Obstruction junction, what’s your function?
Recently I talked about streamlining the Senate Rules to make it a more effective body. Here’s why that’s a good idea:
Currently, to pass a law, it needs to go through a House committee (or several), the House, a Senate Committee (or several), the Senate, and finally the president gets to decide if it will become law. After that– at any point– the Supreme Court can decide they don’t like the law that the law is unconstitutional. Each of these is called (in Poli-sci jargon) a “veto point”, because at any of these stops, a bill could die.
In the House, all the different veto points could, in theory, cause a lot of dead bills. In practice, a long string of rules changes have led to rather powerful committee chairs– who are somewhat beholden to the Speaker for their chairpersonship.
Add to that the Conservative Revolution (begun in the 1980s, but took full force with Gingrich in ’93), which polarized congress, and you end up with “majorities” (and minorities, for that matter) who generally agree with one another on how to solve problems. In practice, if a bill survives a committee vote, it usually has enough support to pass in the House.
And that brings us to the Senate. Suffice to say that the Senate has different rules which allow 41% of the body to stop any bills from passing. And there are a whole host of things that just one senator can do– such as requiring the reading of any amendment in full out loud. If a senator tries to attache the NYC phone book to a bill, he or she can force the reading of the entire thing before it gets voted down. For the last century the House has tried very hard to make sure that it can conduct the business of America, and the Senate has looked down at them from across the Rotunda and insisted that legislation is ungentlemanly…
Given the amount of veto points in the system, America is very well inoculated from the problems of haste. We suffer now from the opposite problem. Our constipated body politic has enormous difficulty in passing the most rudimentary laws.
This might not be a problem– save that the public wants laws. More precisely: the public wants certain problems fixed. The public doesn’t really seem to care how the problems get fixed, or even do a very good job associating a lack of pain with it’s causal mechanism. What the public does a great job of doing is seeing how they feel in even year Octobers, and– if they feel good– returning politicians. If the public feels bad, they send in new faces.
Here’s where Senate obstructionism is very bad: it obscures the relationship between pain and blame. If there were a plan to fix health care, the environment, the economy, _and_ balance the budget– that didn’t raise taxes– The Senate minority would be well incentivized to block, obstruct, and delay this plan. And the rules of the Senate would make it hard to stop them.
The insidious part? If a minority party succeeded in keeping Americans poorer, in worse health and living with more crap in the air and water they would undoubtedly be rewarded at the next election. Americans would just keep switching party control of congress until someone managed to fix the problems– if ever.
So the first thing that needs to be fixed is the Senate itself. Until that happens, America will keep careening from one problem to another…