The Senate Is Broken

The New Yorker has a great article on the many ways that the Senate is broken. We can spend out time debating the merits of Linda McMahon buying a senate seat versus Dick Blumenthal representing the worst in attorney general meddling. But in the end, the choice on who you want to represent Connecticut in the Senate should about the character of the person who will actually show up and do the job they were elected to do, like actaully read bills and attend meetings and hearings and do their best job doing so. And what is going on in Washington now? Read on after the jump.

THE EMPTY CHAMBER

Just how broken is the Senate?
by George Packer

AUGUST 9, 2010

“Sit and watch us for seven days,” one senator says of the deadlocked chamber. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing.”

This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.

“It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.”

The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated; Levin glowered over his spectacles.

“Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.”

She was referring to Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, which requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session. Both Levin and McCaskill had scheduled hearings that day for two-thirty. Typically, it wouldn’t be difficult to get colleagues to waive the rule; a general and an admiral had flown halfway around the world to appear before Levin’s Armed Services Committee, and McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Homeland Security Committee was investigating the training of Afghan police. But this was March 24th, the day after President Barack Obama signed the health-care-reform bill, in a victory ceremony at the White House; it was also the day that the Senate was to vote on a reconciliation bill for health-care reform, approved by the House three nights earlier, which would retroactively remove the new law’s most embarrassing sweetheart deals and complete the yearlong process of passing universal health care. Republicans, who had fought the bill as a bloc, were in no mood to make things easy.

So, four hours earlier, when Levin went to the Senate floor and asked for consent to hold his hearing, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and a member of Levin’s committee, had refused. “I have no personal objection to continuing,” Burr said. But, he added, “there is objection on our side of the aisle. Therefore, I would have to object.”

Burr had to object on behalf of his party because he was the only Republican in the chamber when Levin spoke. In general, when senators give speeches on the floor, their colleagues aren’t around, and the two or three who might be present aren’t listening. They’re joking with aides, or e-mailing Twitter ideas to their press secretaries, or getting their first look at a speech they’re about to give before the eight unmanned cameras that provide a live feed to C-SPAN2. The presiding officer of the Senate—freshmen of the majority party take rotating, hour-long shifts intended to introduce them to the ways of the institution—sits in his chair on the dais, scanning his BlackBerry or reading a Times article about the Senate. Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, said, “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”

Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber. The only people who pay attention to a speech are the Senate stenographers. On this afternoon, two portly bald men in suits stood facing the speaker from a few feet away, tapping at the transcription machines, which resembled nineteenth-century cash registers, slung around their necks. The Senate chamber is an intimate room where men and women go to talk to themselves for the record.

Like many other aspects of senatorial procedure, Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5 is a relic from the days when senators had to hover around their desks to know what was happening on the floor during the main afternoon debate. (The desks, some built as long ago as 1819, are mahogany, and their lids lift up, like those in an old schoolhouse; the desks of the Majority and Minority Leader are still equipped with brass spittoons.) In the press lounge, McCaskill said, with light sarcasm, “Somebody told me the rule is to make sure people pay attention to what’s happening on the floor during debate and not be distracted by committee work. Clearly, it’s an old rule.”

More than anything else, the decision Connecticut faces is over who will best represent Connecticut, and doing the work it will take to legislate. My question to both candidates then is, have you read any bill passed this year by the Senate, in it’s entirety? And yes, I mean in a back to school essay questions sort of way. Wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of our media brethren would focus on legislative issues rather than polls and funding in this race?

  • Braemar

    And who will not vote us off the deficit cliff by going lock step along with any Dem leadership to spend us out of this hole..

  • Charles the Hammer

    The Senate is broken because its original constitutional construct was gutted by the 17th Amendment. In 1913, state legislatures lost their tempering effect on the expansion of centralized Federal authority, when Progressives successfully convinced the electorate that “more” direct democracy is necessarily “better.”

    The Founders devised three distinct means of choosing the members of the elected branches: direct election of the House of Representatives for a brief 2 year term, the Electoral College for the presidency in a four year term, and state legislatures to vote for Senators as representatives of the States in staggered, six year terms(one third of them up for election every two years).

