The Senate has gone from being the wiser, more stabilizing element of our government’s legislative branch (as the framers of our constitution intended) to the one that’s more reflective of the passions and excesses of the least-educated and worst-informed members of the electorate.  At the same time, the House of Representatives’ traditional ability to counterbalance the power of the president has largely evaporated.

How has this happened?

The answer is that our founders could not possibly have anticipated our social order evolving into the celebritocracy it is today, where appearing frequently in the media has become the sine qua non of personal significance. 

With far too many congressmen for the media to elevate into the limited elite of celebrities, vast numbers of Americans today are unable to name their own representative.  Under these circumstances, the small number of representatives who a significant number of voters have actually heard of tend to attain their recognition by voicing more extreme positions than their peers.

The far more numerous remainder have little choice but to beg for a pat on the head from the acknowledged alpha of political celebrities, a sitting president—which turns these congressmen into little more than presidential lap dogs.  

This severely undermines the ability of our legislative branch to keep the executive branch from running wild in all sorts of undesirable activities, including the “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the framers of the constitution specified impeachment as the remedy. How realistic is it for the ability to bring charges to be granted only to a body of the president’s toadies?

Meanwhile, because there are only two of them per state, senators have a better chance of attaining at least a modicum of name recognition.  But because every state gets the same number of senators, each individual voter in a less-populous state ends up getting a proportionately louder voice in the Senate than a citizen living in a major population center.  

To make matters worse, the voters in the least populous states tend to have less education and fewer reliable information sources than their counterparts in the rest of America.  The net effect is to tilt the Senate in the direction of the ill-informed passions it was designed specifically to offset.