Evan Bayh recalls a milder time in the Senate:
While romanticizing the Senate of yore would be a mistake, it was certainly better in my father’s time. My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.
One incident from his career vividly demonstrates how times have changed. In 1968, when my father was running for re-election, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, approached him on the Senate floor, put his arm around my dad’s shoulder, and asked what he could do to help. This is unimaginable today.
One might wonder whether Dirksen was sincere, but suppose he was? Why would the leader of the Senate Republicans want to help a liberal senator from Indiana get reelected? Consider that during the 90th Congress (1967-69) the Democrats had a 64-36 advantage. Mind you, at the time the cloture rule required 67 votes to overcome a filibuster, so this was theoretically less of an advantage than you might think. For some strange reason, though, the 90th Congress was able to pass a good amount of significant legislation. But things have changed:
According to research by UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, there was an average of one filibuster per Congress during the 1950s. That number has grown steadily since and spiked in 2007 and 2008 (the 110th Congress), when there were 52 filibusters. More broadly, according to Sinclair, while 8 percent of major legislation in the 1960s was subject to “extended-debate-related problems” like filibusters, 70 percent of major bills were so targeted during the 110th Congress.
We’re all familiar with the radical abuse of the cloture rule by contemporary Republicans, but would we prefer a political culture where Mitch McConnell works to help Al Franken get reelected? What kind of political culture is that? It’s a political culture where senators are more interested in preventing turnover in their club membership than in doing any of the things they said they wanted to do when their ran for office.
There are problems with the Senate, and Bayh identifies some of them in his piece, but a lack of extreme irrational comity is not one of those problems. People disagree about stuff. The two parties are now fairly ideologically rigid and, as a result, there is no longer any possibility of the Senate working with its old rules.
We don’t need to have lunch with each other, although I see no harm in it. We need the majority to be able to force a vote in the Senate. Maybe there should be a major cost (like the need to devote a lot of legislative days) to forcing a vote in the Senate, but the minority shouldn’t be able to stop a bill from ever getting a vote.
