The California Senate Race is Confusing, and I Don't Care
Demand a debate in Brockway!
It’s an election year, and the Senate is fully displayed in all its horrific glory. The cameras are turned to California. Four candidates — Schiff, Porter, Lee, and Garvey — are running for, well, it’s become a bit confusing after Dianne Feinstein died (remember when she put those bratty kids in line?). Erin Clausen tried to explain it to the good people of San Luis Obispo: “In the March 5 Primary Election, voters will have the full-term contest on their ballot, and they will also have a separate contest for the remainder of the unexpired term ending in January 2025. The top two vote-getters in this separate, partial-term contest will also move on to the November General Election, and the winner of that will be sworn in to serve as California's newest U.S. Senator between November 2024 and January 2025.”
I’ll be honest: I don’t understand how this works. Also, I’m not motivated in the slightest to find out. The only important thing to know is that the Senate is a uniquely undemocratic political institution. The United States is one of the few remaining countries, explained Levitsky and Ziblatt in their latest book, Tyranny of the Minority, that has a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber. It’s one of an even smaller number of countries where that upper chamber is “severely malapportioned” due to the “equal representation of unequal states.” Finally, only the United States has both “a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.” To quote the Democratic Socialists of America’s political platform, it’s almost as if “the nation that holds itself as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all.”
So, Schiff, Porter, Lee, and Garvey will go to town. The reporters will write articles, the anchors will read their lines, and everyone will pretend like any of this has anything to do with democracy. It’s all a bit boring. This show needs something fresh that breaks the rules and makes the pundits pinch themselves to check that they aren’t dreaming. I’ve got one: do the Robert Dahl test as Stanley Levison described (more or less) in Our Undemocratic Constitution.1 Have the debate in Brockway, on a stage overlooking beautiful Lake Tahoe, smack-dab on the California-Nevada border. Garvey (or any of the four candidates — it doesn’t matter) points at a person ten paces away in Nevada. “Thanks to the malapportioned Senate and the Electoral College,” explains the former Los Angeles Dodger, “that person has seventeen times the voting power as any of you in the Senate, and relatively more voting power as well when choosing the president.” He continues: “Assuming I become your next senator, why should I, representing just over eight percent of the country’s population, have as much power as Wyoming’s senator, representing .017 percent?”
Then, the once National League Most Valuable Player goes for the jugular: “Given that states are punished for violating the right of a citizen to equal representation and to have his vote weighted equally with those of all other citizens, the allocation of representation in the Senate is a bit awkward. It’s as if the Senate — and thereby the Constitution — is undemocratic on its own terms.”2 Yikes, there's nothing like getting scolded on your own terms.
Assuming the T.V. feed wasn’t cut, that stunt would make a good show! Of course, it won’t happen this year, and maybe not within the next decade. But in 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in a New York Times opinion piece, "[S]omewhere in the next century we are going to have to face the question of apportionment in the United States Senate.”3 It’s too bad that Moynihan didn’t live to see that conversation's beginnings, though authors like Daniel Lazare, Robert Dahl, and Sanford Levinson had planted a few seeds by the turn of the century. I hope we don’t have to wait until 2094 to see real change. A movement for a democratic Constitution — heck, even for a democratic Senate — would speed up the process. I’ll turn on the T.V. when someone starts talking about the actual Senate. Or, when I hear the next debate is in Brockway
Levison, Sanford. Our Undemocratic Constitution. Page 51.
Lynn A. Baker and Samuel H. Dinkin. “The Senate: An Institution Whose Time Has Gone?” https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/publications/1997-The-Senate-An-Institution-Whose-Time-Has-Gone/download
Ibid.