Our US senate is the upper chamber of our congress.

Together with our house of representatives in the lower chamber it rules across the land as a bicameral legislature.

It’s composed of senators, each representing a single state. Each state is represented by two senators who serve staggered terms of six years. There are currently one hundred senators representing the fifty states.

First convened in 1789, our senate was based on the ancient Roman Senate. Its name is derived from senatus, Latin for council of elders. Senex means old man in Latin.

In his “Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787”, James Madison made the following comment about the foundation of our senate.

‘If elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body, and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.’

To be clear, our senate is constituted to protect the landed proprietors, the opulent minority against the majority. Our senate is constituted to permanently protect vested interests from innovation.

The plain truth is our senate is there to retain and maintain the status quo, and ensure it’s never, ever challenged.

We’re not a democracy. Not even close. Our present form of government allows a tiny and very conservative minority to dictate federal laws and policies for the majority.

Key legislation and the approval of supreme court nominees rests with our senate where an extremely conservative minority in less populated states holds enormous and outsize power over more moderate and far more populated states.

New York, with a population of more than 20 million has two senators. California, with a population of nearly 40 million and the seventh-largest economy in the world has two senators.

While Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming with a combined population less than California have twenty-six senators.

It’s a fucking travesty. The whole reason America was founded in the first place was because we sought a more just and representative form of government.

Our electoral system is severely broken. It’s corrupted by the conservative supermajority on the supreme court while gerrymandering has corrupted the electoral process to the point where only politicians now choose who elects them.

The undemocratic electoral college, the filibuster, the callousness and fecklessness of politicians all prove the system is broken beyond repair. (Although weighted voting might help. Divide the senate voting power according to population. So California has forty times the voting power of, say, Montana, because it has forty times more people. Because that’s how democracy works.)

It’s time for an amendment. Time to dissolve the senate and toss this ancient and unfair method of false representation into the dump bin of history.

Time to shift to a unicameral legislature with a single assembly that truly represents us and moves us all forward

Smaller and less meddlesome government? That’s something every Republican can get behind, right.

Even all those old senators.