Minority rule is the opposite of democracy, but let’s not talk about how America is failing to be a democracy.
It’s weird that the Biden Administration is holding a virtual “Democracy Summit” this Wednesday and Thursday, with the leaders of about 100 countries expected to attend. For if democracy means majority rule, then the United States isn’t much of a democracy.
The U.S. Senate is split 50–50, but the fifty Democratic senators represent 184.5 million people while the fifty Republican senators represent just 143 million. Wyoming has just 583,000 residents but it gets two senators, just like California, which has almost 40 million residents. So each Wyoming resident is 67 times as powerful as a Californian in the U.S. Senate. Nearly 700,000 people live in Washington, DC but they get no power in Congress. Same with the 2.7 million inhabitants of Puerto Rico.
As Todd Tucker wrote in 2019 report for the Roosevelt Institute, “A majority of the US population lives in just 10 states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina). Yet combined, these 164 million people control only 10 percent of the Senate’s votes.”
The Senate also governs itself by archaic rules that allow a minority of Senators to block legislation favored by a majority, which leads to bizarre headlines like “Legislation to pass X fails to pass by a vote of 56–44 in favor.”
Because the Senate is vested with the power of confirming appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, that third branch of government is now stocked with justices confirmed by senate votes that represented only a minority of the country. Three of them were nominated by President Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016. And each of those three — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were confirmed by narrow Senate votes where the population of the states from the senators voting in favor is much smaller that the population of states whose senators voting against. For example, the 54 senators who voted to confirm Gorsuch got about 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million.
This same Supreme Court has already weakened federal voting rights legislation designed to protect access to the ballot and greenlighted the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, another way that both parties have sought to engineer elections to their advantage. And the Trump-made conservative majority on the Supreme Court is very likely about to take away a woman’s right to choose an abortion — something a majority of Americans would prefer be kept legal.
If Biden was serious about the democracy gap in America, he could push the Democratic-controlled Congress to add more justices to the Supreme Court. And he could urge Democrats to make the District of Columbia a state, and offer the people of Puerto Rico that choice as well.
Biden’s Democracy Summit isn’t expected to talk about any of these issues. He’s instead asking leaders to “announce specific actions and commitments to meaningful internal reforms and international initiatives that advance the Summit’s goals,” which are “defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, [and] promoting respect for human rights.”
These are all worthy goals. And it’s important for the United States to try to strengthen democratic trends worldwide and put pressure on the world’s dictators. But living under the forms of minority rule I’ve just described is itself a form of authoritarianism. Allowing people to wield power without the consent of the majority enables corruption. And whether the minority in power is a dictator of one or a minority in Congress, the result is often disrespect for human rights.
The people in the Biden White House and State Department surely believe that, on the margin, what they are doing by convening this week’s Democracy Summit will help oppressed people around the world and demonstrate that, at least compared to last inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, we’re not fans of dictators or torturers. I suppose that’s progress. But American democracy is in need of a similar level of attention. Imagine if instead of this showy international event, high-level officials had spent the last 11 months planning and then convening a huge gathering of all the local, state and national level groups in America striving to save our democracy. It would be a mess and probably a huge time-suck too, but then at least we’d have a forum for demanding that the Biden Administration actually do more at home to meet the ideals that they’re championing abroad.