David Broder can and will use any excuse to promote Broderism, and the death of Robert Byrd is no exception. Because Broder exploits this opportunity to talk about the proper role of the ‘great’ ‘not representative’ Senate, it is of special interest to me. We’ve got a bunch of ‘tenthers‘ out there in the country right now talking about repealing the Seventeenth Amendment that made for direct elections of U.S. Senators. Sometimes I think they’re onto something.
But, really, a more useful reform might be to prohibit senators from running as party representatives. They wouldn’t have their party printed on the ballot, they wouldn’t be nominated by a party, and they’d be prevented by law from accepting support or coordinating with party committees. Anyone could run as long as they could demonstrate support by obtaining enough signatures.
This might be a strange thing to propose, and I am only half serious, but so long as we have this strange institution we ought to consider how to make it work as intended. Consider Broder’s overall point.
What Byrd and other senators of his generation understood is that on a wide variety of routine issues, partisan calculations are always at play, but there is a category of questions that truly are different. And on those issues, senators are bound to consider the broad national interest.
That obligation falls especially on the Senate, as Byrd always pointed out, because it is — unlike the other part of Congress — not designed as a representative body, close to the people. The senators are few in number — only two per state, no matter what its size. They have longer tenure than the president, and three times as long as a House member. Their constituencies are broad and diverse. Everything contrives to give them a degree of independence, to exercise their best judgment on the national issues.
Today, unfortunately, on the big issues that ought to be beyond partisanship, acting in the national interest has almost vanished because the party leaders, unlike Byrd and [Howard] Baker when they led their parties in the Senate, do not display that consciousness or evoke it in others.
Byrd concluded his remarks by reminding his colleagues that “in the real world, exemplary personal conduct can sometimes achieve much more than any political agenda. Comity, courtesy, charitable treatment of even our political opposites, combined with a concerted effort to not just occupy our offices, but to bring honor to them, will do more to inspire our people and restore their faith in us, their leaders, than millions of dollars of 30-second spots or glitzy puff pieces concocted by spinmeisters.”
The sense of loss expressed by Byrd’s colleagues of both parties is real. The “King of Pork” really did evoke what made the Senate great. There is a hunger there now for what is missing.
While I regularly mock Broder for his vapid calls for the two parties to stop disagreeing about stuff, he has a point about why the Senate no longer works. After all, people have always disagreed about stuff, but the Senate managed to function until very recently. The Netroots is a partisan entity, and it has had a large role in the election of Jon Tester and Jim Webb, as well as a large influence on the reelection campaigns of Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, and Arlen Specter. We’ve rejected the wisdom of the national party and pushed our own candidates, and that’s not how things are supposed to work. As Broder says, the people are not supposed to be close to the Senate. We’re not supposed to influence their decisions. But the parties are organizations of people. As a member of the Democratic Party, I should have some say over who my leaders will be, and if I am not supposed to have any say over who serves in the Senate then senators should not be allowed to belong to my party or use its resources.
Personally, I prefer to have a say over what happens in the Senate and I prefer them to listen to the people, but I do acknowledge that that is not how the Senate is supposed to work. And the fact that senators vote overwhelming in lock-step with their party leadership just demonstrates that the intended independence of senators is illusory. If the Founders didn’t intend the Senate to be little more than a smaller House of Representatives, they also didn’t intend the country to be ruled by two ideologically rigid factions.
Now, I’ve written this partly tongue-in-cheek to demonstrate the absurdity of the situation we face in today’s Senate. If someone truly embraces the undemocratic nature of the Senate, they can easily be led down the path I’ve spelled out here of enhancing the Senate’s remove from the people as a way to make it work again. And, repealing the Seventeenth Amendment is only one conceivable way of doing that.
The more immediate problem arises from only the Republican Party, which is paralyzing Congress through their use of procedural shenanigans in the undemocratic Senate. Limiting their power to do that should be the first priority of the next Congress. Tom Coburn isn’t embracing Broderism any time soon.
