History of The United States Senate - Constitutional Creation

Constitutional Creation

The United States Senate, named after the ancient Roman Senate, was designed as a more deliberative body than the House of Representatives. Edmund Randolph called for its members to be "less than the House of Commons... to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy." According to James Madison, "The use of the Senate is to consist in proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch." Instead of two-year terms as in the House, senators serve six-year terms, giving them more authority to ignore mass sentiment in favor of the country's broad interests. The smaller number of members and staggered terms also give the Senate a greater sense of community.

Many of the founding fathers greatly admired the British government. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton called the British government "the best in the world," and said he "doubted whether anything short of it would do in America." In his "Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States," John Adams said "the English Constitution is, in theory, both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of human invention." In the minds of many of the Founding Fathers, the Senate would be an American kind of House of Lords. John Dickinson said the Senate should "consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible."

The Senate was also intended to give states with smaller populations equal standing with larger states, which are given more representation in the House. (See "Connecticut Compromise")

The apportionment scheme of the Senate was controversial at the Constitutional Convention. Hamilton, who was joined in opposition to equal suffrage by Madison, said equal representation despite population differences "shocks too much the ideas of justice and every human feeling." Referring to those who demanded equal representation, Madison called for the Convention "to renounce a principle which was confessedly unjust."

The delegates representing a majority of Americans might have carried the day, but at the Constitutional Convention, each state had an equal vote, and any issue could be brought up again if a state desired it. The state delegations originally voted 6–5 for proportional representation, but small states without claims of western lands reopened the issue and eventually turned the tide towards equality. On the final vote, the five states in favor of equal apportionment in the Senate - Connecticut, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware - only represented one-third of the nation's population. The four states that voted against it - Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia - represented almost twice as many people than the proponents. Convention delegate James Wilson wrote "Our Constituents, had they voted as their representatives did, would have stood as 2/3 against equality, and 1/3 only in favor of it" (Harpers Magazine, May 2004, 36). One reason the large states accepted the Connecticut Compromise was a fear that the small states would either refuse to join the Union, or, as Gunning Bedford, Jr. of Delaware threatened, "the small ones w find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice" (New Republic, August 7, 2002).

In Federalist No. 62, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” openly admitted that the equal suffrage in the Senate was a compromise, a “lesser evil,” and not born out of any political theory. “t is superfluous to try, by the standard of theory, a part of the Constitution which is allowed on all hands to be the result, not of theory, but ‘of a spirit of amity, and that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.’“

Even Gunning Bedford, Jr. of Delaware admitted that he only favored equal representation because it advanced the interests of his own state. "Can it be expected that the small states will act from pure disinterestedness? Are we to act with greater purity than the rest of mankind" (Sizing Up the Senate, 33)?

Since 1789, the Senate has become much more malaportioned. At the time of the Connecticut Compromise, the largest state, Virginia, had only twelve times the population of the smallest state, Delaware. Today, the largest state, California, has a population that is seventy times greater than the population of the smallest state, Wyoming. In 1790, it would take a theoretical 30% of the population to elect a majority of the Senate, today it would take 17%. Today, there are seven states with only one congressman (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming); never in the past has there been as high a proportion of one-congressmen states.