You are correct. Madison specifically put in circuit breakers to prevent the mob swinging wildly one way one month, then wildly another way the next.
To the degree that politicians have circumvented these circuit breakers, we're turning the system more into a winner-takes-all soundbite/24-hour-news-cycle fight.
It's a feature. My (subtle?) point was that when gridlock comes up most people have no idea what they're talking about. Usually "gridlock" just means "my guys are being thwarted by the other guys! That sucks!"
This is revisionist nonsense. There are certain things that supermajorities are required for but the regular business of the Senate was never intended to be part of that. The current reliance on supermajorities is beyond unprecedented in US history and gets worse every decade.
Perhaps you are correct, but the Senate was also originally designed to represent the interests of the states, and was not directly elected until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. The original design would have acted as a brake on popular impulses.
I'm not sure what your point is, I've not claimed footnotes to the Constitution. We do have this thing called the Congressional Record and it's got the rules of each house from each Congress and shows how they have been applied over the years and so we can see how often supermajorities were required for normal business and during the founders time is was practically nonexistent and today it is distressingly common.
>This is revisionist nonsense. There are certain things that supermajorities are required for but the regular business of the Senate was never intended...
Actually I believe pretty strongly in original intent as spelled-out in the Constitution. The original intent was and is that each House gets to determine their own rules. That does not mean the rules never change after the first Congress met.
Your replies seem like great responses to someone claiming that holds and filibusters and the like are unconstitutional.
Unfortunately for you I am not making that argument.
I am claiming that today's level of gridlock was neither intended by the founders (who left us more then the Constitution as it turns out) nor healthy for our country (cf Poland).
>I am claiming that today's level of gridlock was neither intended by the founders ... nor healthy for our country...
That's fair.
But first a step back. I think the real weak link in the HN culture is to be at its best, we must thoughtfully compose HN comments. The more nuanced and deep the subject matter, the more time it takes to compose thoughtful, valuable content, and the longer that composition must be, often being an essay on its own. That's time taken from the rest of our lives. I'm as guilty as anyone, more guilty than some, of attempting to pack more meaning into less time with pithy, succinct replies. Of course this tactic is counterproductive and only diminishes the conversation.
To your point: at the time or our nation's founding, there was only one social question in the political realm, slavery. Yes, there was also demagoguing about the Revolutionary War debt, and taxing distilled spirits affected some socio-economic groups more than others, but by and large the People expected the Federal government to decide matters of State, war and peace, Indian affairs, tariffs, and (most importantly) any legislation requiring expenditure also made provisions for meeting the expenditure.
Freedom of the Press literally meant 18th century movable type. Jefferson was free to concoct lies about Hamilton behind the cloak of anonymity, but it took some time to spread, and Congress, by and large, could deliberate at its leisure the few affairs in actually had to decide.
Gradually (after the overriding social affair in politics blew-up into the Civil War) more social questions came into political consideration: womens' suffrage, the ten, then eight-hour work day, worker safety, product safety, civil rights...much of these social improvements held to be either under the umbrella of the regulating commerce clause, or the 14th Amendment.
Then some really big changes crept in, almost unnoticed. First the income tax, which was sold as only applying to the ultra-rich. In very short order it applied to everyone, and eventually in a crafty accounting trick it became a withholding tax instead of a tax you have to go through the pain of paying. Just as significantly, sometime around WWI (if I recall correctly) Congress changed the rules so all expenditures roll-up into one (or a handful, I'm fuzzy on exactly how it works) appropriations bill. Now Congress is free to pass out social goods without paying for them.
The evolution from the hassle of movable type to the 24-hour always on news cycle does not need elaboration, but I will observe that frequently the info-tainment industry couches every emotion-laden problem imaginable in terms of the the government must/should/can do something about this.
So now we live in an age where every conceivable issue can be considered for legislation, and always-on sources of information/propaganda compete for the public's, the beurocrat's, and the legislature's attention. So is it really a good idea to ramrod every item the legislature considers through on a 51-49 vote? Tomorrow the count could easily be reversed. There's often emotional appeal made to social legislation of the past (worker safety, civil rights, etc.) and that not going forward with whatever social legislation beign considered today will somehow reverse all the good accomplished in the past, but I submit that on the margin, the increase in good achieved by these past examples was great. When there is no limit to what can be considered by the legislature, then many things will come up for which the realistic increase of good on the margin is small...and the unintended cosequensces are unknown.
You're giving to much credit to Madison. There were a couple of other Fathers around. Plus the Senate has evolved a lot since those days.
Overall I think the gridlock is overrated. If we get some bone headed politicians actually passing laws maybe people will start to care again who gets elected.
I think it's a fallacy to think that the Senate has to pass lots of laws to be an effective organization. I think an even more stringent bar for legislation would produce better legislation rather than more of it.
It's supposed to be the great deliberator, let them deliberate until they have an idea worthy of 60% of the votes.
I buy that in principle, though it'd work better if Senators represented a larger spectrum of opinions, rather than two fairly partisan camps. There's something like 5 Senators who regularly vote with the "other" side (e.g. Susan Collins from Maine), which means that you have a pretty bad situation whether either the chamber is 55-45 and nothing can pass, or it's 60-40 and everything the leading party wants can pass. If there were more of a gradation of politics, 60-40 would maybe lead to only the better ideas passing.
