more and more unchecked power over time, making us less like a democracy and more like a monarchy.
The awkward compromises, the frustrating obstacles and the outright mistakes that the founders built into our constitutional system are making the nation almost ungovernable. What could we do to fix this?
While there are many reforms the United States needs, one should be near the top of the list. The Senate has consistently been a roadblock to democracy. More than any other branch of government, it prevents the party that wins elections from being able to pass legislation and to govern as it chooses.
My take is that America was founded as a republic, a collection of states each of which could design their own laws, and build their own kind of government, within the framework of the US Constitution. So the idea of the Senate would be to bring these various ideas together, not driven by populism, but by honest consideration of the ideas of each state, and avoiding populist drives.
It was very idealistic. It has not worked out that way. The idealism of the Enlightenment, and the Founders, has given way to the reality of human nature, and simplistic black and white thinking. It’s boiled down to minority rural folks overruling majority city folks. That’s how the Senate works.
