confessed to dabbling in witchcraft and even\u00a0 had a midnight picnic with a boyfriend at a Satanic altar<\/a>.<\/p>\nNormally, this would be the stuff of a Maury Povich show, except for the fact that this woman is a heartbeat away from becoming a US Senator.<\/p>\n
That’s no small thing.\u00a0 This is the most powerful nation on earth, perhaps the most powerful and dynamic society in human history.<\/p>\n
As a Senator she would immediately emerge as one of the 200 or so most influential Americans, helping to confirm Supreme Court justices, ratifying foreign treaties, and passing judgment over our most important new laws.<\/p>\n
What’s more, she would bear the mantle of upholding one of the most sacred secular institutions in our democracy, a legislative body that has protected our liberties for two centuries.<\/p>\n
So how did it come to this?<\/p>\n
How did we arrive at a moment when a former abstinence crusader with no experience at governance — or running a company, or doing anything of merit, really — has made it so close to the halls of the Senate?<\/p>\n
It turns out this debacle is symptomatic of something far more troubling, a flaw in the nature of the Senate itself.<\/p>\n
You see, the Senate allocates power based not on population, but on territory.\u00a0 Each of the fifty states receives two US Senators, regardless of the number of people who reside there.<\/p>\n
Which means that in tiny or sparsely settled states, a very few voters — numbering in the tens of thousands — can decide who will (or will not) take a seat in the Senate.<\/p>\n
What’s more, their Senators share equal power with lawmakers vetted and chosen by millions or tens of millions of people.<\/p>\n
That is flagrantly undemocratic — a direct contradiction of our one-man-one-vote principles — but it gets worse.<\/p>\n
In many low-population states, turnout for primaries like the one held last week in Delaware is usually incredibly low.<\/p>\n
As a result, it’s fairly easy for fringe candidates to leverage a small but highly mobilized political faction to push their way into the general election.<\/p>\n
Christone O’Donnell prevailed last week in Delaware with just 30,000 votes.<\/p>\n
That is 3% of the population of a state which taken as a whole represents about a third of 1% of the American population.<\/p>\n
You couldn’t get yourself elected mayor of a mid-sized American city with that many votes.\u00a0 Yet thanks to the broken structure of the Senate, O’Donnell has emerged as a powerful new force in our politics.<\/p>\n
If this were an outlier — a case of one unqualified candidate slipping through the cracks — it wouldn’t matter.\u00a0 But O’Donnell is far from alone.<\/p>\n
Joe Miller captured his party’s nomination in Alaska with just over 21,000 votes.\u00a0 Sharron Angle captured the GOP nomination in Nevada with just over 70,000 votes.<\/p>\n
In Utah, meanwhile, veteran Republican Senator Robert Bennett was unseated by a few hundred ultra-conservative activists, without the opportunity to even make his case to rank-and-file Republican voters.<\/p>\n
And the GOP isn’t the only party with this problem.<\/p>\n
Alvin Greene, a virtual unknown who has since been indicted for showing pornography to a strange woman, won South Carolina’s Democratic primary this year with just 100,000 votes.<\/p>\n
The danger here is very real.<\/p>\n
Replayed over a dozen tiny, low population states, it’s possible for voters who represent vanishingly small parts of the population — with views well outside the political mainstream — to reshape the Senate in profound ways.<\/p>\n
There was a time when the two political parties were powerful and confident enough to effectively police themselves, vetting candidates and marginalizing the ones who were too kooky or unqualified for such a lofty office.<\/p>\n
But we’ve learned in 2010 that this is no longer possible.<\/p>\n
Democratic and Republican officials alike have expressed horror at the quality and caliber of candidates who are prevailing in their own primaries.<\/p>\n
And if this sounds elitist, that’s exactly what it is:<\/p>\n
The House of Representatives was meant to be the chamber occupied by every-day citizens, including the kooky and erratic ones.<\/p>\n
But the Senate was meant to be a chamber of states-men and -women, a body made up of the best qualified and most honorable of our public officials.<\/p>\n
Sadly those days appear to be behind us.<\/p>\n
Designed to be an institution that cools the public’s passions, the structure of our most powerful deliberative body now allows it to be hijacked by tiny minorities motivated by the very passions that threaten to tear us apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the weekend, the Republican Party’s candidate for Senate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, made headlines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2756,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}