Editorials
Missouri’s Jack Danforth says the U.S. Senate is in ‘crisis.’ Fixing it won’t be easy
Congress is broken.
Routine bills languish for months. Important legislation — on health care costs, public safety, election security — gather permanent dust. The 116th Congress, in its second year, has enacted 115 bills into law, according to congressional records.
Harry Truman’s “do-nothing” Congress enacted more than 900 laws.
Some of the blame lies with the U.S. House, but the real roadblock lies in the Senate, which was once considered a place for compromise and cooperation. Instead, the Senate is where almost all legislation now goes to die.
That’s why former U.S. Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, a Republican, helped organize an open letter published this week, signed by 70 former senators — Republicans, Democrats and independents — arguing for a new approach to lawmaking in the upper chamber.
“The legislative process is no longer working in the Senate,” the letter says. The committee system is dysfunctional, the signers say, and the need for 60 votes to overcome a filibuster has stopped progress on nearly every important bill.
Signers also included former U.S. Sens. Claire McCaskill and Jean Carnahan, both Democrats from Missouri.
Their answer? A more or less permanent coalition of senators from both parties — an ongoing “gang of eight” — which could pressure leadership to open the floor to real debate, real amendments and real progress.
“If you had just enough people who were committed to the Senate, to make the Senate work, I know they could do it,” Danforth told The Star Editorial Board in an interview. He called the Senate’s current practices “crazy.”
The letter is a welcome recognition that the lack of real work in the Senate is unacceptable. America cannot function if its legislative process has ground to a halt. Today, it has.
Whether a permanent “gang of eight” could change the way the Senate now operates is a different, more difficult question. Danforth was vague on details, and the letter doesn’t quite spell out how such a group would work.
More importantly, though, changing the Senate will require more than a bipartisan gang. It will require changing the people we send there.
There was a time when voters valued candidates — Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas comes to mind — whose willingness to compromise exceeded their devotion to partisanship.
Today, ideologues in both parties and their supporters in the states, reward loyalty and issue purity. That has produced a Senate filled with hyper-ambitious politicians more interested in TV appearances and goofy tweets than solving actual problems.
Even Danforth admits breaking the dysfunctional fever in the Senate must ultimately involve voters. “If all of this is just a one-day story, forget it,” he said. “What it takes is sustained effort and public support.”
Make no mistake: Government is messy, and partisan disagreements are not a new thing. Danforth sponsored the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, which still rankles. That episode was hardly a bipartisan picnic.
But the diagnosis in the letter is accurate. A Senate that can’t do its job erodes the Constitution, and republican government, and it must be fixed. The Senate can do its part, but voters must play a role, too, starting this fall.
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