I read a phrase the other day, attributed to James Madison, that troubled me greatly. The phrase is “… to protect the minority of the opulent.”
So I decided to look it up. The National Archives gives two versions of Madison’s statement:
Robert Yates’ version:
“Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.”
John Lansing’s version:
”The Government ought to be so organized as to give a balance to it and protect one order of men from the predominating influence of the other. The Senate ought to represent the opulent minority.”
This concept of “opulence” stunned me. It is what caused the framers of the Constitution to create the Senate of the United States.
Not only that. It was the source of the Electoral College as well. Even back then, money ruled!
I can’t repeat the phrase that occurs to me when I think about this, not in the refined format of this commentary, but it has to do with excrement of males of the bovine species.
It didn’t occur to Madison, however, that this concept of the Senate could totally unbalance the government in the exact opposite, most undemocratic, way.
How could it have, at that time? Yet, today, it gives the most power to the least populous states!
The Senate is set up so that each state gets two senators. Very democratic!
But that gives Wyoming, the smallest population state — with 600,000 people — the same number of senators as California, the largest state with 40 million people.
That gives a resident in Wyoming 70 times the voting power in the Senate than a California resident has! Very undemocratic!
California’s population equals that of the 21 lowest population states combined! They have 42 senators, and we have two. The few now dominate the many!
Why shouldn’t we have 42 senators? Better yet, do we even need a Senate at all?
So, in order to overcome the great inequities that England placed on the colonies, Madison and our other founders encapsulated a different inequity — the “opulent Senate” — into our Constitution.
To summarize: we do not live in a democracy. Democracy means each person has equal share in electing leaders. We live in an “opulency,” a plutocracy.
It is controlled by the “opulent plutocrats” who fund and control the parties, and who target and control the vote in low population states, among other things.
Jimmy, that’s why you deserve a good slap in the face! That is the whole point of this commentary: who gets to decide what’s “good,” the people or the opulent majority?
On the other hand, looking at the situation on a deeper level, what Madison may really have been saying to the Constitutional Convention was: “Look, do you want to break away from England or not? Do you want to have at least a relative democracy or not? If the rich landowners, especially from the South (including me), don’t have this phrasing in the Constitution, we are not going to vote for it! Do you want to create a new, independent country or not? Sign here.”
Thus, the “art of compromise” was founded. In order to change big inequities in society, you agree to little yet inequitable compromises.
But equity, fairness and even compromise have all disappeared from Congress now!
All rules of men are man-made, for most places in most of history. Look at how long it took us to admit women to vote! How long will it take us to make up and pass some rules that will make this a real democracy?
Question of the day: How do we change things that are so patently undemocratic, when the mechanism for changing them says we need three-quarters of the states to ratify changes in the Constitution?
That is the problem to resolve. We are in charge of our lives, not dead Jimmy Madison.
Vote for a president and Congress who can start the changes that fulfill the spirit, not the letter, of the law — and not the forces of plutocracy!