The Founding Fathers knew this would happen, which is why they created the Senate.
Alarmed by rising national debt and increasingly downbeat about their country’s course, Americans are clear about how they want to attack the government’s runway budget deficits: raise taxes on the wealthy and keep hands off of Medicare and Medicaid.
The Founders knew that the Hoi Polloi would periodically get upset about rich people running the country into the ground and want them to pay their fair share in taxes. The way to prevent that from actually happening was to create a second non-Democratic chamber of Congress made up of members who were not elected but appointed by the state legislatures of each individual state.
Ever since, the American people have been trying to claw back some kind of true representative democracy. In 1913, the 17th Amendment was ratified, which created a new system within which the members of the U.S, Senate are elected directly by the people. But that hasn’t solved the problem.
I think that’s a bit cynical. The system created by the founders was extremely progressive for its time, and it included mechanisms such as the amendment process so that it could evolve as society evolved.
What’s making our country undemocratic today is a whole host of factors, one of which is the abuse of the filibuster to create a 60 member supermajority requirement to get anything done in the Senate. This wasn’t the intention of the founders, nor was the rise of the GOP into a parliamentary style party. The flaw isn’t in the founders design (it was an awesome design for late 18th century!), its that we have one party representing the rich and business elite that has been able to “hack” our rusty political institutions, cynically exploiting those inherent veto points in unprecedented ways. If there’s blame to go around, its (1) on the GOP for throwing aside the informal norms that were put in place in the past half century to keep these rusty political institutions working properly and (2) on Obama and the dems for not using his change mandate in 2008 to improve and modernize these political institutions so they weren’t dependent on the GOP’s good-faith to keep things working even marginally well.
And I think you’re not cynical enough.
An honest reading of the history of the American Revolution shows that the Founders were democratic to a point. And that point was where it started to threaten their own personal power. Which is why voting was initially restricted to property owning white males. The American Revolution was mostly about the resentment of the wealthy elites in the colonies being treated like second class citizens by the wealthy elites in Britain – no taxation without representation was a rallying cry for folks who felt they were being denied their right to a vote, and the non-wealthy in the colonies wouldn’t have had a right to representation anyway.
However the Senate is the way it is mostly because of the “Grand Bargain” that allowed the Southern states into the Union by giving them security in the idea that despite their lower population the Northern states wouldn’t be forcing the elites there to give up their slaves and their way of life any time soon. One of the strong incentives for the Southern states to join the revolution was that slavery had already been abolished in England at that point and the slaveholders were seeing that that sentiment would be heading their way as well. In order to get them to join the Union there had to be some assurances that they didn’t just fight a war with England to have their slaves taken away by the new Federal government, and the Senate, Electoral College, and 3/5ths compromise were all ways to placate the Southern states and convince them that they’d get to keep their slaves if they joined the Union. And that worked for 60-some years until the South decided that wasn’t enough assurance after the abolitionist party managed to get someone elected to the Presidency.
The Senate is the way it is because it IS supposed to be a check on popular will. It’s undemocratic in the extreme and was always supposed to be. It got some good reform with the popular election of Senators but it needs major reform now – if not outright abolishing it altogether and replacing it with something more democratic or turning it into a ceremonial body along the lines of the House of Lords.
I’m not going to disagree with you that judged by today’s standards the founders were extremely conservative and protective of the emerging aristocracy of the merchant elite (in the North) and the plantation elite (in the South). But compared to the rest of the world at the time (late 18th century), they were progressives, radicals even. I don’t think any of that is controversial.
My point is that the Constitution is a living document and its the duty of each generation to adapt it to the particular needs and demands facing each such generation. Institutional reform is a necessity, and Obama became a defender of the status quo after 2008 rather than a champion of change and reform. Let’s not have a pedantic historical debate about the founders better suited to US History 202 and instead talk about organizing for real institutional reform.
To whatever degree that Obama eschewed Change and Hope for the status quo, imagine what he would have accomplished if the Senate didn’t exist.
Or imagine if Obama was better at handling the politics of obstruction. Or imagine if Obama had figured out early on that McConnell controlled the procedural votes of his caucus. Or imagine if Obama hadn’t decided to spend months negotiating with Senators who decried his health insurance reform plan as creating “Death Panels”
I’m a bit of an apologists for Obama’s failures at the hands of our conservative political institutions as well, but simply saying, hey we have a Senate so we can’t get anything progressive done ever is a bridge too far for me.
McConnell’s gambit of unprecedented obstruction worked precisely because he realized that Obama had tactically committed himself to being “bipartisan” and changing the tone in Washington. All McConnell had to do was sit on his hands and not make nice, and Obama didn’t really have a back up plan.
Too many Senators are rich.
The most effective way to influence a Senator is to write letters. Not email.
People need to be involved.
The whole point of the way Congress is set up is to slow things down. When laws are passed too quickly, the people have no idea what is what.
We are a constitutional republic and not a democracy. This makes a difference in how representation works. Democracy has sometimes been called mob rule because the rights of the minority aren’t taken into account.
Also, when Senators are messing with us, phone calls help.
Is Michigan the forerunner of new Rep governorship where its population face taxation without representation? Rachel Maddow is highlighting this and it’s beyond anyone’s imagination of Big Government.
I think the more likely model is the District of Columbia, wherein our elected representatives have no real power and we get ruled by wealthy elites from somewhere else who have no interest in what we think or want and use us instead to implement their own whims or self-interested desires.
I guess I would counter with it’s not a competition to see which District suffers the most from lack of representation but instead, let’s fix it damn it! Rachel has been uncovering the Koch funded new Governors racing to get these emergency managers into place and it only highlights an extension of what DC has been suffering from all along.
Spot on Booman. The way the Founding Fathers have been romanticized is disturbing. The accomplishment was awesome. I’ve got a coworker who grew up in Vietnam and when she studied law, the US Constitution was one of the required subjects. So I don’t disrespect the positives.
But the Founders had their own material self interests very much at heart. I can recall reading that the curious phrase (to our time) of “pursuit of happiness” was based on the idea of pursuing material gain.
I’ve wondered why most of the founders were surveyors. Is it just because there was a lot of that work or was it more for getting access and first looks as the choicest land, and being able to assist oneself in the acquisition of land?
Anyway, the WaPo/ABC poll says the same about Medicare and raising taxes on high incomes:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/20/968648/-WaPo-ABC-Poll:-84-percent-oppose-GOP-Medicare-plan