A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on December 5th, 2009 in US News

Increasingly, there is little difference between the methods of the far left and those of the far right. Take, for example, the use of the Senate filibuster. Air America’s Mark Green is today’s example of liberals behaving ignorantly:

To reach unanimity at the Constitutional Convention, the 1787 “Connecticut Compromise” created a House of Representatives allocating seats by population (favoring big states) and a Senate allocating seats by state (favoring small states). That was one thing when states were somewhat similar in populations, not now when California is 68 times the size of Wyoming. So today each California senator represents 68 times the number of people as a Wyoming senator. Or 10 times that of each Connecticut senator.

Ugh. Take a civics class, will you?
The debate was between the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. Virginia wanted representation in Congress to be based on population, so every person would have about the same say in what happened. New Jersey wanted every state to have the same say. It wasn’t okay to base everything on population, or else there would have been no debate at all and we’d have a unicameral Congress.

Now take a look at the historical data. In 1790, the first year a census was conducted, the state of Delaware had fifty-nine thousand people. Virginia had 746 thousand (691K in Virginia and 55K in W. Virginia, since the two states were not separated at the time). So right off the bat, Virginia had twelve times as many people as Delaware – and that means that it was less of a problem then than the example of California and Connecticut today.

Plus, four states held nearly half of the total population. There were a total of 3.9 million people in the country and Virginia (746K), Pennsylvania (434K), N. Carolina (393K), and Massachusetts (378K) combined for 1.95 million. Meanwhile, the bottom four – Delaware (59K), Rhode Island (68K), Vermont (85K), and Georgia (82K) combined for only 294K. But each block of four states had exactly eight Senators. WTF? Did the Founders hate equality and democracy or something?

The answer is: Of course, not. But they did intend for the Senate to be something besides an echo of the House of Representatives. The House is designed to be the voice of the people while the Senate is designed to be the voice of the individual states.

Green’s further error is thinking that Joe Lieberman is single-handedly stopping health-care reform. He isn’t. Sixty votes are needed to proceed to a vote and Democrats have only fifty-nine votes in their pocket – so Joe Lieberman is no more responsible for holding up health-care than the other forty Senators who are refusing to vote. It isn’t the filibuster that’s stopping things, it’s rank partisanship.

It’s just as disingenuous to single out Lieberman as it is to forget that, not so long ago, Democrats were threatening to shut down the Senate if the filibuster were not upheld. It’s almost as bad as this scare tactic:

Only 10% of Americans living in 20 small states have nearly the votes needed to continue a filibuster and kill any essential health care reform – or any policy reform for that matter. 10% can in effect veto 90%, something the Founders never desired or expected.

Take a look at the numbers I put up above – in 1790, the population from the four smallest states was only seven percent of the whole, but they could hold things up just as effectively as those twenty small states can today. I would argue that it would have been easier for them to do so, because there were fewer people to hold together as a voting bloc.

The problem here is that Green is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to make democracy work. Democrats just need to convince voters in one more state to send another Democrat – or a Republican who is willing to vote – to Congress. But that’s a slow solution and unsure, so it’s better to just change the rules so we can get our way now, right?

No, not if you believe in the version of American democracy that has been around for two hundred years. As James Madison wrote:

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.

The solution, as Madison sees it, is not to monkey around with the rights of the minority – because you may one day be in the minority yourself – it is to simply use the electoral system to defeat the obstructionists. You know – like Democrats did in 2006 and 2008.

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