Looking through the comments to my diary at Big Orange I am struck by how the overwhelming response assumes I am addressing why we are having difficulty passing health care reform through the Senate. I suppose I submitted my diary into a preexisting debate, but that is not really what I meant to discuss.
The article lamenting the breakdown of comity in the Senate is now a genre all to itself. Former senators even write books about the phenomenon. It used to be that everyone crossed the aisle to have picnics and dinners and go out for cocktails. Senators didn’t take things so personally. Et cetera. But now, everyone is a blood enemy, and the whole institution is rife with obstruction and gridlock. The death of Teddy Kennedy has occasioned a raft of new articles in this vein, in addition to hours of commentary on the television.
What I was arguing is that the Senate hasn’t ceased to function because the rules somehow became outdated. The Senate was never intended as a democratic or even a particularly representative body. But it functioned very well for a long time despite these arguable flaws. What turned it from a deliberative body into a black-hole of obstruction was the transformation of one of the two major political parties into a vehicle for the preservation of white, male dominance and the promulgation of magical thinking. That’s why the Senate can’t agree to debate anything. That’s why the filibuster rule is invoked constantly.
Whatever faults the Democrats have, they tend to err on the side of deferring to our nation’s traditions, including the rules of the Senate. I don’t look at a situation where we can’t pass our agenda and say that the Senate is suddenly broken. It’s always been biased against the large states. It’s always been the home of elite representation. What changed is that one party stopped playing along and playing by the rules.
These are two distinct problems.
