Made-up rules are made for breaking

Though neither is on the ballot, life could change dramatically after Election Day for Connecticut’s U.S. senators. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal each have experience in both the majority and the minority in the upper house of Congress, and it’s safe to say they prefer the former. There’s a good chance they could be back there come 2021.

What won’t change are the fundamental problems with the Senate itself, which gives inordinate power to people in small states at the expense of everyone else. For instance, in 2018 some 136,000 people in Wyoming came out to support the winning Republican Senate candidate, putting him into office for the next six years. That’s a bit less than the population of Bridgeport. The same year the winning candidate in California, who has the same authority as her Wyoming counterpart, earned 6 million votes.

It’s enough to make you wonder how we ended up with the lineup of states we have. Why do we need two Dakotas, anyway, with four senators and a total population of about 12?

Blumenthal and Murphy are each in their second six-year term, and though the Senate itself is not going anywhere, both should support measures to make the Senate fairer. The first step is the elimination of the filibuster, which puts an arbitrary 60-vote requirement on anything important and severely limits the effectiveness of anything that comes out of the Senate. Even moderate Democrats seem to favor tossing it aside as a relic of an earlier time.

Then it’s time to take on something bigger — new states. The nation’s capital and Puerto Rico are the obvious candidates, and both suffer from a lack of congressional representation. Puerto Rico has about the same population as Connecticut, and D.C. would be only the third-smallest state. We wouldn’t have a nice even 50 anymore, and we’d have to remake the flag, but those are not good reasons not to do it.

There would also likely be a partisan gain, though we shouldn’t act like that’s something new. The reason we have two Dakotas, as well as a host of other states in the middle of the country where hardly anyone lives, is that the process for adding new ones was always political. When the rules are made up, there’s no reason not to make up new rules.

As to the criticism that adding new states would only benefit Democrats, that’s probably true in the near-term. But it’s worth remembering the Dakotas, today Republican strongholds, had Democrats in three of four U.S. Senate seats as recently as 2004. Things change. We should still strive for fairness.

Still, there are current politics to consider. And speaking of made-up rules, Blumenthal came in for some criticism recently for saying he, along with many other Democrats, wouldn’t be meeting with the president’s lastminute Supreme Court nominee. Our senator says the process is illegitimate and there’s nothing to be gained by the ceremonial sit-down.

Blumenthal rightly recognizes Republicans are breaking their own madeup rule, which they came up with near the end of Barack Obama’s second term to deny a vote on a Supreme Court vacancy. There’s nothing legitimate about the current process, and our senator is right not to dignify it.

He likely remembers that in the runup to the 2016 election, when most everyone assumed Hillary Clinton would win, some Republican senators said they wouldn’t fill the then-vacant Supreme Court seat even after the voting. In other words, the made-up rule didn’t have anything to do with how close a vacancy opened compared to an election. It was in effect a promise that Republicans would not confirm a Supreme Court justice for any Democrat ever. Had Clinton won, the Supreme Court could have only seven members today.

Given all that, we might give Blumenthal a pass on this one. When it comes to making the body in which he serves a bit fairer, there will be much more to do after the election.