    This structure is designed to divide power by elective means, by term length, and by constituency. A Senate beholden to the States prevents diminishing their role in relation to the government in Washington, D.C. Since the ratification of the 17th Amendment, the States have increasingly become mere administrative appendages of the Federal Government. Strong state government is a healthy check on the power and authority of the central government. The Senate is supposed to be a key lever in that design. Let the House be the populist sounding board most responsive to the public as intended. Return the Senate to its original role and the conduct of its business will reform as well. A more robust Federalism will remind everyone that, after all, it was the states that founded our Republic.

    • PubliusShmublius

      Hear, hear! Finally someone sees the wisdom of the original Article One, Section 3. For 145 years the Republic has suffered from an increasingly centralized government, aided and abetted by an increasingly dangerous excess of democracy.

      Yet I fear that such a piecemeal approach to the task of limiting the political influence of the unlettered masses will be doomed until such time as the scope of the electorate itself is returned to that contemplated by the Founding Fathers. One can only imagine the saddened disbelief that they would exhibit upon an appraisal of the current electorate, and the composition of the House and the Senate would be nearly unrecognizable to them. The sight of women and other hitherto unenfranchised groups engaged in public debate would rightly make them fear for the ability of the body politic to deliver the sober deliberations necessary for the maintenance of Liberty. Without a doubt our life, liberty and property are best vouchsafed by those to which the Founding Fathers entrusted it – well intentioned men of education, wisdom and property.

      And to those who bridle at this suggestion, I would point out that no less an advocate of democracy than Jefferson himself opposed female suffrage, noting that women, “to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men.”

      A return to the original method of electing the Senate is a step in the right direction, but we should hardly stop there. For compared with the havoc wrought by the 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th amendments, the effect of the 17th amendment is weak tea indeed.

  • Secondhand Hosebeast

    Finally, a break from the tiresome bleatings of Blarney and Barney. Could this be the Jekyll to Charles the Hyde’s pompous bloviating? More, please.

    • Secondhand Hosebreast

      OH!

      • Thirdhand Nosethrottle

        My goodness!

  • Barnstorm

    Didn’t think I’d notice?

    Anyway, just how does one unring the bell on female suffrage? Seems like a project that would encompass a lot of time and energy, and in the end accomplish less than nothing.

    If you really want to deny women of their rights, you would either 1) do so at your own peril, or 2) find yourself actively recruited by the Taliban or some other semi-feudal society.

    Good luck with either one pal…

  • Charles the Hammer

    Publius, you are a genius! Let’s expand on your satirical straw man propositions by including the election of all Federal judges, extending voting franchise to tourists visiting Vegas, and deciding national policy by clicking our TV remotes. Your inspiration obviously derives from a deep gratitude for the 21st Amendment. I’ll bet you have a portrait of Robespierre on your nightstand; you, you…you populist you!

    • PubliusSchmublius

      Words cannot begin to express my sadness and dismay upon discovering that my full and heartfelt support for Charles the Hammer’s brilliant dissection of the insidious Republic-undermining nature of the 17th Amendment has been met by that hitherto stalwart gentleman and constitutionalist with mockery and derision. O cruel fate! The self-consciously absurd proposals that Charles advances — I both hope and fear that he does so in a spirit of wicked jest befitting his quick intellect but unworthy of his otherwise kind and generous spirit — have no relation to my prior admonitions. For though Charles seems to wish to erect a lunatic funhouse of constitutional horrors upon the solid foundation of my sober proposals, I must point out to those who are not privy to his subtlety of his jest that each of the items that Charles seeks to attribute to me, mystifying as each is (for I know not of the “Vegas” of which he speaks), is indeed the polar opposite to what I propose, and is merely fairy-spun dross of a fevered imagination.

      Each of my proposals for restoring the responsibility of the ballot to those to whom it is most wisely confided is — like Charles’s proposed repeal of the 17th Amendment — based on sound historical fact and taken directly from the original enactments of our Founding Fathers. We drink from the same well of Original Intent, Charles! How can you find that when you dip into that well so carefully set out for us by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jay and others, you fill your bucket with clear pure water, while you accuse me, drawing from the same source, of filling mine with rum?

