Whether or not you agree with every one of its components, the Constitution provides a backbone to the entire existence of the United States. It is the holiest of rules we agree to disagree on and helps us build consensus and set a guide for the fundamental structure of government and rights in our society. No one gets everything they want, but that has been the case since the Constitution was drawn up over 200 years ago.

There’s no dearth of controversy surrounding the Constitution, but the principles of the document are far more popular than the left or right-wing bubbles may imply. There’s stated rights like the right to bear arms underscored in the Second Amendment, which an overwhelming majority of Americans would be against repealing, and there are rights that have emerged based on the current interpretations like the right to an abortion, which is also supported by a majority of Americans. 

The interesting exceptions are those current clauses which have split or even minority support. 43% of Americans want to keep the Electoral College system, which – though a minority – means amending the Constitution to replace it is untenable. Birthright citizenship, which is in the Constitution (namely the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”), rarely breeds overwhelming agreement either. Likewise, 75% of Americans presumably support term limits for members of Congress, which are unconstitutional.

Changing these things, regardless of how controversial or even outright unpopular they may be, is nearly impossible. That’s because amending the Constitution is incredibly difficult. It requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratification by three-quarters (38 out of 50) of the state legislatures. Someday, you may think, there may be such universal abhorrence to the Electoral College that an amendment scrapes by. But that’s hard to imagine since it would require support from a large chunk of the smaller states, all of whom are overrepresented in the Electoral College system.

This is intentional, because a serious fear of the Constitution’s framers was that the larger states would be able to gang up on the smaller states and overwhelm them in national decision making at the federal level. That underwrites why it takes an overwhelming majority to amend the document, it underwrites the Electoral College (presidential campaigns must address concerns in smaller states like Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire if they hope to compete, not just states like California or New York), and – most importantly – it underwrites the United States Senate.

Protections of the rights of minorities over an exuberant majority are a necessary tenant in any guideline for a good government. A person cannot be sentenced to prison and deprived of their liberty without a number of increasingly insurmountable legal steps. The president cannot be removed from office just because a majority of an often-opposed Congress wants them gone, nor can members of the judiciary. And – key in this piece – the rights of Wyoming, the smallest state by population, cannot be trampled by the whims of California, the largest.

Instead, that’s the point of the House of Representatives. California currently has 53 members of the House theoretically advocating for the interests of the state compared to Wyoming’s one.1Of course, they’re not all in agreement either. Currently there are 42 Democrats representing California in the House and 10 Republicans. It wouldn’t be very fair to the rights of the majority if each state had equal say regardless of population, Articles of Confederation style. But in the interest of fostering unity and mutual agreement on how the government should operate, it was deemed necessary to give states some way of advocating on equal footing, and thus the Senate was born through the Connecticut Compromise, which determined that the lower house of Congress would be proportional based on population while the upper house would be equal between the states.2Gotta love the logic of the founders on this one. “Well we can’t agree so let’s just do both!”

It’s been that way ever since, but not without controversy. There’s been a wave of discontent over this arrangement breaking through over the last few years, and they all tend to focus on a key point: that the Senate is undemocratic. 

I’ll cut to the chase. If the last few paragraphs haven’t made this clear enough, we should all agree that the Senate is undemocratic. But it’s supposed to be undemocratic. And it’s not going to change. Not tomorrow, not in 20 years, not in 200 years. You may be thinking that sure, it seems unlikely, but if things got really out of whack surely we could get a constitutional amendment to shift the allocation in the Senate, or abolish it altogether. Setting aside for a moment how difficult it’d be to get two-thirds of the Senate to agree to shake up their own equal power, not to mention three-fourths of the states,3Hey, maybe you use that other very strange method of amending the Constitution via “conventions” in two-thirds and then, once again, three-fourths of the states… the nail in the coffin is that it is explicitly carved out in the Constitution as permanent. It is the one part of the Constitution that cannot be amended.

Article Five of the Constitution, which very succinctly describes how to amend the document, ends by saying as much: “…no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” 

Yes, this antidemocratic epitome of the American experiment is entrenched. That’s not to say there aren’t a number of things that could be amended to reduce the inflated stature of the Senate. The Constitution could be amended to move the confirmation of nominations to the House instead of the Senate, for example, as the Senate is uniquely powerful in the world of upper houses in state legislative bodies (the official Parliament of Australia website even says so, then brags its own Senate is the second-most-powerful). This would counter the seepage of the undemocratic institution into the judiciary and executive nominations in general. Though, after years of watching and covering Congress, I shudder at the thought of the majoritarian vitriol manifested in the reactive House of Representatives having to weigh in on Supreme Court nominations.

It’d be curious to see a write-up to dramatically amend the Constitution to write-around the Senate’s equal suffrage qualification, essentially leaving the Senate as an upper house while stripping much of its legislative and judicial powers (such as trying impeachments) away, but the retention of the chamber in one form or another is set in stone. It’d be easy for progressive reformers to lament this fact, remorseful that the American experiment will forever remain undemocratic in some form or another. Instead, there is something liberating to be found here.

The Senate is the only instrument of federal power that the antidemocratic stain of gerrymandering cannot touch. The House of Representatives is obvious, but thanks to the rules for contingent elections and states who award electoral votes based on congressional districts, this carries slightly into the executive branch too – and from there it seeps into the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Thanks to the 17th Amendment, which created the direct election of senators in lieu of state legislatures selecting them, the Senate has been this way for over a century. Being elected from an unchanging district that represents an entire state has a moderating effect. That’s part of the reason why polarization in the Senate has almost always paced behind the House:

The Senate’s electoral insistence on minority rights and six-year terms also isolate it from the calculus of politicians. In the 2021 impeachment trial of Donald Trump, seven Republican senators voted to convict – just one of them, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, would face voters in the next two years. To put that in a broader context: 14% of the Republicans in the Senate voted to convict Trump, while just shy of 5% of House Republicans voted to impeach him.

Critics of the Senate are right to note the antidemocratic role it plays in federal policymaking. But they are stuck with it. California’s never going to have more senators than Wyoming, and this countermajoritarian institution is here to stay. Antidemocratic representation is the point. And while the Senate’s rural bias has made it undeniably more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole in recent history, the Senate is the more left-leaning of the two chambers historically. Democrats would be wise to remember that the supposedly unrepresentative Senate has consistently killed constitutional amendments banning flag desecration while the House has passed them; the Senate supported 68% of Kennedy and Johnson’s flagship domestic welfare proposals compared to 57% in the House; and it was the Republican-controlled Senate that squashed the House’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

In recognizing the strengths and permanence of the Senate, Americans of all stripes may appreciate an often unstated truth in American history: among a heavily gerrymandered and partisan electorate, majority rule is often against the interests of the minority. Were it not for equal representation in the Senate, a far more rancorous agenda would dominate the American political atmosphere. As representatives and presidents churn every two or four years, a chamber that relies on bipartisanship and continuity of policy is not the worst thing in the world to be stuck with.