Supporters of Obamacare have their next target for obloquy and shame. It’s the United States Senate, an institution whose villainy will almost match that of the insurers and Fox News if the health-care bill sinks there.
The anti-senatorial campaign is already revving up. Liberal columnist Harold Meyerson stamped his feet in frustration yesterday in the Washington Post at the cussed balkiness of the Senate: “Dithering Heights.” “Proceeds glacially and produces next to nothing.”
This amounts to raging at the Senate for its very nature and purpose. It’s supposed to be slow-paced and unproductive. Everyone has their moments of frustration at the Senate (I’ve had plenty) because it is designed to be frustrating, especially when a majority in the House is electric with ideological excitement. Conservatives spent most of 1995 hurling epithets at the Senate.
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So it’s not surprising that the Left is upset at it at a time when “Iron Nancy” is using her solid majority to muscle massive pieces of legislation through the House by a handful of votes. Why can’t the Senate do the same, goes the cry, entirely missing the point. It’s not just that the Senate is built differently from the House: It won’t truly be fulfilling its role in our constitutional scheme if doesn’t deep-six Obamacare.
The Senate exists to keep temporarily enlarged and inflamed majorities from rushing through far-reaching pieces of legislation that don’t command broad and deep public support. In its institutional DNA, the Senate should regard Obamacare the way a cheetah regards a gazelle — prey to be killed.
The Democrats enjoy such a large House majority thanks partly to an accident of timing. The election was held in uniquely disastrous circumstances for the Republicans, in the immediate wake of the collapse of Lehman and the ensuing financial panic. Piled on top of the other causes of Republican woe (some of them quite well-deserved), the crisis allowed Democrats to run up the score. But in a matter of months public opinion began snapping back to its center-right state. So we have a House majority that is caught in amber circa October 2008 when the nation’s mood has already moved on.
Hey, you might say, such is the dumb luck of timing in elections. True. But in their wisdom our Founders devised a check to keep a majority augmented by temporary circumstances from running amok. It’s called the Senate.
The House stands for election all at once, capturing public opinion at one moment in time. In contrast, only one-third of the Senate stands for election at once. Originally, its members were selected by state legislatures, further shielding it from public opinion (a feature done away with by the Seventeenth Amendment, of course). It was supposed to be more elite than the House. And the very fact of its existence, in a bicameral legislature, added complexity to the legislative process.
The Senate is protection against rashness. As the great historian Daniel Walker Howe writes of Publius — the collective author of the Federalist Papers — in his book Making the American Self: “The branches of government he wanted to strengthen were ones he associated with the most rationality: the judiciary, the executive, and the Senate; the elements he wanted to limit he associated with narrow self-interest and the passions: the state governments and all popular assemblies, including the House of Representatives.”
Howe continues, “Of course, factions could be majorities as well as minorities. Indeed, the factions Publius was chiefly worried about were the ones that commanded a majority; minority factions were easily limited. But ‘when a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government . . . enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.’”
