Eliminate the Senate
By WINSLOW T. WHEELER

Recall, please, how the Senate was designed in the Constitution. If you want efficiency and quick turn around in governance and legislation, you want a very different system. Clog and delay were built in from the get go -- quite consciously. Guaranteeing minority rights was a central tenet of the design – as it is of democracy.

The filibuster is merely one of a thousand ways a small number of senators, even just one, can clog the system. Unlike the House of Representatives, the Senate was never intended to operate by majority rule; it was designed to operate by “unanimous consent.” That means, as we observed during the endless non-debate of the health care bill, that one senator can demand that the entire text of any bill or amendment must be read aloud – word by audible word – if one member simply utters the words “I object” at the appropriate moment. It also means that nominations, even bills, can be held up for days, weeks, even months before a majority leader tries to start what passes for debate in the Senate these days. And, it means any and all committee hearings must be shut down any time the Senate is in session – and a senator objects. The Senate rules are an almost endless opportunity for mischief, or worse, for any member or faction wanting to play the role – just like the racist Southern Democrats did in the 1960s when they stood, insistently and almost endlessly, in the way of civil rights bills.

The way the Senate operates also means that any senator with the brains and guts to hamstring George W. Bush’s blustering the country into war in October, 2002 could have done so. (But alas, there was no such senator.) It is a system designed, for good or ill, to permit a minority – sometimes tiny – to interpose itself, as obnoxiously or as honorably as they may choose.

Eliminate all that, and what do you get? You get the House of Representatives. If you want to fix the gridlock problem in Congress and fix it good, the best thing to do is to eliminate the Senate.

It’s a bad idea if you like democracy. As designed, the Senate has an important role: cooling the heels of excess, either from an overreaching executive or the House where the majority can run any tyranny it pleases.

The Senate is also supposed to serve the intersts of the states, and not of political parties, no?