Yet the basic constitutional architecture still remains, and it’s frustrating for those who want to augment the role of the federal government in people’s lives.

This month, the issue bubbled up again after the Economist ran a chart demonstrating how much more liberal major U.S. cities were relative to the national average.

Jonathan Cohn, a liberal policy writer at the New Republic, wrote that the chart was “a reminder of a fundamental problem with our democracy, one that’s baked into the constitutional order. I’m talking, of course, about the United States Senate, where the apportionment of two seats for each state can give rural states disproportionate power — power that comes at the expense of urban states, the ones with lots of the left-leaning cities.”