"(The word “filibuster” comes from vrijbuiter—old Dutch for 'looter.')"
George Packer for The New Yorker, here
Since all the cool kids are linking to George Packer's article on the myriad maladies of the senate, I thought that I would too.
It's a fascinating look at the Senate, and Packer manages to find every synonym for the word opaque out there (labyrinthine, byzantine, etc.).
The first takeaway is that the filibuster, despite its notoriety, is not really the biggest problem with senate procedures. Republicans have been experts in using holds--secret or otherwise--and the constant need for unanimous consent to undertake even the most basic housekeeping measures to slow the pace of governing to a crawl. As Packer writes,
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. [...]
“The Senate, by its nature, is a place where consensus reigns and personal relationships are paramount,” Lamar Alexander said. “And that’s not changed.” Which is exactly the problem: it’s a self-governing body that depends on the reasonableness of its members to function. Sarah Binder, a congressional scholar at George Washington University, said, “To have a chamber that rules by unanimous consent—it’s nutty! Especially when you’ve got Jim Bunning to please.”
Of course, the Senate has both had these rules and been able to function. The new ingredient in the mix is ever-growing crazy faction within te Republican caucus.
You have Senator McCain, who championed the idea of "cap and trade," turning around, and deriding it as the second coming of Marx and calling it "cap and tax." You have Senator Grassley, who put forward a number of the proposals in the Obamacare bill saying that it would "pull the plug on grandma." You've got a world in which ideas that are moderate at best and conservative at worst are being called socialism by members of the Senate. You want to see socialism? Give me single-payer and nationalize the banks. But, no, any regulation is now a "takeover," any tax is now a "shakedown," and stimulus is a "bailout," and everything--everything--is somehow not only a socialist plot, but a communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi plot as well--never mind that those last three are mutually exclusive.
And the problems with the crazy caucus don't stop there. There's something deeply unsettling about having people who actually hate government--who want to "drown it in a bathtub," to use Grover Norquist's now-infamous phrase--in positions of power in government. After all, the Tea people aren't the "I just want goverment to be smaller" Republicans; they're the "all government is tyranny people." (Of course, they're also the "government should be big enough to urine test all welfare recipients" people, which is just a little bizarre, but I digress...)
As much as I wish it, I don't think that all those obstructionist Republican senators will be either voted out or have a change of heart, which leaves finding the root cause of the problems in the Senate. The one I like the most is the never-ending need to fund-raise, and, thus, the absenteeism in the Senate.
First, let's be glib; Packer writes:
[T]he goal was to finish the bill by the end of the evening, so that senators wouldn’t miss a day of their spring recess—apparently, the only thing worse than a government takeover of the health-care system.
And then the serious:
While senators are in Washington, their days are scheduled in fifteen-minute intervals: staff meetings, interviews, visits from lobbyists and home-state groups, caucus lunches, committee hearings, briefing books, floor votes, fund-raisers. 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.”
Nothing dominates the life of a senator more than raising money. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said, “Of any free time you have, I would say fifty per cent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising. In addition to financing their own campaigns, senators participate at least once a week in the Power Hour, during which they make obligatory calls on behalf of the Party (in the Democrats’ case, from a three-story town house across Constitution Avenue from the Senate office buildings, since they’re barred from using their own offices to raise money). Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, insisted that the donations are never sufficient to actually buy a vote, but he added, “It sucks up time that a senator ought to be spending getting to know other senators, working on issues.”
Holds could be broken, things could get out of committee, if senators were actually in the Senate. Perhaps real debates could take place on the floor of the Senate. Perhaps more could get done if, instead of a three-day senate week, we had a five- (or even six- or seven-) day week. Perhaps some of the comity and camaraderie (or whatever) could return if Senators were forced to actually spend time talking.
Plus all of this could lead to the civic bonus of actual discussion of issues, actual debates of problems--substance and not just process.
The trouble is, there's no easy way to get this done. You can't wave a magic wand and make term limits disappear (unpopular and potentially quality-killing, plus there's no guarantee that they won't just end up running for something else...); you can't just snap your fingers and make a constitutional amendment for purely public financing; you can't--and who would want to?--revert the world back to when state legislatures just appointed people.
Packer ends on a rather depressing, but probably true, note:
The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
Of course, the consiquence of this, as Ezra Klein has pointed out again and again, is that the legislative branch becomes less and less relevant, as the executive and judicial branches actually do things.
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