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Don't Tinker With the Damned Senate
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 
Messing with established institutions is what crazy people do when they want things to fall over and collapse. Think of someone who starts trying to re-imagine how the house of cards you just set up on the dining room table would look like with a bridge over it so that people can pass cookies from one place to the next. Hello? How stupid is that? I’m not naming names, Mr. Peej.
There is a discussion out there that centers around the mistaken belief that the rules of the United States Senate are keeping us from getting anything done. Far from it. The rules are keeping Senators from doing too much to weaken and injure the republic. Any fool can see that:
For those of us on the train for Senate reform, Elizabeth Drew’s Politico piece is worth reading, as she offers a very strong — and very convincing — defense of the chamber’s status quo. The short of her argument is that reformers are vastly overstating the extent to which the body is paralyzed or “dysfunctional”; by and large, Drew argues, this Senate has “essentially met all of the president’s major goals,” including one of the most significant public-policy “breakthroughs” in a generation. Yes, the Senate hasn’t moved on climate change and immigration, but as Drew notes, those are issues where there is significant disagreement within the Democratic caucus.
As I’ve argued before, I think this line of defense misses the damage intense minority obstruction does to the Senate’s other priorities; in addition to passing legislation, the Senate is responsible for confirming the president’s executive-branch and judicial nominees. Thanks to the filibuster and other parliamentary maneuvers, GOP senators have kept hundreds of executive-branch nominees and dozens of judges from filling their positions. PresidentObama has the lowest judicial confirmation rate of any president in the last 30 years, and for a long time, key executive-branch agencies were pitifully understaffed.
That said, there’s a lot Drew gets right in her piece, and this in particular needs to be said more often:
A lot of people also confused the fact that for the first time in 30 years a party, in this case the Democrats, had 60 votes (actually, 58 Democrats and two independents who caucused with them) with the idea that it automatically had 60 progressive votes, or 60 votes for the president’s program, which it rarely had. Some of those 60 are moderates from more conservative states (or smaller states, which have disproportionate power in the Senate). Also, Democrats technically had 60 votes for only seven of the 13 months of this Congress so far.
Norman Rogers
