Now, when a judge the Left doesn’t like is, in Brett Kavanaugh, seated on the high bench, the complaining starts about how the senators who confirmed him didn’t represent a majority of the voters. “It’s not about Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior. It’s about justices who do not represent the will of the majority,” says a column in the Times by no less a figure than Michael Tomasky.
That, of course, would be like complaining that the justices do not, say, take in home sewing. It’s not their job to take in home sewing. Their job is decide actual cases and controversies. Nor is it the job of the senators to represent the will of the majority. That is the job of the Representative House, the only house whose seats are apportioned by population. The job of the Senators is to represent the states.
That’s the Senate’s very purpose. The Left likes to suggest that the only reason for this was to protect slavery. Yet even the original Constitution anticipated an end to slavery. It still made the equal representation of the states in the Senate the only feature of the parchment that could never be amended absent the consent of the state being denied equal representation.
I blame the 17th Amendment. The Senate is no longer chosen by the State governments but by the people, same as the House. In effect we have two Houses of Representatives. The State governments are unrepresented.
Do you really think that a Senate that represented the States would vote unfunded mandates on their States?
