David Broder can and will use any excuse to promote Broderism, and the death of Robert Byrd is no exception. Because Broder exploits this opportunity to talk about the proper role of the ‘great’ ‘not representative’ Senate, it is of special interest to me. We’ve got a bunch of ‘tenthers‘ out there in the country right now talking about repealing the Seventeenth Amendment that made for direct elections of U.S. Senators. Sometimes I think they’re onto something.
But, really, a more useful reform might be to prohibit senators from running as party representatives. They wouldn’t have their party printed on the ballot, they wouldn’t be nominated by a party, and they’d be prevented by law from accepting support or coordinating with party committees. Anyone could run as long as they could demonstrate support by obtaining enough signatures.
This might be a strange thing to propose, and I am only half serious, but so long as we have this strange institution we ought to consider how to make it work as intended. Consider Broder’s overall point.
What Byrd and other senators of his generation understood is that on a wide variety of routine issues, partisan calculations are always at play, but there is a category of questions that truly are different. And on those issues, senators are bound to consider the broad national interest.
That obligation falls especially on the Senate, as Byrd always pointed out, because it is — unlike the other part of Congress — not designed as a representative body, close to the people. The senators are few in number — only two per state, no matter what its size. They have longer tenure than the president, and three times as long as a House member. Their constituencies are broad and diverse. Everything contrives to give them a degree of independence, to exercise their best judgment on the national issues.
Today, unfortunately, on the big issues that ought to be beyond partisanship, acting in the national interest has almost vanished because the party leaders, unlike Byrd and [Howard] Baker when they led their parties in the Senate, do not display that consciousness or evoke it in others.
Byrd concluded his remarks by reminding his colleagues that “in the real world, exemplary personal conduct can sometimes achieve much more than any political agenda. Comity, courtesy, charitable treatment of even our political opposites, combined with a concerted effort to not just occupy our offices, but to bring honor to them, will do more to inspire our people and restore their faith in us, their leaders, than millions of dollars of 30-second spots or glitzy puff pieces concocted by spinmeisters.”
The sense of loss expressed by Byrd’s colleagues of both parties is real. The “King of Pork” really did evoke what made the Senate great. There is a hunger there now for what is missing.
While I regularly mock Broder for his vapid calls for the two parties to stop disagreeing about stuff, he has a point about why the Senate no longer works. After all, people have always disagreed about stuff, but the Senate managed to function until very recently. The Netroots is a partisan entity, and it has had a large role in the election of Jon Tester and Jim Webb, as well as a large influence on the reelection campaigns of Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, and Arlen Specter. We’ve rejected the wisdom of the national party and pushed our own candidates, and that’s not how things are supposed to work. As Broder says, the people are not supposed to be close to the Senate. We’re not supposed to influence their decisions. But the parties are organizations of people. As a member of the Democratic Party, I should have some say over who my leaders will be, and if I am not supposed to have any say over who serves in the Senate then senators should not be allowed to belong to my party or use its resources.
Personally, I prefer to have a say over what happens in the Senate and I prefer them to listen to the people, but I do acknowledge that that is not how the Senate is supposed to work. And the fact that senators vote overwhelming in lock-step with their party leadership just demonstrates that the intended independence of senators is illusory. If the Founders didn’t intend the Senate to be little more than a smaller House of Representatives, they also didn’t intend the country to be ruled by two ideologically rigid factions.
Now, I’ve written this partly tongue-in-cheek to demonstrate the absurdity of the situation we face in today’s Senate. If someone truly embraces the undemocratic nature of the Senate, they can easily be led down the path I’ve spelled out here of enhancing the Senate’s remove from the people as a way to make it work again. And, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment is only one conceivable way of doing that.
The more immediate problem arises from only the Republican Party, which is paralyzing Congress through their use of procedural shenanigans in the undemocratic Senate. Limiting their power to do that should be the first priority of the next Congress. Tom Coburn isn’t embracing Broderism any time soon.
I know you wrote this tongue-in-cheek, but still:
The Founders didn’t intend for a lot of things. They were flying by the seat of their pants into mostly uncharted territory without a map. They were broken into different factions and different deals had to be wheeled before you ended up with the government we had.
If the Senate worked the way the Founders intended, each Senator would be beholden to the government of the state they were appointed from. Since the state governments these days are just as highly partisan as the Feds are, this would change absolutely nothing.
The longer I read Broder (and I’ve been reading his crap for going on 30 years now) the more convinced I am that he’s just itching for a king to bow down to. He doesn’t like the factionalization that is a natural part of self-governance through a democratic process. I actually think there are a lot of people like that in this country – they mouth approval for democracy and self-governance because they know it’s un-American to say otherwise, but in the end they don’t actually like the reality of self-governance and the messiness it entails.
