The dysfunctional US Senate

“Sit and watch us for seven days,” one senator says of the deadlocked chamber. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing.”

And if something does happen, it's bad:

Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, was secretly blocking the confirmation of seventy Obama appointees over a dispute involving defense earmarks for his state. (His tactics exposed, Shelby—whose office maintains that he was responsible for fewer than fifty holds—lifted all but three.) Later that month, [KY GOP Senator] Bunning spent several days and a late night on the Senate floor, filibustering to prevent benefits from being paid to millions of unemployed Americans. When [OR Dem Senator] Merkley tried to reason with him, Bunning responded, “Tough shit.” (Eventually, Republicans persuaded Bunning to stop.)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201008170931

Of course this story is an outsider's take on the modern Senate, and he leans left. Maybe the author can't or won't capture all the less publicized, complex good work that the Senate does for us every day, but the problems he describes are obvious to most Americans who aren't committed to a political agenda of making sure Obama accomplishes nothing.

Unlike previous generations, the Senate is not a debate forum among intellectuals for the good of the country. No one even discusses anymore; Senators just talk past each other, read canned statements written by their staffers (often inexperienced, ideological go-getters), and then go home without hearing other views. Maybe they would even prefer to stroke their egos and talk on the press rounds instead. Modern political pressures and 24-7 mass media have turned the Senate into a joke. Of course our founding fathers designed the Senate to be inefficient, unparliamentary, and act as a brake against populism and knee-jerk legislation. But it wasn't meant to be a brick wall, which is what the GOP minority has resembled since Obama took office. So what is the future of government? When a Dem is president, nothing gets done, except for urgent crises like wars and recessions? And when the GOP is in power, maybe the Dems would do the same, or they would blink and cowardly give a rubber stamp, as they did with Dubya? So basically the country can only hold course or swing right, which doesn't represent the interests of at least 40% of voters. Sometimes you hold the line and fight, and sometimes you have to make deals, but you can't be a brick wall all the time.

We already know that lobbying and special interest money contaminate the Congress, and the use of filibuster has changed in purpose and drastically increased since Reagan's time (especially when the GOP is in the minority). Pointless "secret holds" delay uncontroversial, qualified presidential nominees from doing their jobs for months (again, the GOP has taken this to another level with Obama). Many junior senators are pumped up to do good and get bills passed, so they hate the loopholes and philosophically would like to change some rules, but what if their party is in the minority next session? They don't want to lose out on that leverage, just in case (like the problematic super-majority to pass a budget in CA: everyone hates it but fears that they may need it one day). For the minority party, it's become like a degenerate game of curling (and just as exciting) rather than legislation. Don't worry about winning, just find sneaky ways to frustrate and block your opponent from scoring. Then eventually the public will get fed up and kick that party out, and you will get your chance. Who cares about the precious legislative calendar you've wasted? Your term is 6 years, you will most likely be re-elected even if you sucked on the job, and you enjoy fat compensation. And even if you lose your office, just wait the 2-year "cooling off period" and become a big time lobbyist on the Hill instead, which has even higher pay. But that job security and privileged status breeds an attitude of arrogance, apathy, and exclusivity I think.

Senators and their families used to live and socialize with each other (even with the other party) in Washington, so it's easier to talk and be cordial with friends. But now they mainly don't know each other, so it's easier to hate (especially when the rest of your caucus pressures you to). In order to save money, and due to the fact that they're only in DC half the week, some senators even eat and LIVE in their offices. So they're isolated from their peers (and the real world), even for lunch, since they're probably busy courting donors or hearing out special interest pitches downtown. The "old lions" of the Senate, who knew it when it was actually bipartisan and orderly under LBJ, are now dead or dying/retiring, and new senators came up in a more nasty, ideological climate. Unlike the past, more younger senators are coming from the House, which is an even more short-sighted, partisan institution. Also senators have to fly to their home states, maybe several times a week, in order to attend to local business or engage in the endless re-election campaign (Senator Harkin estimates that he and his colleagues spend 50% of their free time on fund-raising activities, instead of better serving the public interest). They are scheduled on the Senate floor literally for 15-minute blocks, and then they're whisked away by their staff punching away on their smart phones. In fact, most Senators aren't even on the floor, even during major business and votes.

[OR Senator] Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat. “The memory I took with me was: ‘Wow, that’s unusual—there’s a conversation occurring in which they’re making point and counterpoint and challenging each other.’ And yet nobody else was in the chamber.”

