An example of a necessary stupidity is the Senate. In recent years, it’s become the Western world’s least democratic legislative chamber, where, in the age of rampant filibuster abuse, around thirty-five per cent of the population can thwart the will of the other sixty-five per cent, as happened earlier this year on gun control. The Senate exists because of a crucial compromise at the 1787 constitutional convention between the big and small states (though big and small are relative terms—the difference in size between Virginia and Delaware in 1787 was nothing like the difference today between California and Wyoming). The Founders were under the spell of Ancient Rome; they included a senate in the Constitution under Article 1, Section 3; and two hundred and twenty-six years later, we’re stuck with it. The Senate could be reformed or abolished only by constitutional amendment, with the votes of two-thirds of senators and state legislatures. What are the chances of Iowa’s Charles Grassley and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp going along?
The filibuster is an unnecessary stupidity. Senators speak reverently of the filibuster as if it were inscribed in the Preamble to the Constitution, but it’s nowhere in our founding documents. The Senate created the rule almost by accident, in 1806, and for around the next hundred and seventy years used it sparingly, until self-restraint began to disappear from the upper chamber. It has almost no positive effect—try to think of the last time a truly terrible bill was prevented from being stampeded into law by the Senate’s failure to pass a cloture vote. Rampant abuse has exposed the filibuster as an anti-democratic tool of the defeated minority to thwart the will of the elected majority.
Some senators keep making noises about reforming, if not abolishing, the filibuster—most recently last month, when two Obama Administration nominees were blocked by Senate Republicans. But it never happens, and I don’t think it ever will happen, which only shows the profound conservatism of our democratic system. We’re stuck with necessary stupidities because trying to eliminate them would do more damage than it’s worth, but why are we stuck with so many unnecessary stupidities?
Without bloodlines or ancient traditions to hold the country together, we have only our founding rules, which take on the infallible aura of holy writ, despite immense confusion about what they actually contain. Certain things can be added, with great difficulty—we have twenty-seven constitutional amendments—but it’s almost impossible to subtract anything.
For example, Chester Arthur, who ranks among the country’s most forgettable Presidents, took the liberty of adding “So help me God” to the oath of office (the word “God” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, either) when he was sworn in at the Arthur-family residence on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan after James Garfield’s assassination. Now every incoming President has to conclude with “So help me God,” verbally prompted by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in what can only be called an act of extra-constitutional judicial activism. By now most Americans must think that these four words are included in the constitutional oath. (Similarly, “under God” was slipped into the Pledge of Allegiance at the height of the McCarthy era, in 1954, just as the singing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch was added to many baseball games after the September 11th attacks, starting at Yankee Stadium.) None of these ritualized displays of religiosity and patriotism can ever be taken back. We’re stuck with them, as we’re stuck with the Senate, and the filibuster.
In an Election Day column, Joe Nocera, of the Times, proposed five extremely sensible reforms to revive America’s flagging democratic spirit. One of them is to move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend, when more Americans would have time to get to the polls. It turns out that the constitution has nothing to say about voting day, either: largely for reasons of nineteenth-century horse travel (which also lies at the origin of the senatorial “hold”), in 1845 Congress made Tuesday the day that Americans vote for the President; Tuesday was legislated for House elections in 1875; in 1914 it was extended to the Senate. Now we’re stuck with Tuesday voting as well, and in spite of the best efforts of Nocera, Chris Rock, and a group called Why Tuesday?, I will probably have to make time to vote on a work day (as I did yesterday) for the rest of my life. There’s always a constituency for democratic foolishness: for the filibuster, it’s senators in the minority party; for Tuesday voting, politicians who fear high voter turnout. Tuesday voting is a classic unnecessary stupidity, but sometimes, the more stupid a thing is, the harder it is to get rid of it.
During the shutdown, the Senate behaved better than the House. Most Republican senators acknowledged that their counterparts in the House were pursuing a nihilistic course of action with no plan for victory. The intra-party hostility was striking (John McCain called the shutdown “one of the more shameful chapters that I have seen in the years that I have spent here in the Senate,” and even Mitch McConnell suggested that it had been a bad idea).
The reason for this senatorial caution, though, has nothing to do with statesmanlike wisdom and the cooling of passions in the world’s greatest deliberative body. It’s that senators’ districts cannot be gerrymandered, because they coincide with state lines, which means that senators’ seats are a little less safe than those of members of the House, where, due to computer modelling and hyperpartisanship, representatives essentially get to pick the voters who will elect them. Gerrymandering is another unnecessary stupidity, and the fourth of Nocera’s five suggestions for reform calls for an end to it: he cites the model of California’s fourteen-person redistricting commission, which includes equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats and four unaffiliated members.
The proximity of Election Day to the shame of the shutdown highlights a certain democratic disenchantment, but the alienation goes well beyond elections. The last time there was such widespread disgust with the practice of democracy in America—a sense that the institutions of self-government had become unworkable and inadequate to the crucial problems of the day—was a hundred years ago. The historian Richard Hofstadter described the Progressive movement as “a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation. Its general theme was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine.”
Today, there’s a similar sense, transcending ideology and region, that Washington, Wall Street, and corporate America (including Silicon Valley) no longer serve the public interest in any meaningful way. It took the Progressives the better part of forty years to achieve their reforms, and they did it—not by bringing America back to a vanished golden age but by moving forward into the modern era. I sometimes fear that our capacity for self-reformation is no longer as great, our institutions no longer young and limber, ourselves no longer so good-natured and optimistic. I’d take it as a good sign if some of the rather modest ideas listed in Nocera’s column catch fire, and we finally start to get rid of some of the unnecessary stupidities that bedevil American democracy.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: George Packer
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