Kill The Senate. Kill It Dead.

Last week, another nation’s survival was threatened by the existence of the U.S. Senate. Arguing for a stronger climate-change treaty that would save his nation from going underwater, Ian Fry, Tuvalu’s representative to the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen, placed the blame squarely at the Senate’s feet. “It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress,” Fry lamented.

It was nice of Fry to single out the Senate, as its actions certainly do not reflect the will of the American people. The House—which, unlike the Senate, gives all citizens equal representation regardless of which state they live in—has already passed cap-and-trade legislation. What’s more, the populations of the states represented by the 45 senators who have already committed to supporting climate-change legislation almost certainly represent more than half the nation’s population, given that opponents of the legislation come disproportionately from small states. America, then, is not dooming Tuvalu. Its upper house of Congress is.

Of course, this is hardly the first time the Senate has tried its best to ruin good legislation. Opposition to the Social Security Act came overwhelming from the Senate Finance Committee, which did its best to turn the act into the stingy—and straight-up racist—bill that was eventually passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had to be watered down at the last minute by Senate GOP leader Everett Dirksen and then-Senators Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy ’48 in order to avoid a successful filibuster. Then, as now, the structural requirements of the U.S. Senate were the enemies of social progress.

The fact that the Senate has traditionally derailed legislation that I support is, of course, not a good enough reason to abolish it. The fact that it consistently neglects the popular will, however, is. Take the example of the Social Security Act. In 1935, when the bill was being debated, Congressman Ernest Lundeen proposed a far more radical bill, in which all workers, regardless of race or industry, would be provided with generous benefits provided by taxing the incomes and estates of wealthy Americans. The American people strongly supported the Lundeen proposal, with a New York Post poll at the time showing 83 percent preferred it to the Social Security Act. Nevertheless, the Senate ended up passing a far weaker bill than the public wanted.

This should not be surprising. The senate is not set up to account for the popular will, but to resist the passions of voters. James Madison said as much in Federalist No. 63, writing that the Senate would act as “a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.” This should be offensive to small-d democrats everywhere, but aside from that, Madison’s defense of the Senate fails on its own terms. The Senate blocks not just benefits for the masses, but legislation of all varieties. As Texas law professor Sanford Levinson—currently visiting at Harvard—wrote in his fantastic “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” the continued existence of the Senate agitates not just against the passage of foolish legislation, but of wonderful legislation as well. This is a recipe not for prudence, but for gridlock.

The Senate’s ability to slow legislation is particularly embarrassing in light of the fact that it is nearly unique among modern democracies. Every other developed nation’s upper house of parliament lacks parity with its lower, popularly elected house. Britain’s House of Lords, for instance, has not been on par with the House of Commons at least since 1911, and, in France and Germany, the lower house has the formal ability to assert its supremacy over the upper house in cases of deadlock.

Of course, France and Germany had the ability to formulate completely new constitutions following World War II, and Britain to this day lacks a formal constitution, meaning that gradually weakening the upper house was far more plausible in those nations than in the United States. Indeed, formally weakening the Senate would require constitutional amendment, just the same as abolishing the Senate would.  If our aim is to allow majority rule in Congress, it makes more sense to kill the Senate in one blow than to use the same maneuver to merely weaken it.

To be sure, changes as large as the abolition of a branch of Congress should not be taken lightly. However, an institution like the U.S. Senate whose primary effect is to prevent the federal government from accomplishing anything of significance has clearly overstayed its welcome. If the citizens of the United States care about maintaining a democracy in any sense of the term, it is high time to abolish the Senate.

Dylan R. Matthews ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Kirkland House. His column appears regularly.