A nonpartisan Senate

After reading George Packer's New Yorker article about the Senate's dysfunctional behavior, one thing seemed clear: the Senate is the hostage of partisan politics.

All of Washington -- indeed, the entire United States -- is hostage to partisan politics, of course. However, the Senate, like the Supreme Court, is a uniquely powerful fulcrum by means of which the minority can frustrate the majority. I quite understand that the majority isn't always right: the majority of voting citizens once tolerated slavery, for instance. Yet when the minority seeks nothing more than deadlock, as is abundantly clear is the Republicans' goal in the Senate, we all lose.

It's long past time we got over our collective awe at the Founding Fathers' wisdom to examine the governmental machinery they established and to consider whether it needs to be modified for our society today.

Human nature is the same, more or less, as it was in the Founders' day. However, this is no longer a struggling coastal nation of a few million, largely isolated from European interference and irrelevant to the rest of the world except as a supplier of raw goods. Indeed, it is not possible to consider the United States as a separable problem of governance any more: the U.S. is, for better or worse, inextricably linked to the rest of the world. Politics, technology, and the sheer number of human beings now alive make that world a different planet from what the Founders knew. It moves more quickly and is much harder to comprehend.

If the Senate is supposed "to check the impulses of the House and the popular will," and further, " to collect knowledge and experience, and to guard against a levelling spirit that might overtake the majority," as Packer's article says, then perhaps it's time we considered whether the demands of partisan politics -- party politics -- are consonant with that lofty purpose.

When push comes to shove, party loyalty trumps problem-solving. As a tactic to trip up the momentum of a President you hate, joining ranks seems acceptable, even commendable. As a way of addressing the problems we all share, party loyalty may well be fatally flawed. Health care will not improve, nor will its costs start to shrink, because one party behaved intransigently. Climate change will not respect the refusal by one major party to believe in it. And the members of the Senate are so few, each Senator's mistakes count far more heavily than those of their more numerous House counterparts.

Perhaps it's time to elect a Senate whose members are concerned only with understanding, as best they can, the nation's true interests. They should not have to raise money to run expensive campaigns (public financing, anyone?). Instead, they should have to debate their electoral opponents, to demonstrate the depth and breadth of their knowledge of affairs of state. This would be excellent practice for the actual business of the Senate, which would be focused on airing all sides of the issues facing the nation, not just the two sides delineated by the two major parties today.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if Senate debate were of such quality that it could convince Senators to change their minds? Wouldn't such debate be a far more useful exercise than the hollow formalism that it is today? Wouldn't the whole nation benefit?

And Senatorial candidates should not be beholden to any political party (hence the no-expensive-campaigns requirement). Candidates obviously hold positions on various issues, and it would be necessary to get them to reveal those positions before Election Day; the spectacle of question-dodging that has become a requirement for Supreme Court confirmation would have to be regarded as de facto disqualification for a Senate candidate. Party affiliation currently serves as a kind of shorthand to express candidates' beliefs today, but carries the price of straitjacketing Senators while in office because Senate races require huge amounts of money only the major parties can provide.

Any number of objections can be raised against this notion of abolishing party affiliation in the Senate, but is any of those objections worth perpetuating the sclerotic mess that is the Senate today?