The upper chamber was never meant to be an instrument of vulgar majoritarianism.
The upper chamber was never meant to be an instrument of vulgar majoritarianism.
‘W ill you stand for democracy?” Joe Biden asks. That has the grammatical form of a question, but it is not really a question. The real question is, “Will you stand for gross majoritarianism?” And the answer should be, for all Americans, “No.”
Not that the Democrats are even much interested in majorities right now. As Charles C. W. Cooke has documented at amusing length, Democrats such as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders are consistently befuddled and irritated that 48 senators out of 100 do not make a majority and cannot do their will when 52 senators oppose them. “Why should two senators have so much power?” they demand, referring to moderate (or at least moderately sensible) Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. But it is not two senators who are blocking the worst of President Biden’s legislative fantasies — it is 52 senators, at least. It might be more in reality, if a few more moderate Democrats were really made to choose. And there almost certainly will be more than 52 senators opposing the worst excesses of the Democratic Party at this time next year, perhaps even including a few more sensible Democrats who have discovered that all of the crazy talk and hysteria of 2020 did not, in fact, shift the ground as far to the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al. might have hoped.
Majorities are, at best, temporary.
But we cannot begin to address the question of vulgar majoritarianism in the Senate until we have dealt with an important political reality: The Senate was never meant to be an instrument of vulgar majoritarianism to begin with — it is, in fact, exactly the opposite of that, a brake to slow down and when necessary to stop Congress from being carried away entirely by the democratic passions of the House of Representatives. Political scientists (if we must use the silly term) of a progressive bent (i.e., who think politics is a science) sometimes talk about the “productivity” of a particular Congress as measured by how many pieces of legislation are passed. But the Senate is not there to pass legislation — it is mainly there to stop legislation.
The House says “Yes,” all the time, like the promiscuous Latin teacher who conjugated more often than she declined; but the Senate, when it is operating healthily, should say “No” about five times as often as it says “Yes,” and should very often say “maybe” or “yes, but” or “maybe later” or “some of that but not all of it.” One of the unconfessed goals of the stampeding style of politics — always and forever trying to convince the nation that we are in the midst of an existential crisis the response to which must be the moral equivalent of war — is bullying the institutions that should be saying “No” and “but” and “wait” into doing their best impression of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally: “Yes, yes, yes!”
The immediate question for the Biden administration is not whether the Senate will stand for democracy — it is whether the Senate will give the Biden administration its way, which to some extent it has and which in certain things it will not. Which is to say, the Senate is acting as though the legislative branch were equal to the executive, with its own priorities, privileges, and preferences. The antimajoritarian character of the Senate is one of the great survivals from the Founding era, one of the few instances in which the federal government continues to operate more or less as intended.
The problem with the Senate is not its rules (on filibusters and other procedural matters) but the character of the men and women who serve in it; this is not to say that senators such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are of low character, though they may be, but that they are not temperamentally inclined toward caution, patience, and inaction. In both parties, there are senators who are radicals and demagogues who do not serve well in a body that is designed to suffocate radicalism and demagoguery. We need more senators along the lines of Rick Scott, who is less inclined to shout, “Once more into the breach!” than to mutter, “But what does it cost?”
A handful of senators can cause a great deal of inconvenience for a president. And have you seen the kind of men we have been electing president lately?
On the particular matter of the filibuster, it is true that the maneuver has been irresponsibly weaponized, and that intelligent and patriotic leaders in both parties should work to tamp that down. But we might say much the same thing about Senate confirmation hearings for judges and presidential appointees, omnibus spending bills, and other occasions for parliamentary shenanigans and risible grandstanding. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have Senate confirmation hearings — it means only that they should be conducted as though adults were in charge of them.
As things stand, it still is possible for one senator to get in the way of something the president very desperately wants. Thank God and James Madison for that.