http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/23/AR2009122301319.htmlAfter health care, we need Senate reform
By Ezra Klein
Sunday, December 27, 2009
snip//
To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king's ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact:
The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.In decades past, the parties did not feel they had both. Cooperation was the Senate's custom, if not its rule. But in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the minority whip of the House, and Bob Dole, then the minority leader of the Senate, realized they did have both. A strategy of relentless obstruction brought then-president Bill Clinton to his knees, as the minority party discovered it had the tools to make the majority party fail.
Unfortunately, both parties have followed Gingrich's playbook ever since.
According to UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, about 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country.snip//
This isn't just a Democratic concern, though Democrats, being in the majority, are the ones raising it now. In 2005, Senate majority leader Bill Frist nearly shut the chamber down over the Democratic habit of filibustering George W. Bush's judicial nominees. "This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," he said at the time.
Potential solutions abound. Harkin would eliminate the filibuster while still protecting the minority's right to debate. Under his proposal, bills would initially require 60 votes to pass. Three days later, that threshold would fall to 57. Three days after that, 54. And three days after that, 51. Merkley has some other ideas. One is to attract Republicans to the project by phasing the filibuster out six or eight years in the future, when we can't predict which party will initially benefit.
There is real promise in Merkley's approach.
The danger of reforming the Senate is that, like health-care reform before it, it comes to seem a partisan issue. It isn't. Members of both parties often take the fact that neither Democrats nor Republicans can govern effectively to mean they benefit from the filibuster half the time. In reality, the country loses the benefits of a working legislature all the time.But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they're relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that
both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.Law professor Lawrence Lessig often compares the dysfunctions of the Congress to the woes of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, he says, might be facing cirrhosis of the liver, the loss of his family and terrible debt. Amidst all that, the fact that he drinks before bed at night might not seem his worst problem. But it is the first problem, the one that must be solved before he can solve any of the others.
America, too, is facing more dramatic problems than the Senate rules: A coming budget crisis, catastrophic climate change and an archaic and inefficient tax system, to name a few. But none will be solved until we fix the dysfunctions of the Senate.
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