11.6: The Antimajoritarian Congress

The basic structure of Congress, as befitting a democratic legislature, is majoritarian. Members are elected by pluralities or majorities of their constituents, and most committee and chamber decisions require plurality or majority support to go forward. Some aspects of Congress, however, allow minorities to thwart majorities. Unsurprisingly, these same aspects are among Congress’s most controversial.

The distribution of congressional seats to states is not precisely proportional to those states’ populations. Some disproportionality is inevitable in any legislature, but the equal Senate (each electing two senators) exacerbates this disproportionality. California (the most populous state) has 67 times the population of Wyoming (the least populous state) but only 18 times as many members of Congress (54 versus 3). In other words, a Wyomingite has roughly four times as much representation in Congress as a Californian does. Just as this disproportionality enables the Electoral College (as discussed in the previous chapter) to award the presidency to the popular vote loser, it allows parties and policies supported by a minority of citizens to find majority support in Congress, even if each member of Congress votes how a majority of his or her constituents would.

Gerrymandering can exacerbate the disproportionate nature of congressional elections. A gerrymander is a district whose boundaries are drawn with the intent to influence election outcomes by including certain voters and excluding others. Most congressional districts in the United States are drawn by state legislatures. If one party controls a state’s legislature, it can improve its performance in congressional elections by cleverly crafting maps that maximize the efficiency of its votes relative to its opponent’s. Illinois Democrats used gerrymanders when redrawing their congressional districts in 2021. Under the squiggly new map (displayed on the right in Figure 11.3 below), Democrats won 82% (14 out of 17) of Illinois’s U.S. House seats in the 2024 elections, despite only earning 53% of the statewide popular vote.

Figure 11.3: Illinois congressional districts, 2013–2032 (Source: U.S. Census Bureau)

Because state boundaries are not periodically redrawn the way congressional districts are, the Senate is immune to the gerrymandering that afflicts the House. But the Senate has its own unique antimajoritarian quirk in the form of the filibuster. Under Senate rules, a supermajority of 60 votes is usually required to invoke cloture—that is, to end debate on a topic and move to a vote. The minority party in the Senate can leverage this requirement to block a majority, either by giving interminably long speeches (sometimes many hours long) or, more often, by simply refusing to vote for cloture. The majority party has some procedural tools at its disposal to get around filibusters, but these are rarely used, generally only in extreme circumstances. Thus, for most Senate business, a simple majority is not enough to proceed if the minority is committed to obstruction.

Some antimajoritarian aspects of Congress are established in the Constitution, making them hard to change. The disproportionate nature of the Senate is not only laid out in Article I but also buttressed by Article V’s insistence that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Others are far more pliable. Some states delegate the task of district-drawing to independent, nonpartisan commissions, and the Senate can amend its rules to limit or abolish the filibuster. The fact that these aspects persist suggests that a sufficient number of those who could change them perceive some advantage in maintaining the status quo, even if it means curtailing majority rule.