{"id":20375,"date":"2021-01-28T16:02:57","date_gmt":"2021-01-28T21:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20375"},"modified":"2021-01-28T16:02:57","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T21:02:57","slug":"united-states-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2021\/01\/28\/united-states-senate\/","title":{"rendered":"United States Senate"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I have a couple of things I want to say about the US Senate, so here we go, I guess.\r\n

First of all, not really an analysis, but I\u2019ve occasionally been looking at seniority in the Senate<\/a>, specifically looking at what percentage of the Senate are long-term Senators. Currently there are 19 Senators who have served at least three full terms in the Senate\u2014Lindsay Graham is just starting his fourth, down a bit from when I first started counting. There are only 11 who have completed at least four terms, what I would consider lifetime senators. Only 35 Senators have completed two or more terms\u2014three-fifths of the Senate are in either their first or second term, and another four Senators have served two terms plus a partial-term. That\u2019s down quite a bit.\r\n

To analyze it a little, it seems as if there has been an increase in turnover in Senate seats\u2014that could be for a variety of reasons (older first-term Senators being one) or could be an artifact of a small sample size, but it also could be because the power (and prestige) of being a Senator has decreased over the last forty years or so. And that turnover could continue\u2014two Senators have already announced that they will not run for re-election, and I count ten more who will be seventy or older by 2022, none of whom (except Chuck Schumer) would greatly surprise anyone by choosing not to run again.\r\n

So what I\u2019m seeing is a Senate with faster turnover, in which power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of \u2018lifetime\u2019 Senators who hold leadership positions, and in which it\u2019s increasingly difficult to climb the ladder, as well as decreasingly appealing to stay only partway up the ladder. The committee chairs no longer run little fiefdoms, and the subcommittee chairs can hardly even get on TV, much less write significant portions of legislation that actually passes. An individual Senator, or even a small group of Senators, can\u2019t get a floor vote for an amendment, even if they are third-term veterans of the place.\r\n

Which brings me to the second thing, which is the filibuster.\r\n

No Senator is going to support getting rid of the filibuster to further whittle their own individual power on the principle of getting rid of the filibuster.\r\n

However, there are a lot of Senators who would support getting rid of the filibuster in order to pass some specific policy that's important to them (for some of them, it's any policy they happen to like; for some it's only one or two hugely important things). There may be ninety such Senators, or ninety-eight. It would surprise me if there really are more than twenty Senators right now who would accept defeat on every single legislative issue they care about rather than get rid of the filibuster. But of course what those policies are will be different for each Senator. Is there any particular policy that has 50 Senators willing to ditch the filibuster in order to get the legislation they want passed? That\u2019s the question.\r\n

The Green New Deal isn\u2019t it. Minimum wage? Voting rights? Gun control? Infrastructure spending? Medicare for All\/public option? DACA? I don\u2019t know.\r\n

And then there's the question of whether\u2014if it comes down to it\u2014there are 10 Senators from the Other Party who would be willing to eat the cloture vote to let some popular legislation pass, so that the filibuster is saved for something else. That could maybe happen for the minimum wage or DACA, but I don\u2019t think it will happen for gun control or voting rights.\r\n

I\u2019ve written a few times about my fondness for the filibuster, as a tool of representative democracy. Seven years ago, at the demise of the filibuster for judicial nominations, I wrote<\/a>:\r\n

And yet, there ought to be room\u2014in the Senate, for crying out loud!\u2014for individual initiative, individual prioritization, individual deals. The filibuster and the hold, which worked by threat of filibuster, allowed a Senator or a small group of Senators to demand action on a particular thing in order to make business happen. Essentially, the Majority Party has to pay off a trouble-making Senator\u2026which of course means paying off that Senator\u2019s constituents, that is, getting the will of (a group of) the people done in the government.<\/blockquote>\r\n

But are there actually Senators who are pushing for individual initiative, against letting (or compelling) the Party Leaders set the agendas and the providing the votes? Are all those two-term Senators interested in making the tool work? Or is the Senate just collapsing into its absolute bare essence: a way for small-population states to thwart the majority of people from democratic participation in self-government?\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger can talk for hours and hours and hours.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20375"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20378,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20375\/revisions\/20378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}