Senate Woes Flag Wider Disease
The Wall Street Journal

On this much, just about everybody agrees: The U.S. Senate isn't well.

Things don't get done there. People can't agree on much. Legislation goes to the Senate to die. Just last week, an $85 billion jobs bill-supposedly Washington's highest current priority-shrunk to a $15 billion bill in a matter of hours, simply because the Senate's malfunctioning body parts couldn't come together to handle more than that.

Democratic Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh said pretty much precisely that Monday in announcing his surprise decision to retire, citing "a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should."

However, let's not misdiagnose the disease. The Senate isn't the problem.

The Senate is merely a symptom of the U.S. political system's larger dysfunction. The Senate is worth examining mostly because it is like a giant X-ray machine, allowing us to peer into the broader body politic to examine its broken pieces.

The common explanation for why the Senate doesn't work better is that 60 has become the new 50. That is, it takes 60 votes, rather than a simple majority of 50 plus one, to break the nonstop debate of a filibuster and move to a vote on a bill. And it's now become virtually routine for the Senate's minority party-the Republicans today-to stop any meaningful legislation by threatening a filibuster.

Thus, it isn't enough for a party to have a majority, as the Democrats do now. Leaders must muster a super-majority to accomplish anything.

"The bottom line is today it's become a 60-vote not a 50-vote Senate," says Robert Dole, former Republican leader of the Senate and one of the giants of the chamber's recent history. It could have been even harder to get things done, Mr. Dole notes; until a rules change in 1975, a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes, was needed to break a filibuster.

The 60-vote quandary grew, of course, with the election of Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who knocked the Democratic caucus down to 59 votes, greatly expanding Democrats' exposure to the filibuster.

There's no doubt that the filibuster, a tool once used sparingly and only on matters of great import, has become virtually an everyday device used to block action. The best way to see that is to track the rise of so-called cloture votes, which are those taken to try to end a filibuster.

In the Congress that sat in the years 1957 and 1958, there wasn't a single cloture vote taken in the Senate. A decade later, there were six, and another decade later the total had risen to 13.

Then the explosion began. In the Senate of 1987-1988, the total was up to 43, and in 1997-1998 there were 53 cloture votes. That number doubled in the next decade, reaching 112 in 2007-2008. The current Congress is on track to top that record.

Yet the real issue here isn't the number of filibusters and cloture votes needed to stop them, but that there is so little common ground between the parties that the tactic is so easily employed.

After all, if there is a rough consensus on a matter, spanning the two parties in the center of the ideological spectrum, filibusters are a futile gesture. They are worth mounting only in a highly partisan, highly polarized environment.

And that's precisely the environment the nation-not just the Senate-has right now. This loss of common ground in the center is why filibusters matter.

There are multiple reasons for this evolution. The first is how senators view themselves. Veterans will tell you that there was a time when lawmakers thought of themselves as members of the Senate first, as representatives of a region of the country second, and only third as members of a party.

Today, the last has become first. The two parties' more-sophisticated machinery, the 24-7 news cycle and the blogosphere all combine to make lawmakers national party figures first, legislators second.

On a personal level, senators today lack the natural human bonds that would make it easier for Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, to come together in compromise.

One Senate veteran said the institution became a less pleasant place when lawmakers were given stipends to cover trips back home every weekend, rather than once a month. Senators now commute to Washington rather than live there. They don't see one another's families on weekends, and don't develop as many friendships across party lines. Thus, they find it easier to alienate one another.

Perhaps most important, the band of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who stand in the ideological center of the Senate, providing a human bridge between left and right, has grown thin. As recently as the administration of the first President Bush, the Republican White House could often find support among a healthy contingent of Southern Democrats such as Sam Nunn of Georgia, and Howell Heflin of Alabama, while having to worry about whether liberal Northeastern Republicans such as John Chafee of Rhode Island and Jim Jeffords of Vermont would hew the party line.

The middle ground such senators represented is lonelier now, and a more polarized Senate the result.

"I don't think it's broken," says Howard Baker, another former Senate majority leader. "I think it's not working well. But it's also a part of the system." That broader political system, more than the filibuster, is the problem.