The Senate is on Everyone’s Mind These Days

Daniel published a post yesterday on the flaws of the government, and it seems to me he’s picking up on a hot topic on people’s minds these days: is the Senate, to use a worn out cliché, “broken”?  The folks at Rationally Speaking seem to think so, identifying the Senate in 3 of the 5 things they think are wrong with democracy in the US.  And despite his partisan bent, Paul Krugman identifies structural problems with the filibuster and other ways to paralyze voting.  Evidently a lot of people think the Senate (and maybe even the entire legislative branch) needs to change somehow.

Of course, no system of government is ever going to be perfect, but I suppose the central questions at the heart of these concerns are “How democratic is the Congress?” and “How can we make it more democratic?”  Arguably, Congress is extremely undemocratic.  The skeptic might say that Congressional pork barrel spending is representative government at work, but it seems to me that this is mostly incumbents watching out for their own reelection chances more than anything else.  (It’s good to bear in mind that the reelection rate for incumbents in the House of Representatives is something like 90%.)  Essentially, Congress is a collection of political (and often economic) elites in a Hobbsian struggle for their own interests.  This is far from democracy.

The hard question is, of course, what do you do to change this.  Daniel’s post mentioned an income-based/demographically bracketed approach, but what about a unicameral legislature?  Would extending term lengths in the House help?  These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, but I wonder what various sorts of changes we could make to Congress to make it more representative.

–Aaron Bekemeyer