Senate and Filibusters for Smart Asses

Most Americans have not read the document that governs us. So I started carrying copies of the U.S. Constitution that I had typeset myself. It was meant to be used as a gentle learning tool. Around the office water cooler, or waiting for my turn at the coffee machine, I’d casually broach something about the founding fathers, one of the amendments or a comment about a SCOTUS ruling from the previous day.

With that Constitution ready to whip out at a moment’s notice, I often found myself feeling superior, especially if the conversation became heated. “Here,” I might say, “maybe you should read this,” or “try reading this, first.” It was not my original intent. I was being a smart ass.

While “effecting change” by distributing the U.S. Constitution in this way, I noticed fewer colleagues joining me at the water cooler or coffee machine.

Nobody likes a smart ass.

A harder issue to win at the water cooler is about majority rule. We do not have a winner take all government. Most of us forget, especially those who have been elected or appointed to high office, that the U.S. Constitution was designed to limit power. We do not want our legislators, executives or judges to lord over us, at least our founders did not believe this. Nor did they want the majority to have unlimited power simply because they were the majority. These simple, grammar-school civics lessons are fading from our consciousness. Especially the elected and appointed, in their heart of hearts, believe that our constitution limits the rights of the people.

So I am glad that the Senate has a rule that can slow down a majority even with up to nine votes over the minority. On my most cynical days, I wish that both House and Senate would have rules that allowed not less than a 75 percent majority to pass any legislation. The fewer bills they can pass the less mischief they can cause. Yet the schoolboy in me remembers that the histories of the Senate and its filibuster are inexorably entwined with slavery and racial politics.

Our Senate, while it seems to have the British House of Lords as its model, has no real comparison to that house of heredity. Our Senate was crafted to ease the fears the small states had of being dominated by the states with larger populations. Had we been a confederation of states with roughly equal populations, America may have not created a bi-cameral legislature.

Our government could run more smoothly with only one legislative body. Fashioning two bills to address the same issue is a drag on efficiency. In both House and Senate, we have duplicative committees going over the same issues, duplicative hearings and two sets of staffers that have to do the same research and other grunt work for each legislative body (plus the extra parking spaces). Then two similar, but not exactly the same, bills must be reconciled. This is usually done in the most secret chambers of Congress.

As Alexander Hamilton predicted, we have not had any major points of contention between the small states and large. Of course there have been some differences, but none important enough to warrant the creation of an upper legislative house to lord over a republic. The Senators are theoretically no more capable by education or birth to legislate than their House peers. The House of Lords was a class apart; in the newly-created United States, that kind of class distinction did not exist, theoretically. It is only because of magical thinking and habit that the Senate remains. We should have eliminated it long ago.

The filibuster is only small potatoes. The issue is really the vestigial body called the Senate. But now I’m being a really super smart ass.

The Senate proved valuable to slave-holding interests, however. Slave states were eager to expand their number in order to equalize the power of slave states in the Senate. That tactic kept pro- and anti-slave proponents busy for several decades, until the Civil War.

The filibuster is not a constitutional issue, per se, since it is merely a Senate rule. Yet in an institution literally designed to hold back the tyranny of the large states (which never really materialized), the filibuster should have had an appropriate home. In practice, the filibuster has an awful record.

Southern states’ Senators kept segregation a going concern for decades with filibusters. That was devastating to the lives of blacks and made coarse our American life as a whole. The Senate could have changed that at any time. The filibuster is frustrating and meant to be thus.

What we have is a legislative body that has outlived its original function holding sway over a republic with a rule it keeps alive to throttle itself.

Pay no attention to this. I’m only a smart ass.