COUPWATCH: The Senate Is Racist And It Must Die!

By Paul Rosenberg

It's not really news that the US Senate is a racist institution. No more than that it's a profoundly anti-democratic institution. (The two go hand-in-hand.) It has not one black member in it, and has had only two black members in all of living memory. That alone is enough to tell you that it's a racist institution, but it only begins to scratch the surface.

More to the point, the Senate has not one seat that represents a majority-black constituency. This means that even on those two rare occasions when blacks were elected to the Senate, they were *not* representing the interests, values or insights of the black community, not even that small portion of the black community in the states they represented. For to represent that black community would most assuredly represent political death.

The Senate quite easily could have two black members, representing a majority-black constituency. That constituency would be Washington, DC, the alleged seat of our purported "democracy," whose license plates now proudly proclaim "taxation without representation" leaving the observer to respond, in true Jeopardy fashion, "What is tyranny?" What indeed.

In the first two years of Clinton's first term there was an excellent opportunity to rid our country of this terrible stain of tyranny on the very ground where government resides. The Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the Presidency. But they did not control 60 seats in the Senate, and so it was certain that a Republican filibuster in the Senate would stop any ordinary attempt to grant statehood to Washington, DC.

Of course, no significant advance in the cause of liberty and justice was ever won by ordinary means. Had the Democrats *really* wanted to, they could have shamed and harassed the Republicans into submission. It was all a question of will. But racist institutions are notoriously incapable of reforming themselves without extraordinary pressure from outside