The Problem Is Minority Rule
The 40 Republican U.S. Senators represent barely a third of all Americans, yet with one added Democratic vote they can stymie what most Americans want.
The health care drama in the U.S. Senate is cresting. After months of hearings -- and decades of dithering -- it is time to see if the United States is going to remain the only advanced industrial nation in the world that does not provide universal health care.
Some have compared the role played by Senator Olympia Snowe, who may hold a key swing vote on various health care proposals, to that of Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, who lined up Republican support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that would be overstating the case. Senator Snowe appears to be driven by personal conviction with little support within her party. It will be interesting to watch her forthcoming votes to gauge how far she is willing to break with party ranks. Will she support a public option? If so, with what conditions?
More importantly, the health care debate reveals in full the Senate's anti-majoritarian tendencies. Democratic senators hold 60 votes (out of 100), yet so far they have struggled to fashion legislation because they fear a filibuster, which allows a mere 41 senators to stymie what the majority wants.
The 40 Republican senators represent barely a third of all Americans. If a single Democrat is added to a G.O.P. filibuster, they can torpedo what two-thirds of the nation wants. It's the most blatant form of minority rule. Only 16 senators are women and five are racial minorities. With two senators elected per state regardless of population, the Senate is the most unrepresentative body outside Britain's House of Lords. But at least Britain has the sense not to allow the Lords to vote on important legislation.
Senators representing a small segment of the nation have thwarted not only health care reform but also renewable energy policy, sensible automobile mileage standards, cuts in subsidies for oil companies, tougher campaign finance reform, Congressional oversight of national security and war, and more.
So the credibility of the entire Senate is on the line. Senator Snowe may wield a pivotal vote on health care, but it is in a body that is unrepresentative and anti-majoritarian by design. How long are we Americans going to ignore this constitutional defect?
Steven Hill is director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation. His next book, Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope for an Insecure Age, will be published in January 2010. A version of this article was published at New York Times.com.
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We are never going to get rid of the Senate or that each state has two Senators. There is a provision in the Constitution that says that "no state can be deprived of its equal representation in the Senate without its consent". That means that any constitutional amendment changing the existence, powers or composition of the Senate would require unanimous consent by all the states. This would never happen. However, I think we can and should reduce the number of Senators required to invoke cloture or break a hold to a simple majority. I do not have space here to do a history of the filibuster, but I think it is fair to say that it has developed from something that was rarely used to something that is now always used. I think that its current use has become abusive of the Constitution and the Senate's privilege to govern its own proceedings. The Constitution says that only two things require super-majorities in the Senate. They are constitutional amendments and treaties. Everything else is supposed to be majority vote. When the filibuster was rare, it was tolerable. Now that it has become universally used, I think that it has become an intolerable and unconstitutional amending of the voting requirements in the Senate by a very small group of people.
Thoughtful. Well said.
agreed.
The problem is minority rule through special interest legislation. Those who have lobbyists in Washington are able to influence what bills are proposed and what those bills contain. These bills, like the proposed Federal Health Care bill, are a combination of minority wants strung together in hundreds of pages in the name of a public good. But it will not end up serving the public good, only those minority interests that get their government guarantees, protections, or new bureaucratic jobs.
The founding fathers warned against combination in a bill for this very reason, and they left social welfare to be handled at the state level because it can be more responsibly managed there. The system is precisely what the founding fathers sought to protect us from. If you want a detailed account of how we got here and what we need to do to fix it, read my book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Version 4.0.
Solving the problem involves (a) ending the special interest legislation process, and (b) putting welfare at the state level. It will include things like repealing the 16th and 17th amendments.
The problem is corporate money in our elections. One need look no further than health care reform to see that.
Until we get those corporate dollars out of our elections the American people will always lose.
Public financing and mandatory free air time on airwaves licensed by the federal government will go a long way towards ridding elections of corportate money. Term limits and a ban on lobbyists, special interest groups, and political action groups will also help eradicate corporate dollars.
I believe the Senate rules for demanding super majorities is unconstitutional. There is some legal debate as to who would win in court. As professed it is just a harmless Senate procedure, but as used it supersedes what the constitution clearly states requires super majorities. An interesting note is that former Rep. Senate leader Bill Frist had no problem threatening to use constitutional grounds to bring majority votes, but Dem leader, Harry Reid has virtually collapsed and ceded the Senate to the minority party.
And most of those repubs in those low population states are not even from those states.
They are carpetbaggers who know they cannot get elected in any other state.
Welcome to the awesome power of bribery.
Now, you and me might have difficulty just imagining ... "what can a group of about 700 people possibly -do- with several BILLION dollars, a YEAR?" How could the Members of Congress (red and blue, by the way) have become so completely corrupted by this illusion of "endless money" that they simply do not give a damn about what happens to 307.7 million other souls? I do not have an answer for you. But I do know that "crime is like that."
