The Least Dangerous Chamber?

In the comments of my previous post, Big Jim said that perhaps the composition of the Senate serves an important goal of federalism. If legislation that is not universally popular is hard to push through the Senate, there will be less federal regulation imposed on people who don't want it. Congress, in a federal system, is not where the bulk of legislation is supposed to come from, so impediments to majority rule at the federal level are not a bad thing.

There is another, broader point contained in here, however. As a wise man once wrote:

[T]he more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority . . . while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

Remember what I wrote in an earlier post: The value of of democratic government or republican government is not democracy; democracy is not an end in itself. (Another one of the commenters on my previous post expressed this idea more colorfully, using a quote from the same author I just quoted.) Democracy is merely one instantiation of—perhaps one means to—self-government. And perhaps it's true. The Heinlein quote above gives a pretty good reason why ideal self-government may not be majoritarian. Perhaps a Congress whose structure stands as an impediment to law-making is a good thing.

However, there is one more wrinkle in all of this. The Senate does not favor no legislation; it favors legislation favored by small states. This is, perhaps, why the populous coastal states give more money to the federal government than they get back, and why rural interior states get more money from the federal government than they pay in. This is the mores of rural America tend to trump the mores of urban America in Congress. If small states can push through legislation instead of simply blocking legislation, then the defense of the Senate that I just wrote does not hold. A law doesn't have to be good or universally popular to be passed through the Senate; it just has to be favored by 26 states—which need not have any more than 16% of Americans in total. However, to the extent that (at least in the current party system) smaller states tend to be more cautious about federal regulation (except on certain types of "values" issues), the defense holds true to some degree.