United States | Senate reform

Lazing on a Senate afternoon

Revisiting the world's most indolent body

|3 min read

By M.S.

GEORGE PACKER spends the opening passages ofhisNew Yorker piece on the dysfunctionality of the Senate portraying a day at the institution in all its tedious, insipid glory. Democratic Senators kill time in chambers while Republicans use arcane 19th-century rules, meant to give legislators time to ride across town on horseback, to prevent committees from holding hearings after 2 pm. Senators deliver stem-winding speeches to the empty Senate floor for the benefit of CNN cameras. Quorum calls drag on for hours. When a bill comes up for a vote, dozens of ludicrous amendments are proposed with the aim of slowing it down: an amendment to prevent rapists and child molesters from using federal dollars to buy Viagra; an amendment to let senior citizens opt out of Medicare. (There is no actual discussion on the floor of the "world's greatest deliberative body". A freshman senator says that in the year and more he has served, he can remember only one such debate between a Democrat and a Republican, while another says he has never seen a senator change another senator's mind.) And this is the Senate on one of the three days of the week when some senators are actually present; every Friday through Monday, they're back in their home states, trying to raise the money they'll need to get re-elected. This day, however, is not a typical day: it is the day the Senate takes up voting on the Affordable Care Act health-care reform bill. In other words, the day Mr Packer portrays is unusual in that, after lazing around and delaying action as long as it possibly can, the Senate actually does something.
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