Lazing on a Senate afternoon

By M.S.

GEORGE PACKER spends the opening passages of his New Yorker piece on the dysfunctionality of the Senate portraying a day at the institution in all its tedious, insipid glory. Democratic Senators kill time in chambers while Republicans use arcane 19th-century rules, meant to give legislators time to ride across town on horseback, to prevent committees from holding hearings after 2 pm. Senators deliver stem-winding speeches to the empty Senate floor for the benefit of CNN cameras. Quorum calls drag on for hours. When a bill comes up for a vote, dozens of ludicrous amendments are proposed with the aim of slowing it down: an amendment to prevent rapists and child molesters from using federal dollars to buy Viagra; an amendment to let senior citizens opt out of Medicare. (There is no actual discussion on the floor of the "world's greatest deliberative body". A freshman senator says that in the year and more he has served, he can remember only one such debate between a Democrat and a Republican, while another says he has never seen a senator change another senator's mind.) And this is the Senate on one of the three days of the week when some senators are actually present; every Friday through Monday, they're back in their home states, trying to raise the money they'll need to get re-elected. This day, however, is not a typical day: it is the day the Senate takes up voting on the Affordable Care Act health-care reform bill. In other words, the day Mr Packer portrays is unusual in that, after lazing around and delaying action as long as it possibly can, the Senate actually does something.

Towards the end of the piece, Mr Packer outlines the movement among some of the newer Democratic senators to eliminate the filibuster or otherwise streamline the institution's ridiculous rules. Republicans, however, aren't buying it.

“They'll get over it,” Alexander said of the Democrats' enthusiasm for rules reform. “And they'll get over it quicker if they're in the minority next January. Because they'll instantly see the value of slowing the Senate down to consider whatever they have to say.” He added that the Senate “may be getting done about as much as the American people want done.” The President's ambitious agenda, after all, has upset a lot of voters, across the political spectrum. None of the Republicans I spoke to agreed with the contention that the Senate is “broken.” Alexander claimed that he and other Republicans were exercising the moderating, thoughtful influence on legislation that the founders wanted in the Senate. “The Senate wasn't created to be efficient,” he argued. “It was created to be inefficient.”

Think about this for a second. Mr Alexander isn't really attempting to claim that the Senate is serving its intended function in the sense of being a less partisan body where legislation can be discussed in a more reasoned fashion than it is in the House. Such a claim would be laughable. No deliberation takes place between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate; the two sides no longer speak to each other. Rather, Mr Alexander is claiming that the purpose of the institution is simply to be inefficient, not to improve legislation but to slow it down. What role the quality of senators might play in such an institution is unclear. It could be staffed by seventh-graders, provided they were sufficiently cliquish and obstructionist.

If you think that most of the world's problems are created by government, then the current situation might suit you well enough. You might welcome the record increase in holds and filibusters that have slowed this once productive legislative body to an indolent crawl. Perhaps the style of governance that obtained in America from 1791 until the 1970s really was too activist, and we're better off with a legislature that is nearly incapable of functioning. But at the end of his piece, Mr Packer lays out a list of issues the Senate will fail to take up in this session:

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.

It's hard to see how any of the issues on Mr Packer's list can be addressed by anyone other than government. And it is hard to see how leaving them to fester for longer is going to do the country, or the world, any good.

(Photo credit: AFP)