Just How Broken Is The Senate?

In the August 9 issue of the New Yorker, George Packer published a long critique of the U.S. Senate called The Empty Chamber: Just How Broken Is The Senate? In twelve tortuous pages during which he leaves no stone unturned, Packer leaves little doubt about the only possible conclusion: the United States Senate, which was once called The World's Greatest Deliberative Body, is completely broken, hopelessly dysfunctional and perfectly incapable of change.

This should come as no surprise to regular readers of DOTE, where documenting our broken politics is more than an occasional pastime. Before quoting some choice bits from Packer's article, I would like to spell out the two main lessons we can draw from his research—

• There can be no doubt whatsoever that the Senate is not capable of producing meaningful legislation. It is the place where policies go to die. We should all bear this in mind when we are told between now and November—loudly, repeatedly, and at great length—that it really matters a lot who gets elected to the Senate (or the House). All this "horse race" talk is merely noise that has the effect of distracting us from the pressing real life issues confronting us. See my post All We Have Is Each Other.


• Insurmountable problems in the Senate should not be viewed in isolation, but unfortunately, this is how most observers will understand Packer's findings. All of America's major institutions, both private & public, are irredeemably broken (e.g. CNN, Fox, MSNBC and other television news & entertainment, the Supreme Court, etc.). The issue is the Decline Of The Empire, not merely massive dysfunction in the Senate. See my post America, A Faltering Empire.

I urge you to read Packer's article because there are so many good quotes in it, like this one—

Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, “Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising. In addition to financing their own campaigns, senators participate at least once a week in the Power Hour, during which they make obligatory calls on behalf of the Party (in the Democrats’ case, from a three-story town house across Constitution Avenue from the Senate office buildings, since they’re barred from using their own offices to raise money).

Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, insisted that the donations are never sufficient to actually buy a vote, but he added, “It sucks up time that a senator ought to be spending getting to know other senators, working on issues.”

Lamar Alexander is either lying or he doesn't come cheap. Or maybe he's just playing hard to get. See my post It's A Kleptocracy. I found Senator Michael Bennet's (D,Colorado) comments most illuminating—

Bennet, the former superintendent of schools in Denver, was appointed to a vacant seat in 2009, and already has to defend it this year. He described the Senate with the dry bluntness of an outsider who hasn’t allowed himself to grow too attached. Bennet repeated a story he had heard about a new congressman giving his maiden speech: “And then some more veteran guy came over and said, ‘Son, you’re talking like this place is on the level. It’s not on the level.’ As the fifteen months or so have gone by that I’ve been here, the less on the level it seems.”

And then there's this one—

Michael Bennet said, “We find ourselves at a moment in our history when the questions are huge ones, not small ones, and where things have been put off for a really long period of time.” He mentioned the national debt, energy policy, and the financial crisis. “Yet you have a Senate that’s designed not to advance change but to slow it.” 

And this one, through the words of Robert Kaiser, who would still like to believe that the system could be made to work—

As the senators cast their votes, I noticed Robert Kaiser, the author of “So Damn Much Money,” in the press gallery. I later asked him if, with the passage of two big reform bills in three months, we were witnessing a possible renewal of the Senate. “If you can engage public opinion in a way politicians can understand, public opinion can still blow away money and interest groups,” he said. “But over the past few decades the reflex has grown in the Senate that, all things considered, it’s better to avoid than to take on big issues. This is the kind of thing that drives Michael Bennet nutty: here you’ve arrived in the United States Senate and you can’t do fuck-all about the destruction of the planet.”

Can't do "fuck-all" about the destruction of the planet—that's the obstructionist U.S. Senate in a nutshell. And will things get better? No Way, Jose—

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.

And here's Michael Bennet!

Comments

[Edward Boyle]

I read once that a hundred years ago senators served maybe a couple terms on average. Nowadays it is Senator for life. More like college of Cardinals or House of Lords. Octogenarians out of touch with modern reality running around there doing their thing with hardly a chance of getting voted out.