What Ancient Rome Tells Us About Today’s Senate
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.
The U.S. Senate’s abdication of duty at the start of this Memorial Day weekend, when 11 senators (nine of them Republican) did not even show up to vote on authorizing an investigation of the January 6 insurrection, makes the item below particularly timely.
Fifty-four senators (including six Republicans) voted to approve the investigative commission. Only 35 opposed it.
But in the institutionalized rule-of-the-minority that is the contemporary Senate, the measure “failed.” The 54 who supported the measure represented states totaling more than 190 million people. The 35 who opposed represented fewer than 105 million. (How do I know this? You take the list of states by population; you match them to senators; you split the apportioned population when a state’s two senators voted in opposite ways; and you don’t count population for the 11 senators who didn’t show up.)
The Senate was, of course, not designed to operate on a pure head-count basis. But this is a contemporary, permanent imbalance beyond what the practical-minded drafters of the Constitution would have countenanced.
Why “contemporary”? Because was not part of the constitutional balance-of-power scheme. As Adam Jentleson explains in his authoritative book ,“real” filibusters, with senators orating for hours on
