Opinion: The senate minority leader versus basic math

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I don’t know why I feel that it’s fallen to me to truth-squad the Senate’s minority leader, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell.

But here I am again. Last time, it was when McConnell, contemplating a bailout of the auto industry, pontificated thusly: ‘Republicans will not allow taxpayers to subsidize failure.’

Yo, Senator. Does ‘Iraq’ ring a very expensive bell?

This time he’s been carping about the Obama economic rescue package and how his party is too relevant to the process; ‘Senate Republicans represent half the population.’

Now, that just didn’t sound right to me. Senate Republicans aren’t even half of the Senate, which is weighted to favor sparsely populated states. And not every state has the same population; Los Angeles County alone has more people than all but maybe a dozen states.

So on my own cherished weekend time, I totted up some numbers. First, I listed the Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Then I listed the populations of the states they represent. Then I added up those numbers. Arizona, for example -- two Republican senators, state population, about six and a half million people. (If a state had only one Republican Senator, I added half of that state’s population.)

Senator McConnell seems to have forgotten basic math, or discarded it, as easily as he’s forgotten Iraq. Because by my rather generous count -– and I did not count Minnesota’s Senate seat for either party -– I figure that Senate Republicans represent about 115 million Americans.

That’s not remotely ‘’half.’’ That’s a bit less than one third of the nation’s total population.

Is the Senator posturing, in which case he needs to have his knuckles smartly rapped on his math-defying whopper? Or does he truly believe, wrongly, that Senate Republicans truly represent half the country’s population?

And if that’s the case, my question is, do you really want a man who can’t -- or won’t -- count properly when it comes to millions deciding on how to spend hundreds of billions?

AP Photo/Susan Walsh