The Best Way to Fix the Senate? Abolish It.

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In one important way, the modern Senate is more democratic than the legislative upper houses of some peer nations. In France and Germany, members of the upper house are still selected by other elected officials rather than by the people—just as American senators were before the 17^th Amendment in 1913. Still, in almost every other democratic respect, our Senate is one of the world’s worst deliberative bodies.

The Senate’s most egregious flaws are actually aspects of its basic design, but as with the House, the rules and procedures the chamber has adopted for itself also matter. One particularly important rule has attracted renewed attention in recent years. While the Senate ostensibly runs by majority rule, it takes the support of a supermajority—since 1975, three-fifths of the chamber, or 60 senators—to bring debates to a close, or cloture. Functionally, that means that a bill can be held in limbo unless 60 senators support it enough to end debate and bring it to a vote. Without that supermajority, the minority in opposition to a bill can keep debates going in an attempt to wear down its supporters—a tactic known as the filibuster. The mere threat of a filibuster today is enough to torpedo legislation without 60 votes—a situation that means most bills can’t pass Congress without a Senate supermajority.

Beyond the countermajoritarian nature of the filibuster, the Senate is inegalitarian by design, thanks to the equal apportionment of senators to all states, regardless of population—a feature founders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton vociferously opposed before small states forced a compromise at the Constitutional Convention. The disparities that made equal representation such a bitter pill for them to swallow have only deepened since the Constitution was written. In theory, states that account for less than 20 percent of the country’s population can hold a Senate majority, while states representing as little as 11 percent of the population can block legislation through the filibuster. Back in 1787, Virginia, then the largest state, had a population 12 or 13 times larger than Delaware, the smallest state, which had done so much to push equal representation through at the convention. But our largest state today, California—which, on its own, would be among the 40 largest countries in the world—has a population more than 67 times larger than our smallest state today, Wyoming. Mathematically, because both have an equal two seats in the Senate, each resident of Wyoming thus has 67 times more representation in the chamber than does each resident of California.

The easiest reforms to pull off in the Senate would be changes to the chamber’s rules—which are not set in stone. The majority party can vote to fundamentally change the way things are done, provided they can get themselves to agree on those changes. In recent years, Democrats have come to something like a consensus on the legislative filibuster, which, again, has already been eliminated for executive and judicial branch appointments; anyone the president nominates to fill a post can be approved with a simple majority of the chamber. But the filibuster remains in place for all legislation that can’t be crammed through the budget-reconciliation process, which was designed for budgetary matters.

One suggestion, endorsed by former President Joe Biden and cautious reformers, is a return to the talking filibuster—forcing those who hope to block legislation to stand on the Senate floor and speak for hours on end, as they once did. But this wouldn’t be a democratic reform. It would leave the filibuster intact and, in fact, only deepen its absurdity.

Rather than introducing tests of physical stamina into the policymaking process, other reformers have more soundly suggested making the filibuster more majoritarian somehow—by stipulating that bills supported by a supermajority of the House can be passed by simple majorities in the Senate, for instance, or that only senators representing a majority of the population can utilize the filibuster. The latter idea in particular would be a clear democratic improvement over the status quo. Of course, so would simply abolishing the filibuster altogether.

Still, reforming or eliminating the filibuster won’t fix the Senate’s fundamental inequities—the equal apportionment of senators to all states, irrespective of population, is democratically untenable. Equal apportionment in the Senate, unfortunately, happens to be one of the few parts of the Constitution that are essentially unamendable: Per Article 5, altering that aspect of the chamber’s basic design seemingly requires the unanimous consent of all states. Some reformers argue that this prohibition can be ignored or somehow circumvented—perhaps we could pass an amendment eliminating the clause stipulating that the Senate can’t be amended, then amend the Senate with another amendment.

What alternative designs for the Senate might we consider, assuming that changes could be made possible? The most obvious tweak, of course, would be allocating senators proportionally to each state’s population. But some reformers, arguing we’ve outgrown the need for an empowered upper house, have suggested that the Senate could be transformed by amendment into a mostly ceremonial body, like the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, which itself was gradually disempowered in favor of the House of Commons. In 2018, Michigan Congressman John Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, backed a much simpler idea: The Senate, he argued, should simply be abolished.

It’s not obvious, after all, that we need a bicameral legislature in the first place. About two-thirds of the world’s countries have only one legislative house—not counting technically bicameral countries such as the U.K., where one house holds nearly all real legislative power.

By Osita Nwanevu. Random House.

Federalism—the idea that the interests of states as entities should be represented in the legislature as though they were themselves people—is not a very compelling democratic defense, especially in a country like ours, where states already have so much independent power that state governments often frustrate the federal government’s objectives. And we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that popularly elected representatives in a large, population-based chamber like the House of Representatives should have their decisions checked by a smaller, slower body of more elite politicians. In fact, if we’re absolutely set on having two houses, we might consider making one of them even more directly representative of the public than the House is—perhaps, as theorists such as Tom Malleson argue, by making it a deliberative assembly of ordinary people chosen by lot:

Imagine a People’s House composed of, say, one thousand people chosen at random (and stratified to ensure accurate representation along gender, race, class, and other important lines). These members could serve four-year terms. The first two years they’d lack legislative power, during which time they’d receive substantial training in issues of budgets, taxation, and distributive justice; be exposed to the various fields of government; take classes in how to deliberate rationally, empathetically, and with a sense of the common good; and “intern” in a specific policy department, such as Health or Energy or the Environment. In the second half of their term, members would have legislative power, perhaps divided into ten departments with one hundred members each. Each department would deliberate on issues within its purview (in a similar manner to the Citizens’ Assemblies), before submitting legislative proposals to be voted on by the entire body to become law.

Deliberative experiments in Canada, the U.K., France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even here in America have shown that ordinary citizens are wholly capable of productively debating the issues among themselves and consulting with experts on policy issues in assembly-like settings. The difficulty with such schemes has less to do with the competence of the citizenry than with how few participate in them—there’s something democratically problematic, if we take decisionmaking agency seriously as a democratic concern, about having a randomly selected subset of the public, and even a demographically representative one, make decisions for the public instead of having the whole public decide for itself. Given all the factors that can influence how groups come to decisions—individual personalities, temperaments, and moods; differences in writing and speaking ability, and so on—it doesn’t make all that much sense to assume that a randomly selected assembly of individuals would deliberate or act just as any other randomly selected group of people or the public at large would have. But something like a People’s House might do some good as a kind of advisory body—a way of bringing our representatives and policymakers into regular contact with a cross section of America and a pool that might be informatively polled and consulted by the press on matters before the legislature.

Whether we settle on an idea like this or not, we should think ambitiously about what a more democratic legislature might look like. Whatever form our next one might take, it certainly shouldn’t resemble Congress as we know it.

This piece is adapted from the book The Right of the People by Osita Nwanevu. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Penguin Random House.

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