Why Power in the Senate Is Increasingly Imbalanced
The Founding Fathers created a chamber that fit the 18th century. Now their design gives disproportionate power to the least-populous states.
The chamber also serves for joint sessions.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
As the stalemate over President Donald Trump’s border wall threatens to lead to another government shutdown, all eyes are on the Senate, where a slim majority of lawmakers continues to support the barrier, even though fewer than 35 percent of Americans do.
What accounts for this and many other such imbalances in the upper chamber of Congress? The answer, sadly, is that the Senate, which has always given outsize political clout to smaller, rural states, has become increasingly dominated by this constituency. And these days, most of these small states lean conservative, giving them far more power than the Founding Fathers intended or than their relatively smaller share of the population would suggest.