Matt Bai has an interesting take on Tuesday’s elections and what they mean for the national parties. His number one take-away is that the elections demonstrated that Obama’s insurgent campaign was no fluke. The Establishments of both parties have never had less control over who the candidates or nominees will be. Anyone with significant constituencies can raise sufficient money outside of traditional sources and make a run for high office. The old levers of influence don’t work anymore. Obama demonstrated that in 2008, and Rand Paul, Joe Sestak, and Bill Halter demonstrated it this week.
It’s no longer possible for a party campaign chairman to snap his fingers and clear the field for his preferred candidate. In Pennsylvania, even the president, vice-president, governor, mayors of Philly and Pittsburgh, the DSCC, the DNC, and the unions could not guarantee a victory for Arlen Specter over a candidate who didn’t even have a campaign manager. This is trailblazing stuff and it isn’t supposed to happen. It’s especially not supposed to happen in the Senate which originally had its members selected by state legislatures. I don’t mean to suggest that a former three-star admiral who worked in President Clinton’s National Security Council is some kind of outsider, but there’s nothing in Sestak’s blueprint for victory that couldn’t be emulated by someone else who has the constituencies needed to raise sufficient cash. Rand Paul proved that. He’s never held political office before.
It is possible to have a reasonable facsimile of the general electorate in the Senate for the first time in history. Is it any surprise that the Senate has slowly morphed into a smaller copy of the House? Nothing can get done in the Senate these days because the rules give the minority too much power and the people provide too much accountability. It’s supposed to be far removed from electoral politics. That was how it was designed and envisioned. That’s how it operated for a hundred and thirty years. Now everything is done with an eye towards fundraising and elections. Either we need to go back to indirect elections or we need to change the rules of the Senate to reflect reality. The people want to hold their Senators accountable.
going back to indirect elections, as the tea party wants, is a non-starter. the voters would reject it, and with good reason (although watching the tea partiers fight against their own idea would be hilarious).
The Senate has been our House of Lords for a long time, except unlike the British Model…
…our Lords have a LOT of power and they use it to no good end.
Personally, I would have no problem doing away with the senate, which I see as an anachronism. In the 1960s, these people delayed civil rights legislation. In the present day, they have twisted health care reform into a bailout of the insurance companies, they’ve gutted necessary financial reform, their climate bill is in doubt, and they want to force every working american to carry a biometric ID. And that’s the supposed GOOD GUYS!
change the rules or scrap the institution.
So we may as well go unicameral and save everyone some money and time.
one of the benefits of our Senate is that it provides the kind of extraordinary stability that makes America one of the most attractive places to invest. It also creates a check on power within the legislative branch, making it easier to defeat populist foolishness that props up with every crisis. So, a bicameral system is desirable, but that doesn’t require us to have filibusters, secret holds, and other nonsense that creates a tyranny of the minority.
It also creates a check on power within the legislative branch, making it easier to defeat populist foolishness that props up with every crisis.
What populist foolishness? Do you really think that the House would pass a measure to abolish the Fed if there wasn’t a Senate?
Not this House, but another one might.
Remember Terri Schiavo? Remember the condemnation of MoveOn.org and ACORN? Congress will do any number of stupid things in the heat of the moment, and the Supreme Court doesn’t undo all of them.
Of course, and didn’t the Senate join the House in most of those(or would have in the of MoveOn.org)?
Remember when I said the Senate now resembles a smaller version of the House? They all face the electorate. They all have to raise loads of money.
But, the Senate is like a sieve. It catches most of the big bullshit, along with most of what is worthwhile.
No! Let’s first get proportional representation—true democracy—and then a national third party can emerge. Otherwise the divisions will only become sharper. An end to the 60-vote majority would do wonders, too. Well, none of this is going to happen in this sclerotic, retro world we live in.
All this does is take the deal-making from within the factions of parties and causes it to be between parties seeking a governing coalition.
Parties exist so long as it is an efficient way of campaigning for election and communications in the development of legislation and governance.
The situation we have now is that the two-party system is still the efficient way of campaigning because of the high cost of entry of other parties. But both parties are being paralyzed by the intra-party factions in governing.
And part of this has to do with so many high-stakes issues having coming home to roost after decades of neglect.
