What is "representation" in the Senate?

The notion of a Senate body in which each state gets equal voice pisses me off to begin with. Wyoming has the same "weight" in the Senate as California, though it has 1.45% of the population of the state. That's right, CA outweighs WY by a factor of 69 in population but is equal in terms of Senate representation. The concept of democracy is majority rule with inalienable minority rights. But does that mean the minority's voice has to be equal to the majority's when the latter is 70:1 larger than the former? We all know that when it comes to getting things done in Washington, the Senate is the place that lobbyists target because it's easiest to gum up the works.

And that's part of the problem. I know that everyone thinks the Founders were infallible and their wisdom about this system of checks and balances is inerrant. But when you look at the fact that the GOP has turned filibustering (another "check" on the majority party) into standard procedure, and the relative difficulty of passing bills that have huge public support, it should make you wonder.

In reading today's NYT report about how the six members of the Senate Finance Committee all but hold the healthcare reform effort hostage to their own desire, I am angry at how these 6 Senators, 3 Dems and 3 GOP, are supposed to "represent" me and the rest of the country. Let's look at what states they hail from and how large those states are in terms of their population percentage of our nation of around 304,059,724 people**:

baucus - montana (0.318%)
conrad - ND (0.211%)
bingaman - NM (0.653%)

dem total: 1.18%

snowe - maine (0.433%)
grassley - iowa (0.987%)
enzi - wyoming (0.175%)

repub total: 1.60%

rep + dem = 2.78%

That's right. The six people who have all but decided a public option isn't necessary and a surtax on millionaires to pay for reform is just too much, despite the absurd inequality that the Bush tax cuts brought about that these "fiscally conservative" hypocrites helped vote for, come from states with a total of under 3% of the US population. That just sucks.

Remember David Brooks' remark,

"It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates."

Republicans can remark that the Democratic party is full of "insular liberals" from urban areas all they want, since those same areas hold the majority of the population of this great nation.*** We members of the Urban Archipelago make up the majority of the nation in population terms, and tend to be more progressive in politics. And so the majority of us aren't as "moderate" as all the talking heads want everyone to believe, it's just that the way the Senate skews power moderates are literally holding us all hostage to what they think is right. And those of us with voting power will remember that, despite how much our constitutional right of representation gets fuc*ed by the system.

(Gail Collins also made this point about Baucus' perverse amount of power, "Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.")

**All data from 2008 figures at census.gov

***World Bank data,Table A2 Urbanization, p337 for the US shows the 2005 population of our country is 80.8% urban and that by 2015 it is expected to be 83.7% urban. From the same table, in 2005 43.3% of our national population resided in cities with a population of over 1,000,000 people.