The United States Senate

The Senate was the price of the Constitution. Small states would not ratify a document that gave Virginia and Pennsylvania control of the legislature, so the Connecticut Compromise paired a population-based House with a chamber in which every state, large or small, holds exactly two seats. Article V makes that equality the one provision no amendment can take from a state without its consent. The Senate reached its first quorum on April 6, 1789, counted the electoral votes that made George Washington President, and has sat continuously since. One hundred senators serve staggered six-year terms, so a third of the body faces voters every two years and the chamber is never entirely new.

Senators were chosen by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, moved the election to the voters. A senator must be 30, a citizen for nine years, and an inhabitant of the state. The Vice President presides and votes only to break a tie. In practice the chamber is run by the majority and minority leaders, elected by their parties, and the president pro tempore, by custom the longest-serving majority senator, who stands third in the line of succession. Because the chamber is small and its members long-tenured, the Senate operates largely by unanimous consent, and a single senator can slow almost anything.

The Senate holds powers the House does not. It confirms or rejects the President's nominees for the cabinet, the federal courts, ambassadorships, and hundreds of other posts, and ratifies treaties by a two-thirds vote. When the House impeaches, the Senate sits as the court, with two-thirds required to convict and remove. Its most famous feature, the filibuster, is not in the Constitution. It grew out of the absence of any rule to end debate, and since 1975 it has taken sixty votes to invoke cloture on most legislation. Nominations are the exception: majorities changed the rules in 2013 and 2017 so that judges and executive appointees can be confirmed by simple majority.

The chamber is routinely described as the least representative legislature in the democratic world, since Wyoming's half-million residents and California's thirty-nine million each send two senators. Its defenders answer that the design is deliberate and that the Senate's slowness has stopped as many bad laws as good ones. The live argument is over the filibuster: whether to abolish it, restore the talking filibuster, or leave it as the sixty-vote gate that forces negotiation on nearly every major bill.