In the sweltering summer of 1787 when a convention of the states had been called to write a new Basic Law to govern the former colonies, delegates were at odds over what structure the new government would take.
The convention had been debating the Virginia Plan, which “proposed the creation of a bicameral national legislature, or a legislature consisting of two houses, in which the “rights of suffrage” in both houses would be proportional to the size of the state, according to the official history of the Senate.
That just wouldn’t do, said all the smaller states. That kind of plan favored Virginia, Massachusetts, and other large states. So New Jersey Governor William Paterson came up with a small state plan known as the New Jersey Plan that took a unique view of representation. “A confederacy,” New Jersey’s William Paterson stated, “supposes sovereignty in the members composing it & sovereignty supposes equality.”
“The centerpiece of Paterson’s plan was a unicameral (one-house) legislature in which each state had a single vote,” relates the official history. “The Convention voted down Paterson’s proposal on June 19 and affirmed its commitment to a bicameral legislature on June 21.”
In the end, of course, the convention adopted equal representation in the Senate and “proportional representation” in the House. It’s too bad Paterson’s New Jersey Plan didn’t win out in the end. If it had, it would have spared future generations who are forced to endure the geese in the Senate mucking up the government.
As a “brake on the passions of the people’s House,” the Senate is useful, especially these days when the people’s passions — defined as Democrat’s notions of what the people secretly want — would take the United States to places it should never go.
Otherwise, the Senate should be seen and not heard. That adage was proven true again yesterday as the Senate announced it had come to a bipartisan agreement on its own spending deal to avoid a partial government shutdown.
The deal is an exercise in virtue signaling. It has no chance of passage in the hopelessly factionalized House nominally in control of Republicans.
In that sense, it’s an exercise in futility. But with Democrats in control of the Senate, the political utility of the deal rests in its PR value, showing up House Republicans as nihilists who crave disorder and chaos.
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It hardly matters what’s in the Senate deal. Several poison pills were stuck in the legislation to make sure Republicans would reject it. There’s $6 billion for Ukraine plus $6 billion in disaster relief and zero cuts in spending. The funding levels are far higher than even Senate Republicans were willing to accept.
The big problem for the Senate is that House Republicans refuse to say exactly what they would accept, making the crafting of legislation in the Senate impossible.
“It seems to change every hour, if not by the minute in the House. So I don’t think they know what they can do at this point. But we know what we can do … and that is to send over a [bill] and see what the speaker can do with it,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.
Cornyn added that the Senate is flexible in its approach: “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a final offer. Whatever we need to do to keep the lights on.”
Either Speaker Kevin McCarthy is being obtuse or he’s genuinely unaware of the game being played by the Democrats.
Though the bill might be able to pass the Senate by the time funding expires on Sunday morning, it “ain’t gonna pass the House,” said senior appropriator Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). The legislation amounts to a challenge from one side of the Capitol to the other, where McCarthy has passed just one of his party’s own full-year spending bills. And it sets up exactly the situation that the speaker warned his rebellious conservatives was coming: paralyzed House Republicans getting jammed by the Senate with a bill they refuse to endorse.
Senate Republicans will try to get rid of Ukraine funding in the bill, realizing it’s a deal killer with the House. But if it were only a question of funding the war in Ukraine, that might have been negotiated. Instead, the nihilists and the Democrats are so far apart, that it’s hard to see how they will ever come to an agreement to get the government running at full speed again.
The New Jersey Plan may not have been the ideal direction the Constitution should have gone. The big state-small state argument would probably have intensified over time and led to separation eventually.
But it’s a pleasant fantasy to imagine the United States without a Senate.
