The Economist’s Democracy in America blog has a post up today recommending the abolishment of the Senate. (Our own Dylan Matthews has the specifics.) As the DA notes, it would be functionally impossible to get rid of the Senate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea. Preach it, anonymous blogger!

“The Senate embodies no rational philosophy of governance, and has a completely irrational electoral system. There is no representational philosophy that would legitimate apportioning the most powerful legislators in the country according to arbitrary and widely disparate numbers of voters, representing arbitrary tracts of land that owe their boundaries to the whims of land granters centuries ago. The fact that there are two senators each from North Dakota, Delaware, Texas and California is flat-out insane.”

Quick side note. As Matt Yglesias pointed out yesterday, far more people live in Queens than in the two Dakotas combined. The separate Dakotas exist merely because ye-olden Republicans wanted twice the senatorial payload when they made the Dakota territory two states in the late nineteenth century.

Anyway, back to the Economist post.

“The Senate was a compromise solution intended to accomplish certain goals in 1789. Those goals have long become irrelevant, and the unintended consequences have overwhelmed the institution.”

The compromise was meant to accommodate the Southern states, which were nervous that the more populous North would be able to out maneuver them politically on key regional issues if all representation was based on population. Key regional issues like, oh, say, slavery. The Senate’s incongruous beginning has defined its existence. Slavery was legally preserved through Upper Chamber machinations, and after the war, the Senate was used most often to block civil rights legislation (like anti-lynching bills) or labor law reform. And imagine what we would have without the Senate today: stronger healthcare reform than we are likely to get, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, and the Employee Free Choice Act.

Of course, we’ll never actually get rid of the Senate. But maybe the filibuster…