It’s the only way to get a third or fourth NATIONAL party off the ground. The two parties will never change things to disadvantage themselves. When was the last time a constitutional ammendement was ratified? Are we really to believe that the constitution is such a perfect document that we don’t have the intelligence, wil and means to create an really more perfect union, a new union based on the founding principles but adapted to our needs? We are taught to believe we are less gifted than the ‘Founders’. As if more than two hundred years ago they could have had such foresight. No one ever has. Well, god does in the bible and it seems to outsiders that U.S.-ians analyse the constitution as if it were a holy text. It’s as man-made as the bible and could use some improvement, in my opinion, a parliament with proportional representation across the entire country. Then three people in Wyoming don’t to tell the millions upon millions in the huge cities what’s going to be done with their taxes. And there is much more. The founders were not gods.
but there’s nothing in Sestak’s blueprint for victory that couldn’t be emulated by someone else who has the constituencies needed to raise sufficient cash.
That is the real key. Sestak had enough money from his House campaigns that he could do despite being cut off by Obama and Co. Randal Paul had his father’s network. If it weren’t for his father, he wouldn’t have had the money to challenge the McConnell machine. So in the end, it still comes down to money. Look at Brunner. Look at Marcy Winograd. They both need(or needed) money.
Going back to indirect elections would be asking the people to hold their legislators accountable for holding their Senators accountable. This would make it more difficult to get accountability, given how compromised most state legislatures are.
Very interesting post that got me thinking: if the GOP is so weak, why are they (again, I mean McConnel and his capos like Gregg) able to exert such rigid control over their entire minority caucus. In other words, clearly Snowe and Collins fear McConnel more than Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman fear Reid- the discipline of the GOP minority in the senate is breathtaking by historical standards- and yet judging by the recent elections, the GOP establishment has very little power to actually defend or help their chosen incumbents or candidates actually win elections. So what gives?
What gives?
When the movement conservatives lose, they double down. Conservatism has to do with stopping the world after all.
The current leadership has lost significantly since 2006. The insurgent Tea Party movement represents the next stage of doubling down. So the progression is: When Goldwater lost, the movement doubled down and started stripping the South of Democrats. When Nixon was impeached and Ford lost, the movement doubled down by allying with the religious right and making abortion their wedge issue. When Poppy Bush lost, the movement doubled down with Gingrichism and the impeachment of a president. When McCain lost, they doubled down with the Tea Party movement.
Liberals tend to double-down only when they win. They tend to move centrist when they lose.
Great points. I guess my question was more narrow than that: how does McConnel control the votes of the less conservative members of his caucus when he himself doesn’t really have that much juice, at least electorally? Every time Snowe, Collins and Brown vote with the GOP, they are presumably out of step with their constituents, And yet they rarely break ranks. How does he do it and can someone please tell the secret to Harry Reid?
well, for example, they basically told Arlen Specter he could chair the Judiciary Committee so long as he voted to confirm all their right-wing judges and looked the other way at 4th and 8th Amendment violations.
Thanks booman. So by that logic, why doesn’t Reid just tell Lieberman/Nelson/Lincoln that they lose their committee seniorities and chairmanship (in the next congress) if they ever threaten to filibuster the Majority Leader or President’s agenda? Seems like that’s not a bad deal- Arlen got a chairmanship just for his vote- all we’d be asking for is that members of a caucus not threaten to obstruct their leadership’s agenda.
By your answer it sounds like the answer is that McConnel plays things tough and Reid doesn’t. Got to be more complicated than that though.
It’s not really McConnell. It’s the caucus unity and the hard-right mentality of the Republicans.
I mean, first of all look at the House. We have a forty seat advantage and yet the majoritiy of House members are anti-choice.
That’s not true in the Senate, but have a big tent mentality and don’t believe in drumming people out of chairmanships over honest disagreements. If there were some more moderate Republicans in the Senate, the Dems probably would have given Lieberman his walking papers. But he was too valuable, as we’ve seen, to risk losing his vote on most procedural votes. The Republicans don’t really care about anything but judges. They spent eight years with Bush and passed two major bills, both of which most of them hate (NCLB and Medicare Part D). They only threw a fit over judges. They don’t really care about procedural votes when they’re in the majority because there are enough conservative Democrats to gather anyway.
It’s their utter lack of concern about the government actually passing new laws that allows them to adopt the completely over the top procedural stalling plan they’ve used this year. And if a couple of moderate Republicans don’t like it? The rest of the party has no problem disciplining them.
It comes down to one thing. They hate government and don’t want it to do anything. It’s there to be looted. Nothing else. And the other side doesn’t get to loot.
