Since public opinion polls show strong support for tougher gun laws--around 90 per cent of respondents favor background checks like the ones provided for in a Senate bill that died last week--one might think that, in our democracy, politicians who vote to thwart "the will of the 90" would be either irrelevant or irredemiably stained by electoral doo-doo. And in some democracies, that'd be the case. In ours, however, they are preserved from both fates by some startlingly undemocratic features, such as the fact that each state, no matter how big or small, gets two votes in the US Senate. This means that when the senators representing California's 38 million citizens and the senators representing Wyoming's fractional part of one million citizens had been heard from on background checks for gun-show and online purchases, the score was not 66 to 1, as proportional representation would have it. No, the score was tied, 2 to 2.
When you put the fact of unequal representation in the Senate together with the Senate rule requiring three-fifths support to move legislation forward to a vote, it's easy to see that senators representing a minuscule share of the country's population have veto power over initiatives enjoying broad public support. Crazy as it sounds, the gun control measures that were killed in the Senate were supported by a majority of senators. But you don't need 51 per cent. You need 60 per cent.
The remaining puzzle piece concerns what Ryan Lizza calls, in this excellent post, "asymmetric polarization." A poll is as close as we ever come to having a national vote. When it counts, we always draw circles around people before counting their ballots, and the circles have the effect of isolating politicians from national opinion. Allen Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, quipped that in his state "gun control" refers to how tightly you grip your weapon. If those are your constituents, who cares what 90 per cent of the country wants? For most Republican senators, the danger of losing in a general election showdown against a Democrat is negligible compared to the danger of losing in a primary to another Republican. President Obama recently won re-election rather handily despite losing 21 states by a double-digit margin. Those 21 states have 42 senators, which is more than enough to relegate his role to that of peripatetic grief counselor.
