***But the fact that democratic reform is hard is no excuse for not putting in the work to make it happen. Precedent for de-fanging the reactionary and anti-democratic “upper” house of a national legislature is readily available—and it has been proven to be both durable and, ultimately, extremely popular. There is no reason why the United States should be a century behind the United Kingdom in reforming its national legislature to align with democratic principles. Americans who take democracy seriously should be mobilizing to support a credible threat of packing the Senate, as a second-best alternative to amending the Constitution to remove its powers. They should be making plans to admit new states and divide existing states so as to assure passage of constitutional amendments reallocating the Senate’s powers to other institutions. And they should be explicitly including these plans in their agendas and platforms, and be prepared to organize and mobilize voters to support these plans consistently and strategically over a long period of time. And they should, ultimately, be prepared to forego the implementation of such plans only if those who benefit from the anti-democratic structure of the Senate act to relinquish those benefits.
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