Every so often we have a national dialog about banishing the Electoral College because it is essentially undemocratic (with a lower-case “d”). While we’re about it, we ought to take a hard look at the U.S. senate itself, perhaps the least democratic legislative body in the western world.

The inequity of the Electoral College exists in large part because of the senate—two senators from every state tip the balance in favor of the smaller states. Any cleanup of the college would suggest an implicit look at the lack of democracy in the upper house.

The thought struck home watching the senate eviscerate President Obama’s already insufficient economic stimulus bill, shearing it of adequate infrastructure funding and aid to state governments but adding useless tax cuts.

There are more votes, house-senate conferences and again more votes to come, but I am pessimistic that the final product will be anywhere big enough to accomplish an economic rescue—though something will be better than nothing.

The underlying issue here is not the bill but the senate—and it’s not a partisan matter. Republicans suffered the same lack of democracy at other times.

The problem is twofold: first, the senate is not representative of the population; second, its arcane rules further hamper democracy.

Taking it from the top: every state gets two senators, regardless of population. That means the 515,000 residents of Wyoming have the same two votes as Illinois’ 12,832,000 residents, Texas’ 23,508,000 or California’s 36,458,000.

Tell me why every Wyoming citizen should have 46 times the voting power of every Texan or 25 times the voting power of anyone in Illinois?

Why?

Because of a doubly antidemocratic deal devised by our founding parents.

They deemed first that an elite upper house—whose members were appointed by each state’s legislature—would serve as a kind of a damper on what might be runaway, representative democracy as voted by the members of the lower chamber.

The other part of the deal was to assure the slave states a bigger and better voice in that upper house. (Without that rotten deal maybe the slave states might not have joined the union in the first place. Could one make a case that we might be better off?)

Eventually the people got to elect their own senators—except when governors get to appoint them to fill vacancies. Remember? This term we’ll have a handful of appointed senators, including a controversial one from Illinois and a real doozy in New York.

That’s our democracy at work.

Obviously there should be elections to fill senate vacancies, just as there are to fill house seats. But that wouldn’t solve the unequal representation issue.

Through the years, house districts, designed to be equal in population, grew less and less so. Then the Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote edict ordered that all house districts must be of equal size.

No such fix for the senate, though every other local and state legislative body had to comply.

But the senate is not happy simply being undemocratic on the basis of numbers. It still allows the filibuster, which permits a minority of the body to thwart the will of the majority by preventing a vote. If a Republican filibusters today, it takes 60 votes to stop it.

That’s why the 58 current Democrats elected to the senate (Al Franken yet to come) had to cajole a few Republicans to come along on the crucial economic rescue package—and risk getting it watered down to uselessness.

Again, this is not a big-D Democrat issue alone. When Republicans controlled the chamber with fewer than 60 votes, they had the same dismal problem.

Certain matters, such as a constitutional amendment, should legitimately require a super-majority, but why should every bill be put in peril?

The filibuster is a relative of the concessions given to the slave states at the very beginning of our democracy. The house once allowed filibusters but eliminated them. The senate occasionally modified filibuster rules, but retained them even though they were invoked primarily by racist Dixiecrats to thwart civil rights legislation.

Is the senate really so proud of a tradition hijacked by the basest prejudices of our society?

But then, since the senate is in part a product of the slave-based society, it all fits together neatly. And since those are the guys who would have to vote to reform it, we will never see it reformed.

So much for democracy.