Filiblustering

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:

"The filibuster allows a minority within a legislative body to thwart the will of a majority. But that is hardly the worst of the Senate's democratic imperfections, most of which spring from the arithmetical disparity among state populations. Fifty-one senators - a majority - can represent states with as little as seventeen per cent of the American people. Sixty senators - enough to stop a filibuster - can represent as little as twenty-four per cent. That's theory. What about reality? Well, if each of every state's two senators is taken to represent half that state's population, then the Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority - a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time."

Hendrik Hertzberg is one of my two favorite political writers these days. He goes on, in this article, to point out that the fillibuster has historically been used for fairly non-progressive goals - it slowed down anti-lynching laws and other civil rights legislation, for example.