Imagine a school board polling its residents on an important change in school policy, and that despite a 59 percent against and 41 percent for, the school board voted for the change. There would be no small amount of voter outrage.
Yet this is exactly what happens time and time again in the U.S. Senate.
It’s the rule of filibuster. Any 41 senators can stop the will of the other 59. Of course, that’s the way it’s always been, and there appears to be little public push for changing business as usual. But there’s more at stake with this policy now.
As author and longtime Atlantic Monthly editor and commentator James Fallows points out in a recent article, those 41 votes could come from states with just 12 percent of the U.S. population. That’s because we’ve stuck with a system that may be antiquated, that of giving every state two senators no matter what their population.
There’s plenty of ammunition for this argument no matter what side of the political aisle one may be on. The current so-called “gang of six” senators who crafted the Senate health care reform bill came from states that make up 3 percent of the total U.S. population, notes Fallows.
It’s also a bit ironic that the health care reform bill may come down to the vote of one senator from Massachusetts in a close election. Add to that this thought: Within the last 10 years, we almost had two presidents win elections without winning the popular vote. George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 election through the Electoral College, even though Gore garnered more of the popular vote. And were it not for an unusual vote counting and last minute turnout situation in Ohio, John Kerry may have been the second-straight Democrat to win the popular vote but still lose the election.
Of course, constitutional founders set up the Senate system of vote allocation as a delicate compromise at a time when the country was trying to unite widely disparate interests of free states and slave states and of varying differences in regional economies, according to Fallows. But as a business model, it doesn’t work very well today. We’ve created incentives for parties to amass power, that 60-vote majority or that 41-vote minority. And we wonder why both parties take so much money from lobbyists and special interests.
And of course, the taste of success is sweet. So the winners of any particular election are more than happy to entertain the well-funded ideas of new lobbyists and welcome them into Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood where everyone’s a friend. Each year, they get a few more tax breaks, a few more special deals, and the credibility of the system wanes.
That may be where we are headed: more legislation without representation. We can change the players every year or every 10 years. It doesn’t seem to affect the rules that much. Each takes advantage of what is theirs when they’re in power. And powers that be are reluctant to change the rules that benefit them so much.
Thomas Jefferson said we need a revolution every once in a while to keep this system of democracy honest. Let’s hope it can be done without the use of cannons.
— Editorial by The Free Press in Mankato, Minn., a CNHI sister publication
