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The current line-up of Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate reflects just how far the nation has departed from the one person-one vote formula for representation in the U.S. Congress. There are now 58 Democrats and 40 Republicans in the U.S. Senate but the two Independents caucus with the Democratic Party.
The Almanac of American Politics (2008 edition) provides a state-by-state estimated 2006 census population.Totaling these figures results in a U.S. population of 300,035,674. Using a methodology by which: 1.) all of a state's population is assigned to one of the two major political parties when both U.S. senators are from the same party; and 2.) the state's population is evenly split between the two major parties when each party has one U.S. senator, the Democratic Senate caucus represents 190,113,711 people and the Republican caucus represents 109,921,983 people. The respective percentages are the Democrats 63.4 percent and the Republicans 36.6 percent. Thus, the Democrats have well over the 60 percent of all U.S. senators needed to kill a Republican filibuster if Senate representation was based on a percentage of the U.S. population.
The skewed party representation outlined above can be well illustrated by what would have happened if Democratic Senator Nelson of Nebraska had voted with the Republicans to kill consideration of health care reform legislation. Nelson, whose vote was considered to be very much in doubt, represents a state with a 2006 estimated population of 1,768,331. Since Nelson would have voted with the Republicans, if we follow the methodology described above and assign all of Nebraska's population to the Republicans, the percentages provided above would have changed only slightly from 63.4/36.6 percent to 63.1/36.9 percent. Thus, senators representing less than 37 percent of the nation's population would have prevented any debate on health care reform legislation.
Even if states with very small populations and states with very large populations grew at about the same rate in the future, because the very large-population states proceed from a higher population base, they will represent a larger and larger percentage of the total U.S. population. The further representation of the 50 states in the U.S. Senate diverges from a basis of one person-one vote, the greater a political problem it will represent.
