The Senate: Sluggish in a Good Way

Written by Steve Bell on Thursday August 5, 2010

Every year in which “good ideas” failed to pass the Senate were years in which I was thankful for the rules of the U.S. Senate.

Well, it has now become officially fashionable inside the nation’s capital to bash the United States Senate.

Last year, the lament de jour was how partisan Congress and politics had become.  That view succumbed to an accurate assessment of history (remember the Civil War, for one thing).

Now, a lengthy jeremiad by George Packer in the latest issue of The New Yorker solidifies the Manhattan view of the Senate as just too slow in this cyber-age.

David Broder’s column this morning, “A Senate without Leaders”, praising the Packer article, also puts the official seal of D.C. approval on the view that the Senate is dysfunctional.

Packer’s fundamental thesis seems to be that the Senate has too many rules of procedure, these rules are arcane and anachronistic, and the Senate, as it really is, has made some newcomers and a few veteran Senators mad.  Oh, to add a little color and controversy to the article, Packer describes how much time Senators allegedly spend on fund-raising, how changed such legislative powerhouses as former Senator Gary Hart view the current Senate, and the obligatory disdainful quote from Norm Ornstein, claiming that the Senate has become increasingly populated by “ideologues and charlatans.”

Packer proceeds to list initiative after initiative that he apparently believes should become law, but haven’t because of the obstruction of the Senate rules and the Senate minority.  In my many years as a senior Senate staffer, I have seen such wish lists before. They mirror the wish lists every President intones in the State of Union Address, and each platform plank the parties adopt at their conventions.

Let’s try the view of a practitioner of Senate legislation, instead of outside observers who have never written a single word of legislation.

The Senate used to be better when Lyndon Johnson was Majority Leader claim some.  No, I would respond, the Senate was more malleable to Johnson because he controlled the money to candidates and had a huge majority with which to work.  Read Caro and see if you really want to go back to the Johnson days.

The Senate has become more partisan than ever, the rant goes, and it took a whole 18 months to pass a healthcare reform bill because of that partisanship.  Well, it took about 20 years to finally pass Medicare, and it takes years to pass most bills that impose new regimes on long-standing economic institutional relationships. Every year that “good ideas” failed to pass the Senate were years in which I thanked the rules of the U.S. Senate.

“Bright ideas” and “reform” have become the mantra of the Blackberry generation.  “I have an idea, and it is good, and I want it to pass right now,” a truly narcissistic Senator might say.  That Senator is in the wrong business. He needs to become an executive of a state, where he will encounter partisanship of a more rugged sort than in the U.S. Senate.  Or perhaps, he or she needs to go run a company, where the success or failure of “good ideas” becomes painfully obvious quite quickly.

In a global competition in which scientific knowledge and professional competence have become sine qua non, we have a Congress made up predominately of folks who have almost nothing more than law degrees and “beliefs.”  It is slightly unsettling to hear all these good ideas about healthcare from people who have almost no knowledge of medicine; or propositions to end America’s energy dependence on hydrocarbons from those who have no experience either in energy nor engineering; or, profound pronouncements on how to cure problems in the global financial world from people whose closest touch with finance is their monthly bank and investment mail.

No, I say, thank goodness and the Founding Fathers for the United States Senate and thank goodness for its rules.

So much mischief has dropped into the proper filing tool because of those rules.

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