Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”
Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate...
It is absolutely absurd that people in Wyoming get 2 Senators, while California has the same.
California has ~66x more people in it.
Yes, I realize back in colonial times, the idea of having a state and its interests considered as "equal" with each other was a thing, but this is a sadly dated notion. Back in those times, they were against the idea of parties, too, but we see how that's gone. Now we have a bunch of red states with hardly any people in it overpowering the representation of huge populations in states like California in a body like the Senate.
If you consider the cluster of mostly flyover areas having almost no one in them, but huge swathes of land and carved up into several states, they have 18 Senators to California's two. If you add up all the people in: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah...it's ~18 million, which is still less than half of the population of California, which is ~39 million.
Somewhere there needs to be some kind of notion of rebalancing things and bringing some kind of sanity to the situation. I don't know the best answer, and I definitely don't think abolishing the Senate is the answer, but as it stands, it is completely ridiculous. Maybe for every X million you get an extra Senator, say something like every 5 million.