I don’t know. If Michael Bloomberg didn’t have to campaign, but only bribe enough people in Albany to get selected as a U.S. senator, he’d probably not he too beholden to anyone but himself.
That’s pretty much how the old system worked, although I think it was mainly mining operations, railroads, etc., who were cutting the checks.
The problem in the Senate is not a failure of institutional form but of political culture. You have one party that believes that it is engaged in a cultural war to save the nation. And because it is war, any tactic is fair game. And since they seek to uniquely decide the future of this country, destroying the country when the other party is in power in order to win an election is also fair game.
Broder either is caught up in an age that no longer exists or he deliberately obtuse about the Republican power grab that was engineered by Newt Gingrich and set in concrete by Bush v. Gore. But Washington has been in Republican hands culturally for twenty of the last thirty years and arguably for more than that, given the treatment of Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
Has the Senate outlived its usefulness? That is a good question not only for the federal government but for all bicameral state governments as well. To what extent is the US still a federation of states? And what does that mean for governance and politics?
And nonpartisan elections do not provide a solution. Local folks know who is the Democratic puppet and who is the Republican puppet. And statewide campaigns require organization of resources that tend to produce party establishments.
The implications of the one person-one vote principle applied to a Senate of 100 Senators means the redistricting of the Senate from states into regions of 3 million people and redistricting on every census. As an exercise, take a map, write the population for each state within the state outline, and figure out how to allocate Senators across the country. South Carolina until we know he results of the 2010 census has a population of 4.5 million; North Carolina 9.3 million; California 36.9 million; Nevada 2.6 million; Oregon 3.8 million.
That means that of itself, North Carolina would get 3 Senators, South Carolina 1 Senator, California 6 Senators, Nevada 0 Senators, and Oregon 1 Senator. So what to do with the fractions? Multi-Senator districts or partitioning on the substate level at county or precinct boundaries?
North Dakota has a population of 0.6 million; South Dakota 0.8 million, Wyoming 0.5 million, Montana 1 million. Those four state have close to 3 million in population. And would share one Senator among them. Think about campaigning for that job as opposed to one of the 2 Senators that Massachusetts would have.
I would argue that Broder’s idea of a Senate without party is somewhat what Democrats have today in the Senate and is the other half of the current problem.
What would help more is reducing the cost of campaigning. A major step would be to require all campaign advertising to be carried in the media free of charge. Now figure how that will be gamed.
But Washington has been in Republican hands culturally for twenty of the last thirty years and arguably for more than that, given the treatment of Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
It’s been that way for a lot longer. Culturally, D.C.(meaning the Sally Quinn types) has been very conservative for ages. They don’t want anyone, or anything, messing up the status quo. And that’s despite people like Sally Quinn being a lot more immoral then the people they criticize.
OK
Well then since the day Katherine Graham became friends with Henry Kissinger.
Agreed. The Senate is a stubborn beast and always going to be an enemy of progressives, but its only since Obama came to power that its gotten so bad. Getting anything done in the Senate requires consensus and compromise. Broder, as well as any american who wants effective governmen, is right to lament its absence in the current Senate. But its when he analyzes why there isn’t consensus and compromise that Broder shows his true colors.
“in the real world, exemplary personal conduct can sometimes achieve much more than any political agenda. Comity, courtesy, charitable treatment of even our political opposites, combined with a concerted effort to not just occupy our offices, but to bring honor to them, will do more to inspire our people and restore their faith in us, their leaders, than millions of dollars of 30-second spots or glitzy puff pieces concocted by spinmeisters.”
…which is why Broder longs for the days, not so very long ago, when a sitting VP could tell a Senator to “go fuck himself” on the floor of the Senate.
Yes, a shining example of “exemplary” personal conduct, as long as you define “exemplary” as “serving as a model of a nasty, twisted war-criminal”.
From a conversation I got into on another site a starkly simple conclusion emerged:
The Senate filibuster rule, although a mere procedural rule, is unconstitutional. For the Senators, whether GOP or Democrat, it is a matter of clubby dispute, but for the rest of us, it represents a continual and chronic violation of our right to representation under constitution with respect to a legislative body that is not especially democratic to begin with.
I would like the senate Dems to have the good sense to change it in January. But I and I’m sure millions of others resent the idea that is completely up to them as members of the club not as our constitutional representatives.
What is the best way for the citizenry to apply pressure to get rid of this? It has becom clear that this is much more than an issue of how the club wishes to run itself.