The Great Compromise: A constitution for minority rule

The End of Majority Rule?

E. J. Dionne discovers the havoc of politics dominated by a crackpot minority, itself dominated by a determined and even fanatical plutocracy, enabled by the Connecticut Compromise, also known by its fans as “The Great Compromise.”

Those are the names commonly given the surrender of the nationalists at Philadelphia to the small state holdouts who already wielded power there and in the then US Congress far out of proportion to their share of the population of the Union.

When for the sake of a unanimous consent that they did not quite get in any case the nationalists finally gave up, what did they give up?

The nationalists, two leaders of whom would soon be writing under the name “Publius” to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Philadelphia constitution, had intended representation in the senate, like that in the house, to be proportioned to population – though the senate was already envisioned to be in the long run less numerous than the house, with the senators to have longer terms and face the electorate in sections rather than all at once.

When the nationalists lost that they gave the smaller states astonishing over-representation per capita in the senate, each state to have two senators regardless of population.

To go with it they gave them exactly the same excess of power, as a group, over the vastly more populous large states in a process of constitutional ratification that included special protection for slave slates, as well.

They gave to the smaller states an extra jolt of power in the Electoral College.

They gave to the smaller states a constitutional guarantee that small states could not be combined by the congress to form larger ones, their grossly excessive power being thus diminished, without their individual consent.

(But an amendment merely to remove this guarantee would not be a congressional act combining any states and so would require the particular consent of no individual state.)

And they gave as well a guarantee that no amendment could deprive any state of its equal representation in the senate without its consent.

(But an amendment merely to remove this guarantee would not be an amendment to deprive any state of its equal representation, and so there is no state whose particular consent would be needed.)

And they backed all that up with a process of amendment providing the small states excessive influence in three distinct ways.

Amendments can initiate in the congress or in a convention called for by the states.

In the first case each must be proposed for ratification by a two-thirds vote in both houses, and then be ratified by three fourths of the states.

In the second, a convention must be called if two thirds of the states ask for it, and its proposals can then be ratified again by three fourths of the states.

Thus the people of America are properly represented in the process only at one step, that requiring a two thirds majority in the house, and play no role at all in propria persona, as is the case in the entire constitution – that last, of course, being an absolute point of pride with that wild democrat, Madison.

In the step requiring a two thirds majority in the senate, in the step allowing two thirds of the states to demand a convention, and in the step of ratification by three fourths of the states the power of the small states is vastly exaggerated, to the very great cost of the American people, the vast majority of whom live somewhere else.

The constitution does not specify the manner of representation and voting in a new constitutional convention, called for by the states.

We can guess what the small states and their political allies would insist on.

Some fun facts to know and tell: 

• Wyoming has two senators for half a million people.
• California has two senators for thirty-six million people.
• One voter in Wyoming has the same clout in the senate as seventy-two voters in California.
• Wyoming, Vermont, and Delaware outvote California and Texas in the senate.
• About a million people in the first three can overpower sixty million in the latter two.
• One person defeats sixty.

 And all of this can be said against that atrocity of Philadelphia before we even raise the subjects of the filibuster and the single senator hold and the home state veto.

Notes EJ,

The filibuster makes matters worse.

It's theoretically possible for 41 senators representing less than 11 percent of the population to block pretty much anything.

The less populous states, of course, as EJ points out, are generally though by no means in all cases rural and conservative.

Exceptions noted, the rule holds in enough cases to make the overwhelming small state advantage of power a distinctly conservative advantage.

Oh, how they love their constitution, those conservatives!

Oh, how they love federalism and states’ rights!

EJ concludes, writing for the blues,

There is no immediate solution to the obstruction of the democratic will.

But we need to acknowledge that our system is giving extremists far more influence than the voters would.

That's why American democracy is deadlocked.

It was supposed to be.

They planned it that way in Philadelphia.