I agree with you that the Senate is not moot, as far as the need for giving individual states a voice. It's power has shifted, though, from making sure that mor

I agree with you that the Senate is not moot, as far as the need for giving individual states a voice. It's power has shifted, though, from making sure that more populous states could not ride roughshod over less populous, to the opposite of that. Less populous states can now ignore more populous states (in the Senate at least) because the Senate is more directly representing the people than it is the state. In essence, 100k people in a midwestern state have the same voting power as 1mil people in a coastal state. Additionally, Senators now have to worry about campaigning directly to the people instead of the legislatures, which makes them more subject to the whims of the people rather than their expected job of representing the states. The Senate is now just another House of Representatives, except an individual Senator has extremely outsized voting power compared to the number of people who elected them.