Our Dysfunctional Senate

As we all know, our government is composed of three branches: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial.  If you liken our government to a modern corporation, the Executive Branch sets the goals and cajoles; the Legislative Branch creates the laws (strategies) to achieve those goals; and the Judicial Branch rules on the Constitutionality of those laws and their application.  No one branch can operate independently of the other two.

The Legislative Branch is further broken down into the House of Representatives, whose purpose our Founding Fathers decided was to represent the people, district by district, and the Senate, whose job it is to play the role of parent to those unruly high strung Representatives.  The original notion was that the Senate would be a wizened, thoughtful, body of elders who would engage in high-minded debate to ensure the sanity of any law proposed by the Representatives; in the past Senators were seldom previously members of the House.  Today that is all changed and the raucous nature of the House has invaded the Senate bringing with it ideologues and corporate shills.  Gone are the wizened elder statesmen, having been largely replaced by dysfunctional party hacks.

And like some others, I often wonder if we don’t have an non elected fourth branch of government: lobbyists.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis shows that more than 1,750 companies and organizations hired about 4,525 lobbyists just to influence health reform bills in 2009.  In 1968, by contrast, there were only 62 lobbyists, total.

In this week’s excellent New Yorker magazine article George Packer writes about the history and condition of the United States Senate, asking the popular question “just how broken is the Senate”?

The New York Times reported in November 2009 that statements entered in the Congressional Record or delivered to the press by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by lobbyists.

And when our Senators aren’t entertaining lobbyists, they are either out fund raising or conspiring with others of their party on voting strategies.  Seldom do they actually debate an issue; the closest they come to that is engaging in filibusters.  But only Tuesdays through Thursdays, the days the Senate is actually in session.

Blogger Greg Sargent writes this week: "It appears that Republicans have calculated that the failure of Democratic legislation, and Democratic griping about the Republican role in blocking legislation, will feed a sense that government is broken and/or has failed to deliver."  "The GOP," Sargent continues, "is betting that failure and griping will reflect badly on the ruling party."

And to paraphrase blogger Charles Lemos: Unfortunately, it is our nation that will fail, almost entirely due to our dysfunctional Senate and the largely radical and recalcitrant GOP that is willing to smash the ship of state on the rocks of an ideology better suited to a pastoral, pre-industrial nineteenth century than to the complex realities of the twenty-first.

I fear this trend in the Senate may not be reversible, no matter which party is in charge.  I also fear that we the people no longer have a say, our vote having been purchased by lobbyists.