The U.S. Senate is a broken institution, and for that its members have no one to blame but themselves and their inflated sense of self-importance and privilege. The problem is, the consequences of that breakdown are becoming increasingly unsustainable.
Because of the Senate, for example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — currently consumed with trying to track down the Boston Marathon bomber — has not had a permanent, full-time director since 2006. That’s seven years. Under the Constitution, the Senate is required to give its advice and consent to presidential nominations, but in the case of the ATF and other federal agencies, it simply refuses to do its job. It’s not that nominees are being rejected. Nominees aren’t even being considered.
Why? Again, the ATF example is instructive. In 2007, then-President George W. Bush nominated Michael Sullivan to head the agency. As a Republican attorney with extensive experience in prosecuting federal terror cases, Sullivan should have been confirmed easily. But after an Idaho gun dealer objected, Idaho’s two senators exercised their senatorial prerogative by putting a “hold” on Sullivan. Just like that, his nomination was killed. President Obama has since nominated two other men to the post, but because the NRA and other gun groups oppose filling the ATF director’s post, neither has been given so much as a committee hearing.
And then there’s the much-abused filibuster. This week, 54 senators voted in favor of legislation to expand background checks; 46 voted against it, which by the Senate’s perverted rules meant that the bill was defeated.
As a practical matter, that didn’t mean much — the bill in question was doomed to fail in the House anyway. But it ought to matter that in most legislative bodies, 54 of 100 votes would have been more than enough. It ought to matter that the Founding Fathers, who designed what they thought to be an exquisitely balanced system, never contemplated a Senate that would require a supermajority to perform even its most basic functions.
Likewise, the Founders never contemplated that individual senators, or a minority of senators, would be given the power to permanently block presidential nominations. It throws the entire mechanism out of whack, especially now that such power is being used so routinely.
Such rules turn the Senate into a institution that does nothing and can do nothing. They turn “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a stage for performance art conducted by strutting peacocks and peahens more concerned with getting their dignified faces onto television than with functioning as a legislative body.
Democrats who now control the Senate after a fashion are growing increasingly frustrated with the system and have begun to talk openly about dramatically curtailing the use of the filibuster and other rules. But they are frightened by the very real possibility that two years from now, Harry Reid will be reduced to Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell will lead a Republican majority and it will be Democrats who need the 60-vote requirement to frustrate the GOP.
As Shakespeare might have put it, “screw your courage to the sticking place” and change the rules anyway.
If the American people vote for a Republican Senate majority, they ought to get the policies, good or bad, that come with that majority. I’m absolutely fine with that. More importantly, that’s how James Madison and others designed our system to function. They certainly never designed a system in which nothing can be done and no one can be held responsible for it, which is what this accretion of rules and traditions has now given us.