So if no one gives an honest effort at outreach or even basic participation, there can be no debate and compromise. Would we survive at our jobs by being absent most of the time and saying "no" to everything? And if Senators are too over-scheduled with other matters to really think about public policy and governance, how can they do their jobs and represent the people? But our government is a reflection of us and our culture, so we deserve our leaders and their broken system. It's just a shame that it's so difficult to change. But if things got this bad so quickly, they can also improve quickly with the right people, conditions, and motivation.

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Some highlights of a typically long New Yorker piece:

The Republicans had turned this old rule [requiring unanimous consent for debate to extend past 2PM] into a new means of obstruction. There would be no hearings that afternoon... Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

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The Republican goal in [blocking Obamacare with endless, pointless amendments] Vote-O-Rama was to embarrass the Democrats while appearing to suggest useful changes; the Democratic goal was to prevent any change to the bill, so that it wouldn’t have to return to the House, where it might be voted down. Several of the Republican amendments had been designed to make Democrats look hypocritical, by forcing them to vote against policies that the Party typically supports.

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Each senator sits on three or four committees and even more subcommittees, most of which meet during the same morning hours, which helps explain why committee tables are often nearly empty, and why senators drifting into a hearing can barely sustain a coherent line of questioning. All this activity is crammed into a three-day week, for it’s an unwritten rule of the modern Senate that votes are almost never scheduled for Mondays or Fridays, which allows senators to spend four days away from the capital. Senators now, unlike those of several decades ago, often keep their families in their home states, where they return most weekends, even if it’s to Alaska or Idaho—a concession to endless fund-raising, and to the populist anti-Washington mood of recent years. (When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, in 1995, he told new Republican members not to move their families to the capital.) Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader, said, “When we scheduled votes, the only day where we could be absolutely certain we had all one hundred senators there was Wednesday afternoon.”

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[Former Dem leader] Daschle sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

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For some Federalists, [the Senate] also had an aristocratic purpose: to collect knowledge and experience, and to guard against a levelling spirit that might overtake the majority. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the Senate, in 1832, he was deeply impressed by the quality of its members: “They represent only the lofty thoughts [of the nation] and the generous instincts animating it, not the petty passions.” But he also recognized that “a minority of the nation dominating the Senate could completely paralyze the will of the majority represented in the other house, and that is contrary to the spirit of constitutional government.” As long as the Senate continued to be composed of America’s most talented statesmen, Tocqueville implied, it would restrain its own anti-democratic potential.

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But the Senate's history was not always intellectual and lofty:

After the Civil War the Senate was captured by wealthy and sectional interests, ending a more high-minded age when Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun engaged in brilliant debate. Aside from spasms of legislation at the start of the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, Caro writes, the Senate remained controlled by an alliance of Southern racists and Republican corporate shills, and was “the dam against which the waves of social reform dashed themselves in vain—the chief obstructive force in the federal government.” By the fifties, the Senate had become far more conservative than the public. And not just conservative: William S. White, in his 1956 book “Citadel,” called the Senate “to a most peculiar degree, a Southern Institution . . . growing at the heart of this ostensibly national assembly” and “the only place in the country where the South did not lose the war.”

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The Senate’s modern decline began in 1978, with the election of a new wave of anti-government conservatives, and accelerated as Republicans became the majority in 1981. “The Quayle generation came in, and there were a number of people just like Dan—same generation, same hair style, same beliefs,” Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, recalled. “They were harder-line. They weren’t there to get along with Democrats. But they look accommodationist compared to Republicans in the Senate today.”

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The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to coöperate across the aisle. The Senate, no longer a fount of ideas, became a backwater of the U.S. government. During the Clinton years, the main action was between the White House and the Gingrich House of Representatives; during the Bush years, the Republican Senate majority abdicated the oversight role that could have placed a vital check on executive power.

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Between 1998 and 2004, half the senators who left office became lobbyists. In 2007, Trent Lott, a Republican leader in the Senate less than a year into his fourth term, abruptly resigned and formed a lobbying firm with former Senator John Breaux, just a few weeks before a new law took effect requiring a two-year waiting period between serving and lobbying.

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Under McConnell, Republicans have consistently consumed as much of the Senate’s calendar as possible with legislative maneuvering. The strategy is not to extend deliberation of the Senate’s agenda but to prevent it. Tom Harkin, who first proposed reform of the filibuster in 1995, called his Republican colleagues “nihilists,” who want to create chaos because it serves their ideology. “If there’s chaos, things will tend toward simple solutions,” Harkin said. “In chaos people don’t listen to reason.”

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“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 [CO Dem Senator] 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.”