… and learn to fly again/Learn to live so free.”
I apologize if I’ve now prompted you to remember a silly 20-year-old pop song. If you don’t remember the song or the group (Mr. Mister), consider yourself lucky. If you do remember the song and the group, consider yourself lucky that you never saw a Mr. Mister concert. (1986 … Ohio State Fair … ugh.)
But I digress.
What prompted the bad-taste musical flashback was The Broken Branch (Oxford University Press), Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein’s recent book about “How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.”
From the subtitle, you can guess that Mann and Ornstein think there’s something wrong with Congress. And this was before the Foley incident!
Mann works for the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Ornstein for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, but the text shows that both men are enamored of Congress, its history, and its traditions. Hence their observations and recommendations tend to reflect the big government, statist perspective.
The authors say Congress has lost its way — especially during the Bush administration — by relinquishing its willingness to challenge, amend, delay, and obstruct the ideas flowing out of the executive branch. Mann and Ornstein long for the good old days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the time when they first headed to Washington as congressional fellows.
Those who distrust all branches of big government will dislike some of the discourse, but other items will prompt some further thought.
Consider this discussion of the Senate’s traditional role as an obstacle to popular will:
Unlimited debate defines the uniqueness of the Senate. … [F]rom its early days, the Senate had no way to stop debate. The “filibuster” as we know it — and the supermajority requirement for cloture — was actually a reform to expedite action, not to block it. Prior to 1917, there was, in effect, no limit on debate in the Senate. Any one senator, or any small group of senators, could keep debate going indefinitely.
That ability was a part of the unique role of the Senate, which was designed by the framers to slow the process and add to its deliberative nature. Just as the Senate itself is not representative of the majority of the country — senators from small states, which collectively represent a fraction of the overall population of the country, command a majority of votes in the body — the Senate’s unique legislative procedures, including its reliance on unanimous consent and its tradition of sensitivity to minority viewpoints via unlimited debate, are extensions of the framers’ conservative views on governance.
Mann and Ornstein use this argument to decry last year’s debate about the “nuclear option” for judicial nominees. I look at those two paragraphs and wonder instead how much better our lives would be if the Senate had used that power to kill the Great Society and other horrible programs.
