Should the senate be changed?

[Alcibiades]

The state boundaries are completely arbitrary. It would be one thing to argue giving all states equal weight regardless of population if the US contained strong regional/national/linguistic identities like Spain or Switzerland, but it doesn’t.

Why should rural plains voters be protected from urban coastal ones? Why not the other way around? Why not blacks from whites? Hispanics from Anglos? etc. Why should the value of your vote be determined by the population density of your community?

I could see the case for state-based upper house if this upper house was less powerful than the lower house, like virtually every bicameral country. But the US is bizarre in that its less representative upper house is actually more powerful than its lower house.

Much of the debate on this thread has centred around the negative future implications of the Senate’s lack of proportionality while arguing it has in the past provided stable government. Many seem to be forgetting that this lack of proportionality has already had a detrimental effect on the US. For decades, the Southern states essentially used the Senate and their outsize influence in it to hold the rest of the country to hostage and prevent federal civil rights legislation, while engaging in egregious pork barrel.