The Senate, not to mention the filibuster makes half our nation's voters less equal than the others

[CreekDog]

please don't try to dissuade me from thinking so by appealing to me with arguments of fairness and constitionality.

where the law treats people unequally (and it does) and where the constitution does the same (and it does), those things should be changed.

and things not even in the law or the constitution that do likewise (like stupid Senate rules) should be cast off without hesitation.

don't ever let somebody tell you that treating someone unfairly in the name of the law is ethical.

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. The Senate is the House of Lords for a putative non-aristocracy

It's a disgrace that it retains the power it does, where similar bodies elsewhere have rightly been relegated to a primarily ceremonial role. The framers of the Constitution were not geniuses. They were people of their time of a particular social class, with quite predictable prejudices and interests for their demographic. Their version of social organization is not eternal, ahistorical, or perfect. It is an effect of their various historically situated interests and beliefs. Fetishization of the framers and their vision of human social organization is increasingly revealing itself for what it is: a social catastrophe, and little better than the God-thought and baseless reliance on authority that their very Enlightenment was supposed to free us from.

[CreekDog]

2. Your post is worthy of an original post

I also want to add that the Supreme Court itself made unconstitutional all bodies in the USA composed like our US Senate. Except for the US Senate itself because that was created by the constitution.

So the Senate itself is by court precedent, considered anti-Democratic and were it not already in the constitution, would have been removed as a valid form of a representational body.

[hedgehog]

3. When I was a kid, the common wisdom was that Civil rights would never pass

because the Senate ran on the Seniority system, and the Southern Senators had a lock on Seniority.

Well, the Seniority system was discarded, but reactionary Southern Senators (and some from western states) are still in effective control of the Senate!

(On edit - we're generally talking about Republican senators here.)