> Why should representatives of these small, mostly conservative states
> dominate national politics? Well one answer is that that's the way the
> Founding Fathers wanted it. The whole point of the Senate is to act as an
> elite check on popular sentiments.
>
> Don't take LBO's word for it. Here it is, from the horse's mouth the
> Senate's official history, on its website:
>
> "In selecting an appropriate visual symbol of the Senate in its founding
> period, one might consider an anchor, a fence, or a saucer. Writing to
> Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional
> Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution's framers
> considered the Senate to be the "great anchor" of the government. To the
> framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a "necessary
> fence" against the "fickleness and passion" that tended to influence the
> attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives.
> George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had
> created the Senate to "cool" House legislation just as a saucer was used to
> cool hot tea."
>
> If you're an insurance exec fearful of expropriation, or a Fortune 500 CEO
> loath to create a new entitlement among the always-dangerous (at least in
> potential) masses, then you have to be pleased with how things are working
> out. Nice to know that Madison et al. had your back.
>
You're confusing two separate features of the Senate. Madison et al. didn't think that the Senate would act as a check on popular will because it overrepresented the citizens of small states. That would be silly, even as a retroactive justification for a political compromise. They thought it would because Senators were designed to be less directly accountable to the citizens of their states, whether big or small, as they were selected by state legislatures and at intervals of 6 rather than 2 years.