| Hey all. Sorry about the intermittent posting. There's been some travel, and a primary computer that desperately needs its hard drive wiped and the OS reinstalled. I'm half tempted to go back to Ubuntu; Vista has been a mess. But what about Windows 7? Has anyone used that, and been pleased?
Anyhoo - last week I lashed out at Baucus and Tester over their refusal to back Senate procedural reform. I stand by the lashing, and stand by the need for reforming Senate procedural reforms, and I've brought along my friend George Packer to bolster my case:
Like many other aspects of senatorial procedure, Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5 is a relic from the days when senators had to hover around their desks to know what was happening on the floor during the main afternoon debate. (The desks, some built as long ago as 1819, are mahogany, and their lids lift up, like those in an old schoolhouse; the desks of the Majority and Minority Leader are still equipped with brass spittoons.) In the press lounge, McCaskill said, with light sarcasm, "Somebody told me the rule is to make sure people pay attention to what's happening on the floor during debate and not be distracted by committee work. Clearly, it's an old rule."
The Republicans had turned this old rule into a new means of obstruction. There would be no hearings that afternoon; the general and the admiral would have to come back another day. Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution's broader dysfunction....
Under McConnell, Republicans have consistently consumed as much of the Senate's calendar as possible with legislative maneuvering. The strategy is not to extend deliberation of the Senate's agenda but to prevent it. Tom Harkin, who first proposed reform of the filibuster in 1995, called his Republican colleagues "nihilists," who want to create chaos because it serves their ideology. "If there's chaos, things will tend toward simple solutions," Harkin said. "In chaos people don't listen to reason...."
On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed {financial reform} bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances-a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis-that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.
Read the whole thing. Weep. The current obstructionism is not part of any Senate tradition. The Senate has become a dysfunctional body where professional fundraisers, not statesmen, rule. Bogged down by a 1,600-page procedural rulebook - with many rules therein written for another era with a different kind of Senator in mind - the Senate has stopped the legislative process for a country in economic and environmental crisis. This is our time, and the citizens have risen to the challenge. We've done our work.
If you are wondering why Democratic House members are in trouble this year, it's not because Americans are naturally more conservative. They're not. President Obama won his election on a progressive platform, as did the Senators and House members in 2006 and 2008, and the Republican congressional delegation still has approval ratings that rival Iran's. No, the reason that people are angry is the United States Senate. Change the Senate, modernize its rules, address the problems that face the country, and do the will of the electorate. It's that simple. |
