Democacy: Hah, What Democracy?

The 2020 Census reported the population of California, represented in the United States Senate by two Democrats, to be 39.5 million.

By comparison, 15 states, each with two Republican senators have -using an ascending combination of the smallest states by population in which Reublicans have two seats – combined population equivalent to that of California.

Together, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming are home to 39.5 million people.

The math is easy, the problem is not and it is that the math gives those 15 states with a combined population identical to that of California 30 Republican senators to California’s two Democratic senators.

Ah says Fox News, but compare the population of Texas, with two Republican senators who represent 29.1 million Texans in the 2020 Census to the number of states with two Democratic senators and populations adding up to 29.1 million people.

Turns out there are 11 such states, again ascending from smallest in population, that taken together are comparable to Texas.

Together, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont are home to 30.1 million people.

So 11 small population states with two Democrats each in the Senate gives those states a 22-2 seat advantage over the two Republicans from Texas. But in the balance that’s exceeded by the 30-to-2 Republican Senate advantage over California in the illustrations.

Ah, but says Fox again, if California is an apple with 39.5 million population then Texas with 29.1 million people is an orange and you can’t compare apples to oranges.

Ok, then let’s see how many Democratic states have to be added to the first 11 to get to 39.5 million combined population. The next two states with two Democrats in the Senate are Maryland, 6 milion people, and Massachusetts, 7 million people.

Add them to the first 11 two-Democrat states and you balloon to 43.8 million in 13 states represented in the aggregate by 26 senators. Observe, that’s still four senators less than the aggregate 30 senators from the 15 smallest Republican states.

As it happens though the difference between 43.8 and 39.5 is 4.3 million – and that just happens to be the population of Oregon.

So if for the fun of it we remove Oregon from the list of the 13 smallest Democratic states by population – well then, presto, the remaining 12 states have, again in the aggregate, 39.5 million people and just 24 senators – compared with Republicans’ 30 senators from 15 states with 39.5 million population.

Ok says Fox, but what if you look at the entire nation?

Let’s do that.

There are six states, Maine, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin that in the present Sentate are represeted by one from column A and one from column B – a Republican and a Democrat. Their combined population is 34.9 million people.

Of the remaining 44 states in our evenly divided 50/50 U.S. Senate each party has two seats in 22 states. The 44 Republican senators represent states with 128.8 million people. The 44 Democrats represent 169.5 million people.

On a national scale then you could say that nearly 41 million people in this country have no representation in the U.S. Senate, whether proportionally or in actual fact.

Of course usually when there is a comparison to express the constitutional disadvantage of Democrats in the U. S. Senate, example is drawn between the least populated state, Wyoming, peopled by 581,000, and California’s 39.6 million people. In this comparison, each California senator represents 68 times the number of people as a senator from Wyoming, which is assinine.

It’s a comparison in which you could argue that if everyone in Wyoming is represented by a senator then 39 million Californian’s don’t have a senator, aren’t represented by a senator – that they are not represented at all in the United States Senate.

If total population proportionality could be applied in the Senate to the 44 states that send two of the same party to the Senate, Democrats would have 51 votes and Republican would have 37 votes.

With the 12 votes from the six divided states evenly divided as they are, the full 100-member Senate would have 57 Democrats and 43 Republicans.

But instead we have a 50/50 Senate and a strong case can be made that 12.5%, fully one-eighth of “We the People” are under-represented if they are represented at all.

This then is what? It’s a pretty stupid state of affairs 234 years after ratification of the Constitution gave each state two seats in the Senate when the first 13 states had all of 3 million people, a fifth of whom, 600,000, were slaves.

Stupid is one word for it. But there is another one that’s far more to the point.

That word is undemocratic.

No, the U.S. Senate is not the greatest democratic deliberative body in the world as its members so like to call themselves.

It’s the word the Oxford Dictionary defines as “a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.”

That word? Oligarchy.