Senate Reform and the Source of the Problem

The increasing polarization of the American political system and the efficiency - or lack thereof, of passing policy is a subject of interest to me.

Ezra Klein has been following that trail and collected his thoughts on the topic this Sunday. Click here.

The main ills of the system are the following:

the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands

In Brooks and Shields last Friday, one of them stated that the number of times a filibustering attempt was made this year exceeded that of the whole decade of the 1960’s.

As a result, bills are focusing on the “low hanging” fruits instead of tackling problems more comprehensively and fixing politically difficult yet important problems. The benefit of the population and the general interest of the state are left to suffer.

This here is the best line of the article:

The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

What this translates into is an inability to legislate effectively because the minority party increasingly wants to see the majority fail and has the power to make it fail. As a consequence, filibustering and other delaying tactics means more time is spent doing less things. If the tendency is maintained, the American legislative process is facing paralysis.

It puts the American political system at a disadvantage when faced with other, nimbler political systems, such as better functioning democracies, or, for that matter, authoritative China. (See here my post contrasting the US and the Chinese political systems in their capacity to take on the challenge of developing and implementing new Energy solutions)

This is not to say that America should repaint itself with an autocratic brush; rather it should seek the following, which is how the system was meant to work:

a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

But short of phasing out filibustering, or implementing a regressive majority threshold - two measures being suggested here and there, I am skeptical that America can get away without making other reforms in other facets of the American political system. This is because the ills of the democratic political system in America lies not in the Senate procedures: rather, the amount of filibustering and partisanship are symptoms of an increase in the power of public opinion, and, at the same time, of the system of electoral financing.

There used to be a time when Congress – and for that matter, their western equivalents, were truly representative: legislators were elected and then went to their Houses, Congresses and Assemblies where, by and large, they were free to confer with their peers and make legislation. Today, because of the explosion of media coverage, politicians are never completely done with campaigning. While there was certainly bickering in the past, compromises and cooperative actions were possible. Today, those are seen as giving in and as political defeats.

Secondly, it used to be that being a public servant was a duty of the higher class of society: doctors, lawyers, and the educated elite that were already rich. There was an ethic of service and an Enlightenment-inspired  duty towards reason that is now greatly lost. Today, politicians are there to cater to the interests of their campaign financiers and constituents, and very little temperate reasoning is left after they have gone through their campaign rhetoric aimed at manipulating the population into voting them into office. The legislative houses are no longer refuges of reason, but stages from which the elected members project their spin. Furthermore, political success is now a way to pursue personal monetary gains, which was certainly not the case in the past but creates conflicts of interest (a public servant is there to serve the public).

I am not advocating a return to past institutions: such change would be anachronistic. But establishing the differences between past and present, and seeing why the rules were working then and not so much now can be enlightening. Another important factor only alluded to here is the homogenization process in successive stages of the two main political parties since the Civil War.

Political reforms are perhaps the hardest things to do for any regime. Reforming part of the american legislative process will certainly be hard in the current context where any bill one party puts forward will undoubtedly be seen through the very same partisan lens it is trying to mitigate. But as the Ezra Klein piece mentions, the first problem a drunk must fix is not one of the biggest he faces – his debt, the loss of his family, etc, but the seemingly lesser one that is the fact that he drinks every night. Likewise, before America can tackle the problems of tomorrow, it needs to fix its very ability to tackle problems efficiently, which is the growing troubles with the legislative process.