The big rethink
The U.S. Senate doesn’t have it easy these days. George Packer’s full-frontal assault on the upper chamber of Congress in last week’s New Yorker has been making the rounds in the national media, and many have been eager to agree with his excruciating portrait of a dysfunctional institution:
The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
Along these lines, E.J. Dionne makes a radical suggestion in his Washington Post column today:
I’ve reached the point where I’d abolish the Senate if I could. It is more profoundly undemocratic than it was when the Founders created it and less genuinely deliberative — problems compounded by a Republican minority’s strategy of delay and obstruction.
Is it time to rethink the basic structure of our representative democracy? The idea isn’t so crazy. As Packer points out, “The upper chamber of Congress was a constitutional compromise between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty.”
If that compromise is no longer necessary, why do we need a Senate? The United Kingdom’s House of Lords, for example, has very little power. There’s no single correct way to structure a government.
Discussion of abolishing the Senate is unlikely travel far anytime soon, but there’s no reason why that’s the case. Sometimes thinking about our future means rethinking our past.
-Sam
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user cliff1066.
Related posts:
- More on healthcare and choice
- How many votes should be required to pass bills in the Senate?
- Compromise
- A tough climate
- Being an ass for the republic
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
