Many people have been discussing the structural impediments to passing legislation, or what is often called legislative gridlock. As Matthew Yglesias put it:
The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it's not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it's the fact that the country has become ungovernable....
We're suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority's governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority's governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It's a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure.
While the most obvious impediment is the filibuster (the requirement of sixty senators out of 100 to allow a vote on a bill), two other structural issues are at work: the demise of powerful committee chairmen, and the concurrent decline of the importance of patronage ('pork') and the rise of the importance of campaign contributions.
Before the Watergate era, congressional committee chairmen were very powerful. If you wanted legislation passed, and it involved a particular committee (or if the chairman decided that it should involve his committee), you had to get the chairman on board. There were problems with this system: civil rights legislation was probably held up by at least a decade due to the influence of powerful Southern chairmen. But it did have the advantage that if someone wanted to break ranks, he could be punished: all of his patronage money that went to his district or state could be killed. You can kiss that hospital or defense contract goodbye. This maintained party loyalty. Now, it's much harder to do this, although it's still possible, if enough senators want to play hardball.
The second structural change is that patronage isn't as important as it used to be. More accurately, campaign finance has become more important. This results in two ways to weaken party solidarity. First, if you can raise 'your own' money, independent of the party, you don't have to be that loyal. Second, it makes politicians beholden to their donors--and, thus, unable to vote the party line (this conflict is usually, though not always, more of a problem for Democrats). As the old joke goes, an honest politician is one, who once bought, stays bought. If you have to choose between TV ads and patronage, the TV ads, particularly when so much of politics is tribal, are probably more important (although bringing home the boodle still matters).
These two problems magnify the effect of the filibuster--there's no really effective way to keep your own people in line to get the sixty votes needed for cloture.
- Log in to post comments
Guardian has a good article on just this very topic:
Tomasky's take, though is that the Dems never had 60 to start with, so it's never been a matter of keeping the 60 together, it's a matter of buying the 59th and 60th votes, which effectively puts another 3 or 4 waverers into play to see what *they* can get.
The real problem is equal representation in the Senate. Senators from shitty-ass small states are much too easy for corporate monsters to buy.
This problem will exist until campaign financing by individuals, PACs, corporations or others is eliminated. The only allowed campaign financing should be public money. But this will only happen when there is a public upheaval and that will only happen when things are bad for the general populace. But give it 20-30 years and we may get there.
Gee, you'd have thought limiting lobbyists to under $100 for meals while allowing unlimited campaign contributions (reform under Dubya) would have solved this problem.
The Senate really is an anachronism with no resemblance to real representation. Too bad it will never vote to reform itself.
You are right about both committees and campaign finance. Another thing is that it is too easy to fillibuster. If you actually had to hold the floor by speaking it would preserve the fillibuster as the last ditch chance to get everyone to re-examine positions (I like to keep a little idealism), but prevent it from becoming the barricade it is.
At one point using the fillibuster at every opportunity was called "going nuclear" and there was an element of mutually assured destruction philosophy. (Luckily, this worked better with actual nuclear weapons.) The idea was the minority wouldn't do it because someday they would be the majority party and then the minority part could do it to them and nothing would get accomplished. Nothing getting accomplished was viewed as a bad things. The current Republicans don't see to view that as a bad thing.
The consensus appears to be that this stems from the combination of private campaign contributions and the small-State advantage in the Senate.
The first stems from the First Amendment. That could be corrected by another Constitutional amendment. The first, on the other hand, can only be changed by tossing out the entire Constitution and starting over from scratch.
Bearing in mind the general level of enlightenment in the US population, how many of us want to live under the Constitution that would result from a clean-sheet-of-paper rewrite?
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Not that I think it'll ever happen, but a constitutional amendment could very easily restructure the Senate. For example, the number of Senators from each state could be changed and made representative of state population. Alternatively, the number of Senators could stay the same, but voting power in the Senate could be made proportional to state population.
Well, I'll take your word about the stupidity [1] -- but I would suggest that "a constitutional amendment" that "could very easily restructure the Senate" would have to occur under Article Five. I've read it, and apparently you haven't.
[1] And, yes, that comment is going in my quote file.
Perhaps you could do two amendments: onenullifying certain inconvenient language in Article 5. The other changing the composition of the Senate. OR we could subdivide all the populous states and admit them to the union en masse. You'd have to have an annex flag to hold all the stars, but it'd be worth it.
I take it you didn't follow the link.
So the solution is to force all states back to territorial status, and only readmit them when they agree to a repeal of Article V?
I prefer breaking up any state that reaches, say, 15 reps. Overly large states can harm the nation in other ways - kowtowing to Texas school book "standards" as one example.