A related problem is that some things really should get done, such as replacing retired/deceased judges, which the Senate is way behind on due to the practice of the past few terms where basically all nominees get filibustered.
I'd be fine with requiring a 60% vote of the house, or votes representing 60% of the population. 40% of the senate represents less than 12% of the US population.
The Senate exists for one reason only: The slaveholding governors of Carolinas, Georgia, et. al would never have ratified the constitution if it was thought that slavery had a snowball's chance in hell of being abolished by the federal government.
Interestingly the Australian Senate was modelled on the US Senate, in as much as it was intended to give the smaller states a brake on federal power (and similarly was really a necessary carrot in order to get the smaller states on board with federation).
It's now a directly elected proportional-representation body, so 60% of Senators in that body would tend to represent a similar proportion of voters.
1) To get rid of a law, you have to pass a bill to repeal or change it. Most laws on the books were passed back when you only needed 51 votes in the Senate. Today, to change or repeal them, it would take 60 votes. Thus the increasing use of the filibuster directly results in government bloat and outdated laws.
2) The government is funded by annual appropriations bills. Gridlock results in omnibus continuing resolutions because it takes 60 votes to make any significant changes. Imagine if your business got to the end of every year and said "it's too hard to think up a budget for next year, let's just use the exact same budget as last year." No matter what happened last year.
I'm curious: do you think all elections should require a supermajority? Perhaps we shouldn't elect a President unless one candidate can get 60%? And why shouldn't all elective bodies require 60% to pass legislation? For that matter, shouldn't all corporate boards use the 60% threshold?
This notion that majority-rules is a great decision procedure everywhere EXCEPT the US Senate seems very odd to me.
I think an even more stringent bar for legislation would produce better legislation rather than more of it.
Why do you think requiring a supermajority increases the quality of legislation?
I haven't seen anyone proffer a reason to deviate from majority-rules decision procedure. If you think it benefits the Senate, then you should be able to articulate what those benefits are and explain why they other governing bodies wouldn't also benefit.
So, can anyone explain to me why corporate boards shouldn't adopt a 60% majority rule as well?
In the case of the Senate, it only requires a simple majority to pass legislation. Terminating debate is what requires a supermajority. That seems fair to me since the Senate is supposed to be extremely deliberative. Also, the 60% supermajority isn't even that arbitrary: two-thirds of the Senate are up for reelection every couple of years. The requirement of a 60% supermajority to terminate deliberation almost ensures that the debate will benefit from the members that can afford the longer-term outlook (i.e. 5-6 years).
The distinction between terminating debate and passing legislation is disingenuous. You can't pass legislation without terminating debate. Which means that you can't pass legislation unless you have 60%.
And of course it is arbitrary. In the recent past, the threshold was 66%, not 60%. And in the distant past, Senate norms precluded this sort of arbitrary interference.
Finally, the idea that the 60% threshold leads to more debate is silly. Consider how many judicial nominations are delayed for months but then sail through with 80-100% votes.
The fact of the matter is that at any given time there are three different classes of sitting senators. The requirement of supermajority that is around two-thirds reflects that there is a qualitative difference between a group that doesn’t face reelection for another half decade and one that is likely in campaign mode. Thus, the supermajority is actually a simple majority among the classes of senators.
Also, while a threat of a filibuster might not lead to more deliberation among the members, it certainly signals to the public that something important might be at stake. At the very least it will cause journalist to report and/or editorialize on the issue.
With regard to judicial nominations, I know that there are some shenanigans but I would also expect an ideal process to look just about identical since the floor vote should be delayed until each senator has performed an independent investigation of the nominee.
For most Congressional sessions in the past several years, I would much prefer no bills be passed than what we actually got. I don't think it would be a huge tragedy for an entire year to go by without a single bill being passed.
So, you'd like to go for a year without filling judicial vacancies, or confirming executive branch appointments or passing any appropriation bills? Do you realize that this would cause the government to stop paying its bills?
Milton Friedman used to point out that the only reason the government balanced the budget in the late 90's was not because Republicans controlled congress, but because gridlock.
He accurately predicted that if both Congress and the White House were controlled by the same party (whatever party) spending would get out of control.
As others have pointed out, gridlock is a feature of the US political system, not a bug.
The 90s balanced budgets were caused by 1) the PAYGO rules enacted in 1990 that were allowed to expire in 2002 2) the huge 1993 tax increase 3) the strong economy and runup of the stock market in the latter part of the decade.
This is not correct. Party conflict (which is what Friedman referred to) is not the same as gridlock.
To balance a budget you have to adjust spending and revenue. To do that you have to pass new bills. This is what happened during the late 1990s: the GOP Congress and the Democratic administration were forced to compromise with one another. They passed a new budget that resulted in the balanced budget.
But during gridlock, it is impossible to get new bills past the 60 vote barrier.
Gridlock does not create new balanced budgets, it creates omnibus continuing resolutions. CR's spend and tax exactly as they did last year. If last year wasn't balanced, next year under a CR will not be balanced either.
Yup, as Will Rogers said: "Just be glad you're not getting all the government you pay for"
Sure it's kind of annoying when they're building a highway or something useful but the rest of the time it's a pretty good thing that it moves at the pace of molasses.
Not when you have an executive that can outpace the rest of government on anything with the word security attached to it, so that it can do stuff like drag you into a war before anyone else can even get their boots on.
Interesting how one week it's a bug, the next week it's a feature.