Over at the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib argues against interpreting the Senate as the problem with our political system. He maintains that the issue runs far deeper, which is true, to a point.
Let's not misdiagnose the disease. The Senate isn't the problem.⌠The Senate is merely a symptom of the U.S. political system's larger dysfunction.
O.K. It isnât the problem. But this characterization ignores our ability to realistically address âlarger dysfunctionâ, while giving too much credit to the Senate as an institution.
For example:
The common explanation for why the Senate doesn't work better is that 60 has become the new 50.⌠There's no doubt that the filibuster, a tool once used sparingly and only on matters of great import, has become virtually an everyday device used to block action.
It's true that the Senate barely works because of the filibuster and the ridiculous amounts of power it gives to, say, parties that were voted out of office because their policies ruined the country. And it is true that it used to be used sparingly. However, the next part of the sentence is only true if you replace âonly on matters of great importâ with âonly against laws that gave black people a shot at political equity.â
Before the current fad for filibustering everything, the procedure was usually used to block progressive reforms: chiefly civil rights laws, and occasionally labor law reform. (Anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938 were supported by majorities in the House and the Senate, but were defeated by the filibuster.) In short, the filibuster is an antimajoritarian tool, historically used to protect the interests of white people. It has never been good for our country.
Seib continues:
Yet the real issue here isn't the number of filibusters⌠but that there is so little common ground between the parties that the tactic is so easily employed.⌠[Filibusters] are worth mounting only in a highly partisan, highly polarized environment.⌠And that's precisely the environment the nationânot just the Senateâhas right now.
Seib goes on to enumerate the changes that have resulted in this process: changing media landscape, lack of civility in the upper chamber, the fact that Senators now get travel stipends and are no longer forced to hang around the Capitol on weekends, drinking scotch and reading the Constitution to each other. These factors probably have a (small) influence, but they smell a little too strongly of nostalgia for a bygone era. The real issue, as Seib eventually admits, is increased party polarization.
Well, yeah.
Seibâs article points out the obvious: the parties are more partisan than they used to be. Of course they are. Pre-1970s the parties werenât as polarized because Southern conservatives made up a substantial wedge of the Democratic Party. But they were loyal for largely historical reasons. As the Dixiecrats moved to the Republican column after the civil rights reform swept the South, the swollen ranks of purity-minded conservatives were able to force moderates out of the GOP, resulting in the more ideologically coherent parties we have today (on the right more than the left).
Seib presents no solution to this problem, because there isnât one. As Marxists discovered long ago, itâs really hard to alter world historical forces (or national historical in this case). They are even harder to change than the rules of the Senate. Ending or reforming the filibuster: still the way to go.
