Article I, Section 3, Clause 1: “The Senate of the united States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”
Originally published as part of the “90-Day Study of the U. S. Constitution,” Constituting America, February 28, 2011.
Publius famously asserted that “the science of politics” had “received great improvement” in modern times. (Some fifty years later, Tocqueville rather more dramatically—he was French—called for “an new political science for a world altogether new.”) The newness of American politics and of American political science consisted of two things: first, our freedom from rule by monarchic dynasties and titled aristocrats; second, our freedom from the already formidably centralized governments of Europe. The “New World” that Europeans had ‘discovered’ was new to them; what they had discovered was of course a very old world populated by Amerindian nations and tribes. It was new to the Europeans. The real newness of the New World arose from the politics of the European settlers, governing themselves largely unsupervised by European ruling classes and institutions.
Freedom from monarchs and aristocrats meant that Americans could found a regime not seen since antiquity, a republic in which the people were sovereign, with no admixture of any families or classes that claimed a superior right to rule. For example, although most states required property ownership of voters and office-holders, nothing but ill luck or incapacity barred today’s pauper from property ownership and full citizenship rights tomorrow. The socially egalitarian regime of the United States could better reflect the natural equality of human beings enunciated in the declaration of Independence, vindicated in the revolutionary war for independence.
Political communities coalesce not only in the form of their regimes. They also form themselves as relatively large or small societies in terms of population and territory and as relatively centralized or decentralized with respect to their ruling structures. The polis of ancient Greece, small and centralized, contrasted sharply with the contemporary empires of Persia and of China—huge but decentralized entities which gave their provinces substantial latitude for self-government because they had to. In antiquity, no ruler commanded a ruling apparatus that could do much more than exact tribute from the peoples it conquered, quell uprisings among them, and defend imperial borders.
The modern state changed this. Envisioned in principle by the Italian Renaissance writer, Niccolò Machiavelli, and put into practice by the tudor dynasty in England, the Bourbon dynasty in France, and many others, the state combined some of the size of an empire with some of the centralization of the polis or ‘city-state.’ With their standing, professional armies funded by revenues collected by state employees or ‘bureaucrats’ from societies whose energies were funneled into commercial acquisition, and industrial productivity spurred by the new, experimental science aiming at the conquest of nature—all guided by reformed financial institutions—states quickly became the most powerful political entities ever seen.
The American Founders needed to frame a modern state in order to defend American citizens from the statist empires of Europe that still bordered them to the north and south, and also from the still-powerful Amerindians in the west. As we know, they wanted a republican regime for this state. But could a centralized, modern state have a republican regime (and keep it, as Benjamin Franklin pointedly remarked)? Did the centralized ruling apparatus of modern statism not lend itself to the rule of the one or of the few? European statesmen thought so; for the next century, they expected the new republic to implode. On occasion, it very nearly did.
The invention of statesmen devising a new political science for a new world, the United States Senate answers these questions, both with respect to the regime of republicanism and the polity of statist confederalism.
At the Philadelphia Convention, the Framers eventually agreed that the unicameral legislature of the Articles of Confederation should be replaced by the bicameral legislature that had been most copiously advocated by John Adams in his treatise, Defence of the Constitutions of the United States. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania argued for bicameralism as a pillar of what Aristotle and other classical political philosophers had called a ‘mixed regime’—one that balanced the rule of the few who are rich with the rule of the many who are poor. The Senate, Morris said, ought to represent the interests of the commercial oligarchies consisting of urban merchants and financiers as well as country gentlemen. The House ought to represent everyone else—particularly the middling classes of small farmers and shopkeepers. “The two forces will control each other,” providing “a mutual check and a mutual security,” Morris asserted. The British Constitution exemplified such a mixed regime, albeit with a House of Lords—titled aristocrats—not American-style commoners who happened to be wealthy. John Dickinson of Delaware hoped that the Senate would “bear as strong a resemblance to the British House of Lords as possible.”
James Madison of Virginia saw the regime implications of the Senate more clearly. The Senators would represent no particular class or caste; they would represent the constituent states of the United States. Without titles of nobility (banned in the Constitution) or any other set standard of wealth, the senators as such would have no interests separate from those of the people. The Senate therefore would fit easily into a pure or unmixed republic. At the same time, the six-year terms of office would lend the Senate some of the virtues of an aristocracy: steadiness of purpose, the tendency to take a longer view of things that was unlikely among the representatives in the more democratic House, with their biannual re-election worries.
The design of the Senate also addressed the dilemma of statism. Under the Articles of Confederation, the country had suffered from the inefficiencies, injustices, and dangers of excessive decentralization. At the Convention, however, delegates from the smaller states in the Confederation feared relinquishing any more of their sovereignty, fearing domination by the large states. The Framers had already tied the House to the democratic principle of proportioning the number of representatives from each state to the size of its population. Large-state delegates advanced the Virginia Plan: a bicameral legislature, membership of both houses being determined by population. Small-state delegates countered with the New Jersey Plan, which would have retained the Articles of Confederation’s unicameral legislature, with one vote per state. All accounts of the Convention emphasize that the debate between small-state and large-state delegates consumed more time and energy than any other item. How could the small states defend themselves in the new legislature without sacrificing the just, republican claims of the large states?
The answer—called the Connecticut Compromise because advanced by Roger Sherman of that state but also propounded by Dickinson—stipulated bicameralism but with two different modes of election that satisfied both sides and also guaranteed the independence of one house from the other. If the senators were selected by the House, the Senate would have no independence and bicameralism would be nominal; if Senators were selected by voters in each state they might prove better demagogues than statesmen. The compromise established that state legislators choose the senators. The legislators would have every reason to send their ablest men to defend the interests of their state in the national capital—men of “distinguished characters,” as Dickinson put it. For his part Sherman joined George Mason of Virginia in arguing that confederal union must give each state—especially the small ones—the means of defending themselves within the national councils.
Setting the number of each state’s senators at two accomplished all of these purposes. As John Randolph of Virginia argued, a Senate smaller than the House would be “exempt from the passionate proceedings to which numerous assemblies are liable”; the more intimate chamber would conduce more to deliberation than to verbal pyrotechnics. This comported with the ‘aristocratic’ character of the Senate. At the same time, delegations of two senators instead of one reduced the risk of a state being disenfranchised by accident or illness. Finally, giving every state an equal number of senators calmed the fears of the smaller states; confederalism would sustain them, not overwhelm them.
By designing the United States Senate, the Framers thus addressed both the ‘regime’ questions and the ‘polity’ question. The Senate reinforces the republican regime by providing an institutional platform for deliberation and steadiness of purpose that a large, unicameral legislature might lack. The Senate also reinforced a confederal polity—a modern state sufficiently centralized and powerful to defend itself in a dangerous world, but sufficiently responsible to its constituent political parts to prevent that centralized power from usurping the right and duty of self-government.
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