Opinion: The power of the minority in America
As the Senate held hearings and debated the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, attention understandably focused on the policy implications of a sixth conservative vote. What got less notice was an important political fact: If she's confirmed as expected, it means five justices will have been put there by senators representing a minority of the American people.
Four justices on the Court already - Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh - were confirmed by a Senate "majority" put in office by fewer voters than the senators who opposed them. Barrett will be the fifth.
In fact, the ideal of "majority rule" in the U.S. is mostly window-dressing these days. The people in power as we head toward the November general election increasingly do not represent the will of the American people.
This starts at the top. Of the last three presidents, neither President Trump nor, in his first term, George W. Bush won more votes than their opponents. In the Senate, the Republican senators now in control represent not just a minority of the country's population, but a minority of its economic activity (as measured by GDP) and of its tax revenues.
The Senate has never been democratic, since small states from the very beginning have had the same number of senators as large states. Yet now we're at the point where the makeup of the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future will be determined by a group of politicians who, as Vox pointed out recently, received 13 million fewer votes than their colleagues across the aisle.
The one federal body that does reflect a majority of the country at the moment is the House of Representatives. Yet if neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden is able to win an outright majority of the Electoral College, the decision gets thrown to the House, where each state's delegation will get a single vote. Since Republicans control a majority of the delegations, it opens the real possibility of a president installed by a House minority.
So the U.S. finds itself in an uncomfortable situation: Our basic institutions no longer reflect majority rule. In the past, when bipartisanship was considered a congressional value and the Senate majority paid greater attention to trying to accommodate the views of the minority, this might not have mattered as much. But politics is fought with bare knuckles these days, and political power is seen as bestowing the ability - and hence, the right - to ram through legislation and court nominees.
Daunting procedural obstacles stand in the way of reforming the governing structure of this country so that it better represents the majority of voters. And ensuring attention to the rights and political interests of the political minority is baked into both our Constitution and Americans' enduring sense of political fairness and decency.
But if this minority-rule pattern continues and U.S. political and judicial leadership no longer represents a majority, one has to wonder, with Lincoln, how long such a country can endure.
Lee Hamilton is a senior adviser for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.