What’s Wrong with the United States Senate?

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:

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. 

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.