Daniel Franklin: Get Rid of the U.S. Senate: A Dangerous (and Undemocratic) Institution

[Daniel Franklin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He received his BA in political science from UCLA and his MA and PhD from the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. He has taught American politics and American foreign policy at Colgate University, The Colorado College, El Colegio de Mexico (Mexico City) and the University of Texas, Austin. He served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in the offices of Rep. Larry Smith (Fla.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa).]

As the political pundits have well explained, last week’s election of Republican Scott Brown to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate means the Democractic Party has lost its filibuster-proof majority. The filibuster, you’ll recall, is the legislative tactic by which a minority of Senators — sometimes even a single Senator — can delay or prevent congressional action on a bill by talking so long that the majority of Senators either grants concessions or withdraws the bill in question. In order to avoid a filibuster, 60 Senators have to be willing to vote for cloture – the so-called “supermajority” requirement — and the Democrats now have only 59 seats in the wake of last week’s election.

The irony of the supermajority rule is that it makes the Senate — an inherently undemocratic institution – more, not less, democratic.

But how can that be? How can a rule that requires more than fifty percent of the vote be considered a perfecting reform in the democratic sense?

The answer lies in the nature of the Senate itself. The Senate, as mentioned, is an inherently undemocratic institution, especially without the filibuster rule. That is because the Senate is an institution where as many Senators represent the 600,000 residents of North Dakota as the 35,000,000 residents of California. In Britain these unequal constituencies were known as “rotten districts” and were done away with in the 19th century. But here in the United States, the rotten districts of the U.S. Senate persist.

The supermajority requirement in the Senate derives from the tradition that members in both Houses of Congress were originally allowed to speak for as long as they “held the floor” and were “up standing.” But as the House grew in size (under the original Constitution, House members were supposed to represent 30,000 constituents) the filibuster rule was dropped, but continued in the Senate. At the urging of President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, the Senate adopted its first restriction on the filibuster in the form of a cloture motion that would close debate if agreed to by a two-thirds vote. In 1975 the requirement was dropped from two-thirds to three-fifths of the Senate. Thus, in order to avoid a filibuster, 60 Senators, as mentioned, have to be willing to vote for cloture.

The filibuster almost never happens anymore but it is still probably one of the most important procedural rules in the Senate. The mere fact that a small group of Senators can talk a bill to death has all sorts of implications for the legislative process. The unanimous consent procedure that requires, as the name implies, unanimous agreement to the rules of debate is predicated on the assumption that if even one Senator is dissatisfied, the legislative process can be brought to a halt. Even the so-called senatorial “hold,” the right any Senator has to stop a bill from coming to the floor for any reason for an indefinite period of time is based on the assumption that it is within the power of any individual Senator to delay the proceedings of the Senator with a filibuster.

The only saving grace in all this is the rule of reciprocity, or the unwritten understanding, that every Senator wants something either for himself or her state and irreconcilable obstructionism will attract a retaliatory response from other members and no one will get anything and nothing will get done. Thus, Senators will generally allow at least a vote on bills, even those with which they violently disagree. Nevertheless, on grand, relatively broad-based issues, such as Supreme Court appointments or health care reform, in order for anything to get done there needs to be in favor (of at least a vote) a minimum sixty votes. Thus, to save time the leadership in the Senate will generally schedule a cloture vote on a piece of legislation at the beginning of a debate in order to test the strength of support for the bill. If the cloture motion fails to gain 60 votes, the leadership pulls the bill, right then and there. Why bother to go on?

All of this dependence on 60 percent seems kind of strange. However, in view of the fact that rural, lightly populated states control almost half the votes in the Senate, a straight majority rule could result in the domination in the institution of well under a majority of the population of the United States. Imagine a scenario under which there was no supermajority requirement in the Senate. Every time an important bill passed the Senate, the press would publish a count of the population in support. The results would be outrageous. The Senate would soon be exposed for what it is, a throwback to an earlier era, a time when the Framers both failed to trust democracy and when a person’s loyalty was primarily to his state (the only voters were male, and the Senate was selected by state legislatures anyhow).

Even though the Senate is now popularly elected, because of its skewed representation, it still represents an anachronism, and a dangerous one at that. There are important issues to be dealt with, and there is a structural bottleneck in the institution of the Senate that gets in the way. Now it’s all well and good to talk of the separation of powers and checks and balances, and, in the main, those are still useful constructs. But when the obstruction is consistently skewed towards the representation of jackrabbits, the nation can’t do its business.

It is time to reform the Senate. In fact, get rid of it, I say.

Here in Georgia we have a bicameral legislature with the upper body allocated by population; larger districts than the state House and, as a result, a smaller body. The Georgia Senate is elected on the same cycle as the Georgia House. Thus, there is little substantive difference between the bodies. In fact, the homogeneity of the legislature is reinforced by a districting procedure that becomes an incumbent protection racket and not much else. Nebraska has the right idea as it is the only state in the Union with a unicameral legislature. There is none of the corruption of representation there of the United State Senate and the deceptive illusion of balance that characterizes the Georgia State legislature (and most other state legislatures for that matter).

We either trust democracy or we don’t. As it stands, in the United States we would rather stick with a violation of democratic principles at their most basic than set an example to the rest of world. I think I can safely say that Great Britain, or Germany or any one of a number of advance industrialized states is more democratic than we are. Our election system is a joke (the Electoral College comes to mind). Our institutions are little more than democratic veneer (besides the Senate, the Supreme Court comes to mind). But of all of this I think the Senate is the worst. The issue isn’t the filibuster rule in the Senate. The issue is, shall we have a democracy?