February 13, 2010
In contemporary American political life, only the rich can afford to be politically impatient. The big question: How long will the rest of us tolerate such a unrepresentative political status quo?
By Sam Pizzigati
Four score years ago, amid the tumult of the Great Depression, Americans rethought their democracy. Out of that rethinking came the New Deal — and a generation of steadily growing equality and prosperity.
Might our current Great Recession trigger another new epoch of rethinking? Annie Lowrey, an editor with America’s most influential foreign policy journal, hopes so — and she’s doing her part. If we Americans believe in representative government, a Lowrey column suggested earlier this month, why do we tolerate an institution as anti-democratic as the U.S. Senate?
Our Senate allocates votes strictly by state. America’s 21 smallest states currently hold just a tenth of the nation’s total population. Yet these states have enough Senate votes, between them, to prevent the passage of any legislation.
What would happen, Lowrey wonders, if we allocated senators by some other yardstick? Imagine, she asks, if our 100 senators represented income brackets and not states, “with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent, and so on.”
If we allocated Senate votes that way, then 94 of our 100 senators would owe their election to Americans making under $100,000 a year.
In our current Senate, we have essentially the exact opposite. The vast majority of our senators owe their election to America’s most affluent.
Indeed, to reach the Senate today, you either have to be wealthy — two-thirds of our current senators have personal net worths over $1 million — or espouse an agenda that a significant number of wealthy contributors will find appealing.
And woe unto you should you turn, once in office, less appealing. The wealthy will turn the spigot off, as the Obama White House now seems to be learning. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment