This weekend, Annie Lowrey of Foreign Policy wrote a very clever and provocative essay for the Washington Post on alternatives to a Senate designed to represent the interests of states. She begins by asking what might happen if Senators were assigned to different income brackets.

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on. Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year. Imagine trying to convince someone — Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? — to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!

These numbers would look different if we limited representation to U.S. citizens over the age of 18, though of course House members are apportioned on the basis of total population and not on the basis of the population of eligible voters. Regardless, this is an interesting thought experiment. Lowrey continues:

Or how about if senators represented particular demographic groups, based on gender and race? White women would elect the biggest group of senators — 37 of them, though only 38 women have ever served in the Senate, with 17 currently in office. White men would have 36 seats. Black women, Hispanic women and Hispanic men would have six each; black men five; and Asian women and men two each. Women voters would control a steady and permanent majority — making, say, discriminatory health-care measures such as the Stupak Amendment and the horrible dearth of child-care options for working mothers seem untenable.

I don’t think that this is quite right. The most recent Gallup survey suggests that there are more women who identify as “pro-life” than as “pro-choice” by a margin of 49 percent to 44 percent. Among men, it is 54 percent to 39 percent “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice.” To be sure, these numbers have moved a fair bit over time, and an alternate reality in which the upper chamber of Congress is apportioned along demographic lines might yield a different public opinion spectrum. It might even yield a different public, as immigration laws could have been very different circa the 1960s and the cumulative impact of even very small changes would likely prove very large. The same goes for the mix of pro-natalist or anti-natalist tax and zoning policies and much else besides that shape the rate of natural increase.

And that’s the problem with a lot of the counterfactuals that have arisen this year. If Republicans had 59 votes in the Senate and were desperate to pass something like Paul Ryan’s Roadmap, would left-of-center writers be agitating for Senate reform? One easy rejoinder: this scenario is unimaginable because a Senate that reflected the more urban, more non-white character of the U.S. population would never elected so many Republicans. But of course both parties would look very different in this world. The labor left used to ferociously oppose mass immigration. A stronger labor movement in the 1960s and 1970s might have forestalled the demographic transformation that seems to have strengthened the constituency for entitlement expansion, at least in the short term. Who knows?

All that said, Lowrey makes an excellent and important point: Ben Nelson’s deal was a reflection of the nature of the Senate as a creature of state interests.

These days, people don’t much like the anti-democratic structure of the Senate and the bring-home-the-bacon politics it begets. Recent polls have shown that Americans despise the upper chamber — more than the House, more than the White House. But you can’t blame Nelson for doing exactly what the founders asked him to do.

Indeed, I would say that the problem isn’t Ben Nelson or the Senate per se. Rather, it is that senators like Paul Kirk and Charles Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand and Chris Dodd, among many others, weren’t doing their jobs adequately. Instead of pressing for a federalization of Medicaid that would not punish their states for engaging in coverage expansion efforts independently, they pressed for a partisan victory on health reform that would have a relatively negative impact on their relatively affluent states.