Plenty, obviously and not the least of it is the sort of person that gets elected to the world’s most insufferably self-regarding body. But what really annoys high-class liberals such as Hendrik Hertzberg and Ezra Klein is the Senate’s supposed lack of democratic legitimacy. Well, that’s what you get when you choose to build a Republic. Jonathan Bernstein sums up the complaint, thus:
Bernstein acknowledges that this ain’t changing any time soon. Or ever, for that matter. But allow me to make a modest case for the equal representation of the many and various states in the upper chamber. At the risk of seeming facile, the clue lies in the country’s very name: the United States of America. Before there could be unum there had to be pluribus.Now, I happen to agree with Hertzberg (and nearly everyone else) that the two-per-state Senate is a terrible idea, and does not at all comport with generally accepted ideas of democracy.
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