Post Election Funk

I haven’t been terribly motivated to blog since the election largely because elections take it out of me.  All of the energy expended and afterward I can’t read one more press release and so this year, I took some time off somewhat unplanned. It’s always only a matter of time until politics draws me back, but the current anger at Obama has been keeping me more annoyed than usual.

The reality most liberals cannot deal with is that the US Senate is broken and until that is fixed, the government is going to be more dysfunctional than normal.

I like to point out the amazing thing about the US government is not how little gets done, but how much.  That’s in a normal time.  While I typically shy away from saying the Founders thought this because given they were individuals often times they disagreed and had quite divergent views on government. However, one thing they all agreed upon was that government shouldn’t work too well and they designed just such a government that didn’t.  They were successful and in fact, their first attempt in the Articles of Confederation was too successful and they had to try again with the Constitution.

Over time the Senate ‘improved’ on the not working Constitution by developing an arcane set of anti-democratic rules including holds and the filibuster.  The Senate being anti-democratic isn’t too surprising given it was originally an appointed body.  The filibuster was long used to stop change–the status quo is inherently a conservative position, but the filibuster was used lightly. Until the 1970s when it grew in usage and then exploded in the 1990s and now is being utilized for nearly everything of any substance.

From Talking Points Memo

Any legislation now requires essentially 60 votes to proceed which is absurd.  Absurd reality is still reality though.

You can criticize Obama for some decisions reasonably, but for compromising to get things through the US Senate isn’t one of them.  That’s the reality he and we all face.

Apparently many think a magic unicorn out there could overcome this problem. How?  That’s not entirely clear, but debating and yelling a lot is supposed to work to change Republican minds. If Obama just went up to Maine and campaigned for this  or that he could pressure the two Senators to vote his way… The problem with this assumes that Republicans are playing to a general election audience. After the fights this past cycle, any Republican not worried about conservative challengers is delusional and say what you will about US Senators, they are seldom delusional about reelection matters.  This is especially true for the few moderates left in the party.

Until the US Senate is fixed, legislation is going to be hard to pass that is about anything other than kittens and apple pie.  Instead of whining (and it is whining given there aren’t plausible alternatives) or plotting a primary challenge like  a caller on sports talk radio pretending to be a big league manager, it is most productive to work to solve the problem which is the rules of the US Senate.