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Business Standard Packed court, unrepresentative senate: Is America Becoming a Failed State?

G.O.P. obstruction did a lot of damage even during the Obama years

As I write this, it seems extremely likely that Joe Biden has won the presidency.

And he clearly received millions more votes than his opponent. He can and should claim that he has been given a strong mandate to govern the nation.

But there are real questions about whether he will, in fact, be able to govern.

At the moment, it seems likely that the Senate — which is wildly unrepresentative of the American people — will remain in the hands of an extremist party that will sabotage Biden in every way it can.

Before I get into the problems this confrontation is likely to cause, let’s talk about just how unrepresentative the Senate is.

Every state, of course, has two senators — which means that Wyoming’s 579,000 residents have as much weight as California’s 39 million. The overweighted states tend to be much less urbanized than the nation as a whole. And given the growing political divide between metropolitan and rural areas, this gives the Senate a strong rightward tilt.

An analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight.com found that the Senate in effect represents an electorate almost seven percentage points more Republican than the average voter. Cases like Susan Collins, who held on in a Democratic state, are exceptions; the underlying right-wing skew of the Senate is the main reason the G.O.P. will probably retain control despite a substantial Democratic victory in the presidential popular vote.

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