Where Are the Senators? Our Congress is not a parliament. It is composed of members who are elected from specific geographic regions (districts in the House and states in the Senate). The members are then supposed to represent their people’s interests in the national legislature.
The interests of the people that one member of Congress represents will often conflict with the interests of the people that another member of Congress represents. This is true even within the same party. Despite the increased nationalization of our politics, there are still differences between a New York Democrat and a California Democrat, or a Florida Republican and a Utah Republican.
Even within states, these differences between voters exist. Because of the Warren Court’s (constitutionally illiterate) decision in Reynolds v. Sims, the upper houses of state legislatures are required to have equal-population districts just like the lower houses. As a result, both chambers of state legislatures are almost always controlled by the same party (Minnesota is currently the only state with divided control).
As anyone who has ever followed state-level politics knows, unified control of the legislature does not mean easy legislating. A state house speaker and state senate president might be rivals despite being of the same party. A large majority with a dozen seats to spare might still be hard to corral when it comes time to vote on a bill. There are plenty of times when an assemblyman will talk to his party’s leadership and say something along the lines of, “I agree with you in principle, but my district has a lot of people who will come out on the wrong end of this bill, so I can’t support it as is.”
The American ideal of legislative representation is strongly linked to people living in a certain place. This is especially true of the Senate, where the boundaries are state borders that pretty much never change. Elizabeth Warren represents the same territory that Daniel Webster did. Mitch McConnell represents the same territory that Henry Clay did. The interests of the states are the most important thing in the Senate, and they always have been.
Democrats’ strategy during this congress, it seems, is to completely ignore the particularities of the American context and pretend we have a parliamentary system instead. With only three votes to spare in the House and no votes to spare in the Senate, they decided to throw their entire agenda into two pieces of legislation and expected everyone to fall in line.............
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/where-are-the-senators/
