Abolish State Senates
What the country needs is 50 majority-rule unicameral state legislatures. By Harold Meyerson At first glance, California state Sen. Richard Richards might have seemed an exceptionally powerful lawmaker in 1960. The justcompleted census revealed that Los Angeles County, home to just over six million people, constituted a whopping 38.4 percent of the entire state’s population. So Richards, as the county’s sole senator, could speak for more than one-third of the state’s residents. At second glance, however, Richards was no more than a legislative pip-squeak—and, more distressingly, so was Los Angeles. California, like virtually every other state, had shaped its upper house in the image of the U.S. Senate, apportioning its seats not by population but by jurisdiction. Every county was entitled to no more than one senator. As California’s senate had just 40 seats, but the state itself had 58 counties, the smallest counties had to buddy up to get the total down to 40, but that still meant that a senator representing a district with roughly 6,000 residents could, on any given measure, cast the same number of votes (one) as Richards, who represented six million. That disturbed the U.S. Supreme Court, then under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren and in an uncommonly egalitarian frame of mind. In Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court held that equality under the law meant that state legislatures had to be governed by districts of equal population. No longer could senators from two all-but-unpopulated Sierra Nevada districts outvote the one senator from teeming, gridlocked L.A. In short order, California reshaped its Senate so that roughly one-third of its members came from L.A. County, and all the other states (except Nebraska, which already had a unicameral legislature) did likewise. The Court’s one-person-one-vote doctrine became the law of the land. And in the process, state senates became entirely redundant. Just how redundant becomes apparent from a survey of the partisan makeup
of each of the legislative bodies in the 49 states with both a house and a senate. In 47 of those states, one party controls both houses, often by very similar margins. (In California, for instance, three-fourths of the members of each house are Democrats; one-fourth, accordingly, are Republicans.) In only two states—Minnesota and Virginia—does one party control one house and the other party control the other, but in both states, the margins are minimal, and could easily move to one-party control at the next election.
Since the 1960s, as the identities of the two parties have grown radically dissimilar, fewer and fewer voters split their tickets. And as the electorate has become more polarized, that polarization has taken on a spatial dimension, with cities becoming more Democratic, rural areas more Republican, and suburbs experiencing more polarized voting as well. As senate districts in some states are overlaid atop assembly districts, the partisan makeup of both are largely the same. Nor is there an appreciable difference in AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13