There has never lived nor breathed any high-criminal who suddenly "saw the light" and abruptly decided to actually become the "furniture salesman" that he professed to be on the occasional tax-return. If Al Capone was ever responsible for any piece of wood, it was a coffin. Crime does not listen to reason; does not turn from its ways. Ever.
Mark my words, though, Steven: until and unless we actually determine that Article 2, Section 4 of our Constitution means exactly what it says it does ... and that it truly is "the Supreme Law of the Land" as it proclaims itself to be ... then there is no law-enforcement; therefore, no law; therefore, in the end, no Republic. There are over 6 billion humans on this globe. What ultimately happens to a poorly designed band of 307 million of them is ... c'est la guerre.
Speaking in broad generalizations it’s easy to sound dramatic without actually saying anything at all. You seem to be suggesting a criminal conspiracy to indict the entire congress. Now that you've impressed ... well, someone, I'm sure ... with vague generalizations, and allusions, delivered in an amazing load of blowing wind full of implied yet unnamed sinister acts, can you give names, dates, and descriptions of actual real persons involved in criminalities that are not vague or generalized but exact in detail -- and actually real?
I'll just hang out and whistle while you gather up your ... sure to be entertaining, evidence. See because here in the land of the free it is all about the evidence. Vague references to Capone aside, It's not about your feeling of certainty, it' is not about inference and allusion, it's about reality. So. Jack, got anything real to offer up here?
I'm sure your fashionable beret toting newly minted awareness of radicalism seems all suave, intellectual and cool but in reality your acjoie de vivre is not being crushed by an occupational army. So unless you can produce factual input the flapping breeze of stale teen angst is already overwhelming these pages.
"Constitutional defect"??
We are a republic, not a democracy. We wisely do not allow mob rule.
Beware the tyranny of the majority.
I am a Democrat. I voted for Carter, Mondale, Clinton, and Obama. I am for a single-payer insurance system, or at the very least, A STRONG Public Option. I am a Howard Dean fan. I hope you now understand where my loyalties lie when I say - You cannot be for a filibuster when the Dems are in power and against it when the Repubs are.
This is the kind of akward thinking that affects our whole country. The filibuster must go either way. Or at least be paired down to 55 votes and kept that way.
The other issue is one of leadership. Obama must lead, using the bully pulpit, to create the change we need. Or just go home. I am sorely dissappointed with a White House, after winning the election so big, that acts either timidly at worse, or incrementaly at best.
If Hillary Clinton had been elected I don't see this even being close. My father-in-law, staunch republican, no RINO is he, was worried she wouldn't have the balls to be President (sexist yes I know). I think he was wrong as her trip to Pakistan showed.
You realize Obama's plan is pretty much identical the one proposed by Hillary in the 90s? She's no more for single payer or the public option than Obama is, and she is every bit as much a corporatist as he is.
Corporatist ...?
Wow I love these made up words, let's see, I suppose you are saying that you are Anti-Corporatist?
Let's see, without Corporations we would not have had the industrial revolution.
Say goodbye to television,blue tooth and wifi and the internet, cell phones, microwave ovens, the interstate highway system, life saving technologies such as CAT Scans and MRI, home PC's, the digital watch, calculators, the national Power Grid, clean fuels, the jet engine, the diesel engine, air conditioning, espresso, cappuccino, and Micky D's famous burger, fries and a shake ...
Sounds like a lovely Marxist workers paradise ...
I also wonder what things would be like if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination and was now the leader of the free world. Oh, wait, we're not free, we're being held hostage and captive by special lnterest groups and those in power aiding the wealthiest in this country. Sigh.
The problem isn't uneven electoral districts as much as politicians who have been "influenced" to work directly against the interests of most of their constituents most of the time. Until this problem is corrected there is little change of other necessary reforms being implemented.
Pt 3:
Secondly, it would allow any party with power to ram through the most egregious of laws on a straight party line vote. Since party loyalty has become a fixation second only to Reaganism on the right, that would allow a future Republican Congress to make whatever law they wished without any kind of legislative check on them (and let's not forget, the SCOTUS is currently dominated by the extreme-right as well). The Founders distrusted direct democracy for good reason, the tyranny of the majority is a constant danger.
I'm tempted to suggest a fixed limit to filibusters in the same way as football limits timeouts and wrestling limits rope-breaks but that simply becomes a game of ever more devious strategy, the classic being to offer mildly objectionable bills to draw out the filibusters before offering the really offensive stuff once the filibusters have been exhausted. So I'm at a loss. The situation obviously needs changing as the unprecedented Republican abuse of the filibuster effectively makes them still in power but any change would likely make matters worse.
*fin*
Pt 2:
The Repubs aren't trying to be a loyal opposition, they're not trying to compromise, they're trying to tilt the playing field permanently in their favour and the so-called "liberal media" is accepting their blinkered, revisionist framing of the issue.