You made a bingo Booman. Thanks for the long response and very insightful. I think this hatred for government is sort of the “silent” leverage that Republicans have that makes so many of the “bargains” struck in Congress to forge the consensus and compromise required by our political institutions seem like such raw deals. In any negotiation when one of the parties is actually completely fine with nothing getting done and fine with walking out of the room and saying that the negotiation failed, then that party has a huge amount of leverage, whether they’re arguing over what movie to see or what role government should have in health care.
What’s really interesting about your observation though is that while it seems so obvious, the media completely ignores this reality. They always present it as if the both parties are negotiating in good faith and they just disagree about the appropriate policy solution.
see my most recent post.
The Dems are not ideologically in lockstep. Feingold and Cantwell, for example, threatened to filibuster the finance bill because the wanted it stronger. Would we want them to lose their seniority because of that? It’s hard to see how Reid could get away with disciplining Lincoln but not Feingold.
Indirect election is just too silly to comment on. Yeah, the Senate rules need to change in all the ways mentioned. That won’t be nearly enough, though. Congress is unresponsive to the citizens because the citizens are not the ones holding the carrots and sticks.
I don’t see how it could get more obvious that the root problem is money in politics. We have radically discarded the old idea that political office is a form of public service and made it into an overt race for money and power. There’s no logistical or philosophical block to taking the money out of elections. All the alleged attempts so far have been ridiculously inadequate. If we really want change we’ll overwhelm private money with public media time for qualified (by petition or other public hurdles) candidates, and we’ll force elected officials to live on their salaries and pensions with no “gifts” or “contributions” from anyone or anything. But apparently we like the corruption and prefer bitching from the sidelines to actually getting what we say we want.
You can’t get rid of money as long as the Supreme Court asserts that money == speech.
Sure you can. You can provide enough free media to qualified candidates to make private money irrelevant. Plus you can prohibit candidates from accepting gifts and contributions of any kind. The donors are free to offer them, but the conditions of employment for office holders prohibits them accepting them.
What is not being said in the comments is the fact that the Constitutional form of American government is an archaic model TOTALLY UNSUITED to the high speed, expanding technology of the 21st century. The era in which the Constitution was written was a period of time that supported an environment that has little in common with our current evolving modern society. Everyday we witness politicians and judges struggle to decide extremely complex modern problems in accordance with the statues of a 19th century regulatory architectural framework for a functioning government of that period.
We are faced with the ridiculous situation of having Congressional personnel create legislation governing the flow and jurisdiction for information data, business decisions and economic transactions moving through technological frameworks that these lawgivers not only don’t understand but have no comprehension as to the internal operations of such frameworks. Further, add in the complexity of a mega-node plane, where each node of which feature executable control and database functions that operate in a nanosecond environmental timeframe and you will have a complete picture of the impossible task that these non-technical members of Congress face in attempting to perform their function as mandated by the Constitution. It is important to keep in mind the fact that at the time the Constitution was written the fastest means of normal communication between adjacent cities within the same state was by mail, and depending on the travel distance and the season of the year the mail may take any where from a week to two weeks. Today, with a flick of the wrist and a press of a button on a cell phone and verbal contact is made, regardless of the distance or the season of the year.
Another deficiency can be found in the fact that through the facilities of the internet and satellite technology the world has now truly become a village and businesses are increasing taking on a global corporate structure. There are NO PROVISIONS within the Constitution to accommodate an American society facing problems created by membership in such a global environment. Americans continue to cling to the belief that the Constitution as originally framed efficiently lives on and its structure and language is eternally applicable to any era and society that America may experience. However, the current state of American society, and the continued growth of unsolved problems along with the inability for Congress to properly address them with the appropriate legislative remedies, indicates a failure in the structure of the American Republic to cope with complex modern situations.
Americans can vote out the entire Congress and the Executive and replace them with people with little or no federal government experience, and the current social and economic problems will continue to multiply. (This is assuming that the world continues to avoid a worldwide war.) Also any attempts to draft new Constitutional provisions designed to address interpretive problems caused by 21st technology are in danger of falling under the influence of the visions of editorial technocrats. Let me make one thing clear, the original Constitution MUST REMAIN as the cornerstone of the Republic, but new amendments are desperately required if America is to hold leadership in the world of the 21st century. Many will say such a proposal is NOT POSSIBLE in an America that is currently wracked from within by virulent dissent and excessive partisanship. They will say opening the door to any such Constitutional reform will essentially open the door to all sorts of political chicanery and special interest agendas seeking to wrest control of the government from the people. To these objections, I say that precisely the time to start the process is now, besides America has two choices, make the Constitutional changes or be forced out of the global leadership role in the 21st century. Peace….
So you’re a Technocrat?