Jack Rakove’s WSJ podcast (“James Madison’s Critique of the Senate Still Holds,” Sept. 16, 2022) is right on the history of the so-called Great Compromise, but wrong in arguing that representation by the states qua states in Congress’s upper chamber is a constitutional flaw.
It can be shown, as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock do in The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, that a bicameral legislature whose members vote by simple majority rule is equivalent to requiring a supermajority (two-thirds or three-quarters) for passing bills in a unicameral legislature, but only if the seats in the House and
