By the way, the 57 Senators who voted to convict Trump during the impeachment trial represent 76.6 MILLION more people than the 43 Senators that voted to acquit. The difference still falls short of 2/3 of the country, but it reveals a structural problem.
This shows a very real problem with the whole idea of the Senate. When a state like Wyoming with a little more than half a million gets two Senators, and California with about 40 million also gets only two Senators, you know that time has moved on to the point where the Founders’ vision has been distorted beyond what they would recognize and they would likely disapprove. As I have written before, I believe the invention of the Senate was a needed compromise to bribe the slave States to join the Union. It gave them disproportionate representation in the Federal Government. Then the expansion west into very lightly populated territories gave mining and ranching interests disproportional influence.
Maybe it’s time to abolish the Senate? Won’t happen without a new Constitutional Convention, which won’t happen, of course. But there is a problem in our democracy when an unpopular minority runs the country.
We need the Constitution to protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority. But we also need the Constitution to protect the majority against the tyranny of the minority. I don’t know how to do this.
I think it is just fine that the bulk of the Republican Party is still trapped in the slavish Trump Cult because I think that the Trump ship has hit a iceberg and is in the process of sinking. I hope that an honorable Republican wing can rise up and take over. But I think the Party will just split and fade away. They cling desperately to power through blatant gerrymandering and blatant voter suppression but that can’t last for long.
As I have mentioned before, there are deep structural issues we seem to unable to address - catastrophic climate change (Texas power grid failures due to unprecedented cold, California firestorms due to unprecedented heat and drought, hurricanes, floods, ice melts, etc.), and dangerously widening economic inequality (history showed us the French guillotine and the Bolshevik revolution as results of previous too much disparity). We need very fresh approaches, but we seem to be stuck in a system that preserves both killing pollution and economic chasms.
