Is the Senate necessary?

I’m not all that encouraged.  So far this year the house has passed a health care bill, a climate change bill, and a financial regulation bill.  Now it looks like they’re going to take on immigration reform.

The Senate, on the other hand, is almost maybe perhaps going to think about passing a health care bill before the new year.  To be fair, they did pass a stimulus bill.  To be even more fair, though, the compromises necessary to get a stimulus bill out of the Senate meant that the stimulus was significantly smaller than it ought to have been.  That means that, even though we got some kind of stimulus, the recession will probably be longer and more painful (read higher unemployment for a longer period of time) than it would have been without a Senate.

On the bright side, at least the Senate’s inclination to slow down the legislative process placed a check on President Bush when he wanted to invade Iraq, cut taxes at irresponsible levels instead of providing for the nation’s long-term fiscal health, and gut the clean air act.  Seriously, can anyone point to one example from the last ten years of a way in which the nation is better off because the Senate exists?  The U.K. seems to be doing fine with effectively one house of parliament.

It’s bad enough that the way representation in the Senate is allocated means that the Senate is a highly undemocratic institution.  It’s even worse that their filibuster rules make it even more countermajoritarian such that 41 Senators representing 37% of the population* can veto essentially any piece of legislation.  In years past, the Senate has served essentially as an institution designed to essentially send a higher level of government services to rural states than their share of the population would otherwise suggest and, in some instances (namely civil rights), protect the parochial interests of regional blocs.  Now it just seems like the place where legislation goes to die.

A lot of liberals seem to be blaming this shift on the President, but it seems to me that it has a lot more to do with the electoral incentives of Senators than it does with the President’s desire to get things done.  Anyone who thinks that Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod are content to sit around and wait for the Senate to pass a health care bill on its own time should contact me about a bridge I have for sale.  The President just doesn’t have all that much leverage over lots of individual senators.  Republican senators have gamed it out and made the craven decision that a faltering economy, high unemployment, millions of people without health care, and climate disaster are electorally advantageous.  The notion that if the President only tried a little harder everything would work out seems to me to be totally wrongheaded.  The  problem is that the great deliberative body is making the nation essentially ungovernable.

*Note – the 41 senators include every Republican Senator and Joe Lieberman.  The 37% statistic is determined by assigning each senator half of the population of his or her state, summing those numbers, and dividing by the national population.

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