Continuing on the theme of my earlier post, Jamelle Bouie eschews posting “another jeremiad against the filibuster” and asks, simply, why can we not run the country via majority rule the way your club or school board does?
That in a body already disproportionately weighted towards the least populous states it requires a supermajority to get nearly anything done in the Senate is an affront to one-person, one-vote. So Bouie asks, “What, exactly, are the rules of the Senate — and of Congress in general — for?” Do they facilitate governance or hinder it?
By now their purpose has been lost, Bouie suggests, citing again Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1893 critique of congressional rules:
“The primary and the only proper and intelligent object of all parliamentary law and rules is to provide for and to facilitate the ordinary action of public business,” Lodge wrote. “When any set of parliamentary rules ceases to accomplish this object they have become an abuse — and an abuse of the worst kind.”
It was not just that obstruction stymied the work of government, but that it undermined accountability and made lawmakers less responsible: “If a minority can prevent action, the majority, which is entitled to rule and is entrusted with power, is at once divested of all responsibility, the great safeguard of free representative institutions.”
Lodge had no trouble with the Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate. But, he insisted, the Senate did not exist to debate; it existed to govern and its rules must work to that end. “The two great rights in our representative bodies are voting and debate,” Lodge wrote. “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion.”
Lodge blamed the majority for even allowing the minority to throw sand in the Senate’s gears, writing, “The blame for obstruction rests with the majority, and if there is obstruction it is because the majority permits it.”
Hoary tradition is no excuse. Every few months, designers of computer operating systems upgrade their software. Likely, your machine updates whether or not you want it to and whether or not the upgrade is an actual improvement. But users are by now conditioned to periodic tweaks and roll with the changes. That Senate traditions resist all efforts at upgrading speaks to the dire need for it.
Also for reforms to “traditions” that result not just in the Senate being a counter-majoritarian body, but the House being less representative than originally intended.
The World Population Review offers a list of states in which gerrymandering results in the House, too, being less representative than democracy demands. I mentioned North Carolina’s statewide vote split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans, yet how districts are drawn means the GOP controls 8 of 13 House seats. In Texas in 2020, Democrats received 45% of the statewide vote yet hold only 36% of the state’s 35 House seats. In Ohio, Democrats received 43% of the statewide vote, but hold only 25% of its 16 House seats. In Kentucky, Democrats won 34% of the statewide vote, but occupy only one of the state’s 6 seats (17%).
Rules change. Rules should when they no longer serve the people.