A family of seven rents a two-room cabin. Two take the room with a queen-sized bed; the five remaining get the room with two bunk beds and a twin. After dinner, two pies appear. How should they divide them?

Well, one they divide equally among the seven family members. The other pie they divide in half, giving one half to each room.

Wait, what?? How does that make sense? Why would pies be allotted by room?

Such is the logic of "representation" in the US Congress. Half is allotted evenly (ish) by population. Half is not.

If we’re ever going to divide the political pie evenly, we have to get serious about changing how the Senate works.

As Americans we're taught to toast the Great Compromise that created our bicameral legislature, the two congressional chambers that write our laws. The story goes that small state reps at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia wanted equal votes for states and big state reps wanted to base votes on populations, so a compromise was reached to create two houses, one apportioned each way. The original horse trading was forgivable enough; the framers were operating under existential fear and chose to wheel and deal to find a way to survive. But here we are, centuries after the Great Compromise, and our country remains greatly compromised.

The small state reps had protested that large states would vote as a bloc and bully them in a Congress apportioned by population. Bloc voting seemed likely after working under the Constitution’s predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, in which each state delegation (which could have up to seven members) got exactly one vote. In other words, states had to vote as a bloc. But today in the House of Representatives, party dynamics completely drown out state loyalties. Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania vote with their parties, not with their fellow Pennsylvanians. State-based bloc bully voting never materialized. The whole nasty bicameral design is built on a false premise. Our constitutional design got twisted to solve a problem that never existed.

Another tempting rationale lies in federalism. In the late 18th century, many Americans thought of their states as countries. Thomas Jefferson himself used the phrase my country as often to refer to Virginia as to the US. Many have suggested that the arrangement left a degree of ambiguity about whether the USA was, itself, a nation or a collection of nations. And if we were a collection of nations, couldn't it make sense to think of the US as at least somewhat like an international organization, where each member nation might have equal suffrage?

Europe today uses remarkably similar language to that used in post-revolutionary America: the European Union comprises member states. And the EU is recognized as both international (a collection of wholes) and supranational (a whole unto itself). Where the EU functions as a supranational body, representation is proportional, just like in our House of Representatives. Where the EU functions as an international body, each state is represented once, much like the Senate.

However, even in international EU bodies like the European Council and the (not-the-same-thing) Council of the European Union, votes are typically weighted by population. So even if Monaco and Germany each have one person in the room, their votes aren't given equal weight. More importantly, those bodies can't write laws. In a fair electoral system, egregiously non-representative bodies should never write laws. And indeed, in most democracies they don't. But in the US, they still do. The most influential legislative body in our country is woefully undemocratic.

Today, the always-thin rationale for equal suffrage in the Senate has emaciated. The US was never really an international body; the Constitution stripped states of the capacity to act like independent nations. And states have only grown less nation-like with the conclusion of the Civil War, the expansive interpretation of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, the ballooning of the executive branch, and the blossoming of the US on the international stage. If you ask an American today what country she lives in, she may say the US, the USA, America, the States, etc. But she won’t say “Virginia”. The United States is now unambiguously a whole, not just a collection of parts.

It was egregious enough to give equal voting power to two states when one was almost 14 times as large as another, as Virginia was to Delaware at the time of the Constitution's ratification. Today, California’s population is 67 times that of Wyoming. Still two senators each. Anyone living in a state with more than 2% of the US population is permanently underrepresented in Congress. That’s almost 70% of us. And in return for the underrepresentation, what do the 70% gain? Nothing. In what way does an individual living in a large state have greater access to the levers of power to justify her weaker vote? In no way. It’s not a compromise; it’s a shakedown.

The UN General Assembly is similarly ill-conceived. It gives tiny Tonga and Tuvalu one vote each, the same as China and the USA. At least, the General Assembly cannot create law, only non-binding resolutions. Would we ever allow such a non-representative body to write global policy? Would we be happy to give a dozen Pacific nations with a combined population smaller than Jacksonville's twelve times the voting power of our entire country? Would we ever stomach something so disgustingly undemocratic? I mean... again?

There is no credible defense for this arrangement.

None of this is to say I have no sympathy for small states that want to resist having their identity washed away by a national tide. In lots to nest, we argued:

Only assemblies representative of the whole should ever set policy for the whole. But enough assemblies representative of the parts should be able to override the whole and pull power out to the parts again.

Pull power outward. The way to honor and protect small states is not to give their citizens disproportionate control over the nation’s policies but to support mechanisms that support the cultivation of local authority, local flavor, and local identity. It’s possible to celebrate Wyoming and empower Wyomites without giving every one of them the voice of 66 Californians in our national government.

Another day we'll offer oncrete proposals for decentralizing and reorganizing the legislative branch. (Unsurprisingly, my leanings in both cases center around the extensive use of systems of democratic lotteries.)

Today I want to let our embarrassing congressional design underscore the need for citizens' constitutional conventions.

Obviously states' equal voting in the Senate is baked into the Constitution, so fixing it means constitutional change. But to rely on the traditional route of amending the Constitution – via legislative supermajorities – is to decide never to fix it at all. Never. The Senate can shoot down legislative constitutional amendment proposals with merely 34 votes. No amendment improving the structure of the Senate could ever pass that hurdle. Currently the 33 smallest states, representing just 30% of the population, are advantaged by the arrangement. They boast 66 of 100 Senators.

Worse, even if such an amendment miraculously passed, it would likely be invalidated in the courts. The Constitution expressly prohibits altering the states' equal suffrage in the Senate. In fact it's the only amendment restriction applicable today. Perhaps more than any other clause in the Constitution, this Article V limitation is an affront to the notion of small-R republicanism: it implies the Constitution can prohibit us from choosing our form of government.

So our Senate predicament forces us to face a stark choice: either we will live in perpetuity in a miserably misrepresentative non-democracy, or we get serious about our authority to update our Constitution. My favored solution, as I have hinted, is a citizens’ constitutional convention, a large, long-term assembly of ordinary citizens selected by democratic lotteries empowered to propose constitutional changes.

When Congress has previously entertained setting rules for a convention, their model was to hold elections for participants. This should terrify us. An elected convention would inevitably be deeply partisan, which would lead either to painful deadlock or, far worse, to one party emerging as dominant and inflicting its ideas on the other. And Congress would likely choose an unrepresentative mechanism for allotting votes, basing them on the electoral college or the Senate. In other words, citizens of small states would (again) have a disproportionate voice in our nation's bedrock legal code. We'd be stuck in the same trap.

Unlike elected bodies, citizen assemblies, facilitated deliberative bodies selected by lottery, do not tend towards partisanship. Ordinary citizens simply don’t act like politicians. They’re not fixated on political ambition or hardened by political warfare; they’re still capable of hearing each other. Citizen assemblies commonly set a high bar of consensus, typically around 70%, and they thrive at reaching decisions together even with such thresholds.

Nobody can say for certain what a citizens’ constitutional convention would decide, including whether it would opt to reform the Senate (or even the constitutional prohibition on altering Senate suffrage). Where we can be confident is that the participants will work hard to study issues, consider options in good faith, deliberate earnestly, and reach thoughtful decisions that reflect the thinking of a large majority of participants, and thus of Americans.

We know that Americans by and large revere the Constitution and in particular its consecration of rights. So any descriptively representative body – which votes cannot deliver but lots can – would also revere the Constitution and proceed with great caution in changing it.

To believe that such a large, representative group of us in such a thoughtful, deliberative context would act rashly and trash our shared values is to have a much darker view of America than I can muster. I may not respect our congressional structure or trust our politicians, but I do respect and trust our people.