The problem is, I don't know how you can fix it. If you let the situation go on like this, the Republicans only need to sway one Democratic vote (and Lieberman is usually a reliable one) to block absolutely everything. But eliminating the filibuster entirely has numerous problems. Firstly, you enshrine literal mob rule and since the public are so often so short-sighted (I never claimed to be a believer in democracy), they can be led around by the nose by whomever has the biggest megaphone which will invariably be the corporate class and their media lapdogs. Prior to Caesar Julius, Rome was a Republic. The plebs had to ratify the Senate's rulings but they always did so because the common mass of people can always be manipulated by those who shout loudest. The people who make up mob rule are, not stupid exactly, but very forgetful, not especially intelligent, often distrustful of intelligence and frequently just plain cruel.
cont...
Pt 1:
I find it both amusing and infuriating that the Republicans have effectively raised the bar to get anything, not just healthcare but anything, from 51 votes (or 50 and the VP) to sixty by making it clear that unless there are enough votes for cloture, they will filibuster absolutely everything.
The filibuster was intended to be a once-in-a-great-while, exceptional circumstances move and now, the Republicans are making it clear that they will filibuster absolutely everything they have a chance to. Was only a few years ago when the Republicans were threatening to eliminate the filibuster altogether because Dems filibustered three of W's most paleolithic judicial nominees (contracy to conservative revisionism, the Dems were never as widespread or unreasonable with their filibusters). "UP OR DOWN VOTE" they screamed, they shouted that the filibuster was unconstitutional over and over (and I remember this because the website I worked for at the time had loads of advertising from conservatives about it). Eventually, they worked out a "compromise" that the filibuster could stay as long as Dems promised to never, ever use it. Now, the second they're in the minority, they threaten to filibuster everything they have a chance to. The second they're back in the majority, it'll be back to 51 votes to pass anything.
cont...
The issue at hand has nothing to do with the procedural issues of the Congress. Regardless of what the far right would have the country believe, our form of government is a direct representation of the times in which it operates. The Founding Fathers, which the right so often references as "all the news that's fit to print", would have simply given up in today's political climate.
I commend the President for allowing this debate to be flushed out in the halls of Congress. What at first seemed like inaction on his part has proven to be a reasonably adept political calculation.
Pelosi and Reed were marginalized by the far right long before the last election. Neither one is closely deserving of having a major public works project named in their honor, but the President now has the opportunity to outline to the American people what the crux of this debate is really about.
It is time to adopt the tactics of the public relations wing of the Republican Party: repeatedly play a 2 to 3 sentence video clip and dissect it for 15 minutes by a panel of 3 to 4 like-minded conservatives.
If the President played tough on national television and proactively addressed the fallacious arguments his opponents would make in response, we wouldn't be having this debate about 60 votes in the Senate.
You lost me at "the President now has the opportunity to outline to the American people what the crux of this debate is really about."
It most certainly IS NOT up to the president to "tell people what to think," it is up to the president to merely authorize or refuse to authorize bills sent from congress.
Presumably you do understand the president and congress are obligated to serve the people -- NOT RULE THE PEOPLE. This is not a Fascist State where people are ruled by force. The Government works for the people, period.
Your post is all about rule by force: "if the president played tough on television," it's as if you think the president is "Daddy" and congress is a bunch of unruly children, perhaps if they are all sent to their rooms without dinner they will learn to behave.
That just is not how the system works.
You are right. It is not up to the President to tell people what to think. However, I think it is up to the President to tell us what he thinks and attempt to persuade us that is the way the country should go.
The President's not supposed to be a leader? Do you really believe that?
The problem isn't necessarily the Senate. Or even the filibuster (which isn't in the constitution other than the fact that the constituion gives each house of congress the ability to create their own procedures).
The founding fathers believed that the congress would split along state-by-state lines. like it did leading up to the revolution. They did not see national political parties forming. But more than that they expected that everybody in the congress would be partiotic. In other words they would seek whatever solution to a problem was best for the country.
But the problem is that instead of being the 'loyal opposition' and partiotically seeking what is best for the country the Republicans are simply focused on denying any success to the Democrats. As has become so clear in this heath care debate whatever the form of the bill that the Democrats came up with it would be rejected simply because it was the Democrats bill. What was best for America was irrelevant, or rather narrowly and artificially defined as being to deny any success on any matter until they were back in power.
The Center of Responsive Polictics has a list of republicans and bluedogs who have received money from insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Joe Lieberman was for the Public Option in 2006. Since then he has received over a million dollars from the insurance industry. Call and email your elected officials every day and tell them you want a strong Public Option that forces insurance companies to compete. We need affordable health care now. And tell them to pass H R 1826 Fair Election Act. We need public funding of elections in order to get the influence of corporations out of our government. The opposition to health care reform is well financed by insurance companies to keep the status quo.
Rather than address the constitution, I would address the filibuster as usurpation of right to representation for all.
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