  • Charles the Hammer

    Intoxication is the out I granted you as a gentleman. Yet, repeal of prohibition should serve as an example of how to retract legislation that is dysfunctional. However, your clever but arrogant mocking of the founders belies an inexplicable waste of your erudition. Do you really consider yourself so hip, so “in the know” as to write off the intent of the original design for the Senate with a few key strokes? Apparently you do. By simply avoiding discussion of the topic at hand by means of sarcasm, you play at serious thought in a witty exhibition of rhetoric. Additionally, while your linguistic skills are impressive, you are mathematically challenged as proven by your silly fallacies of logic: the 14th and 15th amendments, as well as many other worthy changes to the constitution, were enacted prior to the change to Senate elections. As you also see fit to mock Original Intent, let’s declare this discussion to be “living and breathing”. I’ll read what you say, and decide what it means based upon my mood at the time. Like a State Trooper on the roadside, I urge you to FOCUS, or if you can’t, hop on one foot and touch your nose with your eyes closed. Have another drink Publius, “repeal” made it legal again.

  • PubliusSchmublius

    I am grateful, Charles, that you no longer attempt to tar me with wild proposals of your own imagining, and urge instead that we focus upon the structural damage wrought to our constitutional edifice since it was erected by our Founding Fathers. And as I focus upon your words, I find that verily you are of a far more “progressive” mind than my own, in spite of your curious fixation on Amendment XXI. (Since you and I are now friends, I will confide that I prefer whenever possible to use Roman rather than Arabic numerals, for reasons that I need not describe, but with which I am sure you will sympathize.)

    Indeed, you appear to grant the validity of the illegitimately “ratified” Amendment XIV, and accept Amendments XV, XX and XIV with nary a whimper. While you seem to see Amendment XVII as a watershed moment, curiously casting aspersions upon my chronological (not mathematical) abilities, I view them all, whenever enacted, as part of the so-far inexorable march toward what our Founders feared most – mob rule. I say, repeal them all, and be done with it!

    (I must hasten to add, in the event that any of the kind readers of this weblog might think that I am inalterably opposed to ANY changes to our constitutional structure, that Amendment XII was a much-needed prophylactic measure against further machinations of traitorous snakes such as Burr.)

    My personal hurt at the insults you fling at me, Charles, does not cloud my judgment so much as to prevent me from thoroughly endorsing your premise that it was the States, not “the People” that created the Republic. And were it not for the damned Committee on Style and that one-legged drunken womanizer Gouverneur Morris, we would not have a Constitution whose preamble suggests otherwise. “We the People” indeed!

    As for Amendment XVII, let you and I together stick to our pistols, Charles, and not be distracted by those States where the “people” directly elected Senators by referenda for years before Amendment XVII. Nor should we take note of the states who had Senatorial vacancies for lengthy periods of legislative deadlocks — “the fewer Senators in Washington the better!” — that’s what I say. And to those who whine that the Senators chosen by the state legislatures were in fact chosen by, and were simply creatures of the party bosses, I say — “What’s wrong with that? They must be bosses for a reason! Why shouldn’t they have the right to choose a Senator or two?” You and I stand together as one against these nay-sayers.

    But again Charles, I am constrained by my respect for your positions to counsel against excessive timidity in either your goals or your critique of the democratizing Jacobins that have seized control our our beloved Republic. Indeed, Charles, let us no longer beat around the bush. For we both know that by the time that Connecticut provided the ratifying vote to include (for now at least) Amendment XVII in our Constitution, the Founders’ view of the primacy of the States was already dead letter, trampled under the boots of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and burned by the same torches that set Atlanta aflame. And we both know who the true villain of this piece is, for as much as I despise Wilson and his Free Silver loving acolytes and suffragettes, it is not the Progressives that killed the sacred sovereignty of the States. It was instead the first (but sadly not the last) presidential tyrant from Illinois — LINCOLN! And until we undo the damage HE visited upon these united STATES, the Founders’ perfectly conceived federalism shall not be restored.

    PS: As for your repeated intimations and indeed outright accusations of intemperance on my part, sir, I shall grant you the courtesy that you have denied me, and refrain from a Churchillian response.

  • Barnstorm

    And Blarney thought I was having too many conversations with myself…sheesh.

    Friends, here we have proof that even history majors were capable of dropping too much acid.

    Let us march forward, if we must….to the 18th century!

  • Joe B

    Yes let us march foreword to the 18 century, because this administration has tried to put back in the 16th century.

    Hows that “Hope & Change” working out for you?

    This November it will finally start to take place.