Democracy's Last Gasp?

What he said.

Checks, Balances and the Duty to Filibuster

No one runs for the U.S. Senate on the slogan: "Elect me and I will maintain the status quo."

No one runs for the U.S. Senate promising to go along to get along.

Yet, when push comes to shove, most senators end up as cautious players who choose the easy route of partisanship, ideological predictability and personal political advantage over the more dangerous path of adherence to the Constitution. Americans have grown so accustomed to the compromised nature of the chamber that they often forget that the founders of the American experiment intended the Senate, in particular, to serve as a check and a balance on the excesses of the executive branch.

Unfortunately, major media outlets that now serve as little more than a stenography service for the D.C. consensus regularly reinforce this misinterpretation of senatorial duty by painting members of the body who choose to embrace their Constitutionally-mandated responsibilities as, at best, eccentric or ambitious and, at worst, vindictive or dangerous to the healthy functioning of the body politic.

The move, led by Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, to block the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court with a filibuster is already being dismissed by White House aides, Republican operatives and their echo chamber in the media as a mad misadventure that exposes the Democrats as legislative anarchists bent on wrecking the smooth-functioning processes of the Senate. The Republican National Committee's Tracey Schmitt summed up the sentiment when she peddled the official line of the man who would be monarch, arguing that in George W. Bush's America the Senate's advice and consent responsibilities are no longer required.

"The judicial confirmation process, particularly one for the nation's highest court, should be insulated from such thoughtless bomb throwing..." Schmitt growled.

Our founders were, in spite of their manifest flaws, men of character and, as such, assumed that their successors would also be men (and women) of character. Unfortunately for us, that has not always been the case. The "intent of the framers" was, clearly, not to have a rubber-stamp Senate that simply defers to an imperial president. But you don't have to take my word for it; their own words still speak to us thanks to the wonder of the free press.

First. It is a misfortune incident to republican government, though in a less degree than to other governments, that those who administer it may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust. In this point of view, a senate, as a second branch of the legislative assembly, distinct from, and dividing the power with, a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient. This is a precaution founded on such clear principles, and now so well understood in the United States, that it would be more than superfluous to enlarge on it.--Federalist no. 62

Today, the influence of big money and television on the electoral process has produced an amorphous mass of political equivocation instead of the righteous defender of the republic our forefathers intended the senate to be. And the watchmen--our free press--have all been paid off to look the other way. In such a world, can democracy long survive?

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