The Capitol Audit: The Senate. We Graded the Upper Chamber Against Article I. It Got a 68.

"The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State." Two per state, full stop — no population weighting, and Article V specifically forbids amending this without a state's consent, making it the single most entrenched clause in the Constitution. It is functioning exactly as the framers designed it as part of the Great Compromise. What's graded here isn't a deviation from design — it's the growing real-world strain the design was never built to absorb: California's roughly 39.4 million residents and Wyoming's roughly 589,000 both get two senators, a disparity of roughly 67 to 1. The clause works precisely as written. Whether "as written" still fits a country this size is a question the Constitution itself doesn't let voters answer.

Senators serve six years, divided into three classes so roughly a third of the chamber is up for election every two years. The design goal was continuity — a body that never fully turns over at once, insulated from any single election's mood. That is exactly how it still functions two centuries later: no controversy, no erosion, no workaround. It's the cleanest-functioning piece of Senate design on this list.

Age 30, nine years a citizen, an inhabitant of the state at the time of election — three requirements, unchanged since ratification, still applied without exception or workaround. No modern controversy over eligibility rises to the level of the design failing; the clause simply works, quietly, the way most durable design does.

The original design let state legislatures pick senators; the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified April 8, 1913, replaced that with direct popular election. This is the one entry on this list that is itself a correction — the framers' original mechanism produced enough vacancies, deadlocks, and corruption scandals in state legislatures that the country amended it out. Since 1913 it has functioned without serious incident or reversal effort. A design change that actually worked.

"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings" — that's the entire textual basis for the modern filibuster. The Constitution names specific supermajority requirements in only a handful of places — treaties, expulsion, veto overrides, impeachment conviction — and implies simple majority for ordinary business everywhere else; the 60-vote cloture threshold for ordinary legislation is a Senate rule, not a constitutional one, and it has been used at a scale the framers never contemplated. Cloture motions were filed 201 times in the 115th Congress (2017–2018), climbing to 328 in the 116th and 336 in the 117th, before dipping to 266 in the 118th — a level of routine supermajority gatekeeping unrecognizable against most of the chamber's first 180 years. Both parties have chipped at it with "nuclear option" carve-outs rather than a floor debate on the rule itself: Democrats in 2013 for most nominations, Republicans in 2017 for Supreme Court nominations, and Republicans again in September 2025 for en bloc sub-cabinet confirmations. The rule is real, self-imposed, and now edited by whichever party has the votes to edit it — the opposite of a stable constitutional design.

The Constitution gives the Senate a check on executive and judicial appointments; it says nothing about a home-state senator's veto. "Blue-slip" practice — letting a nominee's home-state senators block a Judiciary Committee vote — is a 20th-century committee custom, not a constitutional rule, and it's actively eroding: in 2025, Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim withheld blue slips to block a U.S. Attorney nomination, while Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has publicly resisted pressure from the Trump White House to abandon the practice for blue-state nominees entirely. Meanwhile the September 2025 rules change allowing en bloc, simple-majority confirmation of large batches of sub-cabinet nominees speeds up exactly the kind of individualized "advice" the clause was written to require. The constitutional check still exists; the custom that shaped how it's actually exercised is being renegotiated in real time by whoever holds the majority.

"He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur" — one of the Constitution's few explicit supermajority requirements, and the one most thoroughly routed around. Since 1789, the United States has concluded roughly 1,834 formal treaties against 16,704 executive agreements that never touch the Senate floor at all; in the post-WWII era, treaties have made up less than 7% of U.S. international agreements. The two-thirds check hasn't been repealed. It's just been made optional by relabeling almost everything an executive agreement instead.

"The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments," with a two-thirds conviction threshold — a deliberately high bar, and the Senate has never lowered it or found a procedural workaround. The design has held structurally through four presidential impeachment trials (Andrew Johnson, Clinton, and Trump twice) without a single conviction, in every case falling along near-total party lines. That's not a broken mechanism — the two-thirds requirement is doing exactly the counter-majoritarian work it was built to do. What drags the grade down is that every modern trial has functioned as a foregone partisan head-count rather than the deliberative proceeding the framers described, which is a real erosion of the clause's spirit even where its letter holds.

A two-thirds vote can expel a sitting senator — deliberately hard to reach, and used only 15 times in the chamber's history: William Blount in 1797 for conspiring to help Britain seize Spanish territory, and 14 more during the Civil War for supporting the Confederacy. Nobody has been expelled since 1862. That's not the clause failing; the 2024 case of Sen. Bob Menendez shows it working indirectly — facing a bribery conviction and Democratic colleagues publicly organizing to expel him, he resigned rather than face the vote he was expected to lose. The formal power sits almost entirely unused because the threat of it still functions.

A majority constitutes a quorum to do business, and the Senate must keep and publish a journal of its proceedings. Both requirements function as basic housekeeping today without major controversy — quorum calls are sometimes used as a procedural stalling tactic rather than a genuine head-count, but no sourced case from the current Congress shows this rising to a real breakdown of the requirement itself. The most mechanical piece of Article I on this list is also the one working closest to as-written.