Senatus Decadens

The Roman Senate outlasted the fall of the Republic, the splitting of the Empire in two, repeated invasions, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and several centuries of intermittent Barbarian rule. The institution didn’t finally die off until 603 A.D.—about six hundred years after it had ceased to have any purpose.

The United States Senate hasn’t matched that record yet, but it’s getting there. At this moment, the Senate doesn’t look so bad, but that’s only because the House of Representatives has recently managed to outdo it in sheer pigheadedness—defeating the majority party’s own fiscal plan, refusing to allow a vote on Hurricane Sandy aid. Also, we’ve grown numb to the Senate’s paralysis. Stagnation and obstruction have become its only identifying characteristics.

During the fifty years after 1917, when the cloture vote, which ends debate (and is the only way to measure filibuster activity), was introduced, there was about one cloture motion a year. In the hundred and twelfth Congress, the one that just disbanded, more than a hundred were filed, for the third straight session—and this is only a fraction of the real number of filibusters going on. You probably weren’t aware of more than a few of them, because filibusters are now as routine as quorum calls, and because hardly any significant legislation made it far enough to be filibustered in what became the least productive Congress in modern history.

The Senate is in a prolonged, self-induced coma. It does not produce creative legislation. It does not inspire important debate. It is not responsive to key national problems. Its pretense of institutional dignity is so battered that junior senators openly mock it. I’m amazed that so many talented people—Elizabeth Warren among the most recent—still fight like hell to get into it.

How does an institution decay? The answers vary from one to the next, but in almost every case there is some combination of cultural transformation and individual failure. Wall Street banks have grown at least as toxic as the U.S. Senate, with almost no limits on what insiders will do to succeed. On the surface, the Senate appears entirely different—it’s not exactly a hotbed of cutthroat market competition. But what is filibuster abuse other than the Senate’s version of a synthetic collateralized debt obligation, a clever manipulation of the rules for the narrowest possible ends? Senators say that they are cooling ephemeral passions and bankers say they are providing cheap credit for businesses and homeowners, but in both cases the original purpose is long gone.

Something similar has happened in Congress and on Wall Street, over roughly the same period—the years since the late nineteen-seventies: limits on behavior eroded, leaders stopped caring about the example they set, the idea of a higher interest than mine today (valuable as a restraint even when it was pure hypocrisy) faded away, and the connection between the institution and the broader nation it supposedly existed to serve was broken. As a result, constructive behavior was punished and destructive behavior was rewarded—in fact, required. Democrats have to do what the Republicans did, just as Morgan Stanley has to do what Goldman Sachs did. Once the taboos are pushed aside, things escalate very quickly, and it doesn’t take long—usually less than six centuries—for venerable, essential institutions to begin collapsing in on themselves.

Wall Street cannot be reformed from within. The short-term thinking is too deeply entrenched, the institutional norms too shredded. The Dodd-Frank bill was an important but inadequate attempt to do the job from the outside, by legislative means. But the Senate does have the tools to reform itself, and it is beginning to show signs of having the will, too.

Article One, Section Five of the Constitution allows the Senate to establish and change its own rules. (The same Constitution has nothing to say about the filibuster. It was invented, extra-constitutionally, in the early nineteenth century.) By precedent, the Senate approves its rules on the first day of a new session. The Senate of the hundred and thirteenth Congress, the one just sworn in, could vote today to change the filibuster rule. This vote would not be subject to the new normal of a sixty-vote supermajority. It would take place on the long-forgotten principle of the simple majority—fifty votes plus one.

Several proposals are circulating. The most intriguing is the one introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon (the same Jeff Merkley who told me, back in 2010 when I was writing about the Senate, that he winces every time he hears the phrase “world’s greatest deliberative body”). Merkley would simply require filibusterers to be present on the Senate floor and speaking, just like Jimmy Stewart or Strom Thurmond. No more waivers, no more silent filibusters, the kind that take place multiple times every legislative week. (The Senate has sunk so low that there’s a nostalgia for the good old days when southern senators used to stand and read from the phone book for days on end, refraining from filling their bladders, in order to block civil-rights legislation.) Merkley’s change would also force forty-one senators to vote for a filibuster rather than sixty senators to vote to end one.

It’s actually a modest proposal—not as sharp a change as the one that Tom Harkin, of Iowa, introduces every new session, which would lower the number of votes required to end debate with each successive cloture motion filed, all the way down to a simple majority. By one count, Merkley has a bare majority to get his passed. But it’s a shaky prospect and unlikely to succeed. Not a single Republican will vote for it, and among Democrats, most of the leadership oppose anything that will upset the status quo, perhaps out of a fear that the same tactic could be used on them. Harry Reid has sent mixed, mostly negative signals on filibuster reform. Carl Levin, the veteran Michigan Democrat, who back in 2010 found Republican obstructionism “unconscionable,” has offered an alternative to Merkley, co-sponsored by John McCain, that would basically leave the current rules in place.

These Catos see themselves as steady hands trying to keep the hallowed old institution from being changed out of recognition by young barbarians like Merkley, Warren, and Tom Udall. But the changes have already happened, happen every day, and have come close to destroying the Senate. The barbarians are the ones who want to restore the institution to health. In the next few days, we’ll find out whether the U.S. Senate has the will to keep itself from going the way of the Roman original.

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: George Packer