Bruce argues in favor of increasing the number of representatives in the House beyond 435—maybe to 535—and this suggestion tracks a recent editorial in The New York Times calling for “a bigger House.” I don’t have any objection to this idea, and as I argue in my working-paper version of “Senate Democracy,” a slightly bigger Senate of 110 would fit well with a bigger House.

I’ve responded separately to Moritz’s professional inquiries, and the main response for other readers is to see my longer working-paper version, which goes into details about the various “modes” of constitutional interpretation: text, structure, history, morality, and legal precedents. Briefly, I disagree with Moritz that “states have voting rights” in the U.S. system of representation. People should and do have voting rights, not states, and it is the right of people to vote that the voting-rights amendments protect. There is a view that senators should represent the “states” that they come from rather than the citizens in those states. But the modern view—and one confirmed by the Seventeenth Amendment—is that U.S. senators represent the citizens of the states and not the states themselves. This view represents an evolution of the U.S. system over time, but the idea that the Founders were creating a national government was a main point of the creation of our Constitution in Philadelphia, especially among the likes of James Madison, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton. And as for the “higher order of law” point, I ground the Senate Reform Act in the delegated powers given to Congress expressly by the voting-rights amendments. This sets up a conflict between two texts in the Constitution, but as I argue in greater length in the working-paper version, this conflict should be resolved in favor of the later amendments and a Senate Reform Act that would be enacted under their delegation of power.

I agree with Justin Roshak from Boston with respect to a need to focus on gerrymandering, and I support ranked voting as well as other innovations. I disagree with his characterization that my idea is unconstitutional. Roshak ignores my argument that the legislative authority is based in the voting-rights amendments delegating power to Congress to correct the abridgments of voting rights. Many are upset about the theory of equal voting rights that I advocate, but at least the theory itself is no more revolutionary than Madison’s vision for how the Senate should have been originally apportioned. In fact, my argument is pretty much an updated version of Madison’s original plan. As for the charge of the idea being “half-baked,” Roshak should consult my 70-page paper that is still in working-paper form. It’s not quite fully baked, I admit, but it’s more than halfway done.

Justin Stoll raises a good point, and a strong argument against my proposal is that the states have not “consented” to this change, as Article V seems to require. My argument, though, is not that the states “consented” to this particular change. They have consented repeatedly to give delegated power to the Congress to protect voting rights of many kinds as well as, essentially, “the equal protection of the laws” under the Fourteenth Amendment. As I discuss in the longer paper, some southern states have said that they never “consented” to the Fifteenth Amendment forbidding the denial or abridgment of voting rights on the basis of race or color. (Tennessee did not ratify it until 1997!) But these amendments went into force when three-quarters of the states ratified them. The states consented, then, to give Congress the power to correct the abridgment of voting rights by the United States or the states. The constitutional history of Article V is also interesting in this regard. In contrast to almost all of the other provisions of the Constitution, it was added at the last minute and without debate at the end of a long and tiring summer. (Madison and his allies might have been too worn out or distracted to object.) And finally, as to the famous quote of James Madison in The Federalist Papers, we should remember that The Federalist Papers (though increasingly revered as evidence of original intention) were actually written for propaganda purposes: focused mostly on getting the citizens of New York to ratify the Constitution after it was written. A number of good recent histories of the Constitutional Convention show that Madison was a strong proponent of apportionment of the Senate by population—the Virginia Plan—and he predicted trouble in the future if the “one state, two senators” rule was adopted. He was right. We’re in trouble. And I’m suggesting nothing any more revolutionary than to return to Madison’s original plan (though skipping his possible preference for illicit representation of slaves in the count). For good further reading on the history, see my late Penn colleague Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009) and the Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016).

Lastly, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my Atlantic editor, Juliet Lapidos, who helped make “The Path To Give California 12 Senators, and Vermont Only One” a little punchier, more persuasive, and more provocative than it would have been without her excellent editing.