Solving America’s Biggest Crisis: Abolish the Senate

The United States Senate is a corrupt, antidemocratic, obstructionist, and failed institution whose only purpose is to kill good ideas when those ideas threaten billionaires and corporations.

The Senate was originally created to keep power in the hands of rich white male landowners during the establishment of popular democracy in the United States, and the Senate should have been abolished in 1820 when it became a deliberate compromise on preserving slavery, but instead it’s been elevated as the most powerful institution in American government, and is directly responsible for this country’s current political, social, and economic failures.

The Senate has no place in our legislative system, and should be abolished as soon as humanly possible. In fact, most other countries that have grappled with the failures of similarly powerful political aristocracies tend to reduce them to ceremonial roles that don’t have any real power - like the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. But in the United States, our rich, white, elderly cabal of power brokers have unlimited minority veto power over efforts to reform institutional failures.

The Senate is the reason that we can’t pass voting protections, marijuana legalization, universal healthcare, student loan debt forgiveness, a minimum wage increase, or any other ideas that if offered as a vote to the American people, would pass with nearly unanimous support. Even the Senate itself isn’t ruled by it’s own majority - as we’ve repeatedly seen, the filibuster rule means that 40% of Senators can single handedly kill popular legislation. But the answer isn’t to repeal the filibuster rule, it’s to repeal the Senate, because fundamentally, having an upper chamber of Congress that’s based on the number of states not the number of people, means that where people live is more important than what people want.

We didn’t even get to choose our own Senators until 1913 - it is historically, and currently, perhaps now more than ever, an anti-democratic, and totally unnecessary institution. We are watching, in real-time as individual senators subvert the explicitly stated will of the American public through petulant and open corruption - a multi-millionaire coal baron who lives on a boat is single handedly preventing an absurdly overdue transition to clean energy, a bizarrely overrepresented political class of white supremacists are eagerly voting against holding criminal proceedings for crimes of insurrection that we all saw happen live, just months ago.

There is a blatant disregard within the Senate for representing the country instead of representing the interests of the ultra-wealthy and the companies in which they hold stocks - because that’s where Senate members make their outrageous fortunes while serving public office. And as time goes on, the number of people actually represented by the Senate is shrinking to effectively zero.

Within two decades, less than a third of the country will hold 70% of the power in the Senate, and demographically, they will be white. While the United States continues to evolve into a multicultural society where the majority is no longer mono-ethnically white, the Senate is nowhere close to reflecting the rest of the country. In the last 230 years, nearly 2,000 Senators have wielded power in the United States - only 11 of them were Black, and five of them were Barack Obama, Tim Scott, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Raphael Warnock.

The average Senator is 64.3 years old, two-thirds of them are millionaires, 89% are white, 76% are male. By comparison, the average American is 38 years old and makes $47,520 a year. The United States is 60% white and 49.2% male. But you don’t need those numbers to already know that the Senate doesn’t reflect the average American, it reflects the wealth class of the United States, and its relentless grip on power at the expense of everyone else. 

The Senate is a malignancy, a defensive wall against progress, equality, and justice in the face of a society that has been exploited by the wealth class for the entire history of this country. Abolishing the Senate isn’t a radical idea, it’s the last sensible idea we have to keep America from total collapse while Senators actively siphon every drop of wealth and power from the American people to their friends and donors.