Anyone else learning to HATE the Senate? I am totally done with these bastards

[SeeHopeWin]

They do nothing, they talk and talk and talk and talk...I am getting ready to delete CSPAN 2 from my Tee Vee.

How is it that the founding fathers thought these 100 punks can have so much power? or is it that they have some internal club rules that make them such lazy assholes?

Here is a list of things that come to mind:

1) All of them standing up to welcome Ted Stevens after he was indicted
2) All of them giving Vitter a big hand after his prostitute story
3) 60 votes rule? Isn't Democracy the majority +1?
4) Sotomayor's hearings/debate...All kind of time wasted talking, when she already has the votes!!!
5) The Senate finance committee government masturbation for the past 10 weeks!!! (health care bill)

I can go on and on...


The United States Senators are a bunch of mother fucking elitists. They have the easiest job in the world, and you don't have to be smart to do what they do...

What happens if we abolish the Senate? Can someone tell why these people/jobs exist? Why can't the other 435 Congress people make laws and pass crap? Seriously, is there a logical reason to have these government positions?

I want to lay off 100 Senators and close their offices, how much would we save?



















P.S. I would like to exempt Senator Franken from this rant, he is too new.

:rant:

[kirby]

1. The founding fathers...

thought that the Senate would be a a 'cooling saucer' to put a check on fast movement of the House and the People.

[jody]

2. And to save the People from themselves. n/t

[Kid Dynamite]

19. Which exactly exemplifies

the elitist attitude of the Founding Fathers and basically every Senator that has held office

[jody]

24. Agree, the Federalist position led by Hamilton was for a government as near to an elected monarch as

possible.

[TheWatcher]

28. Who is going to save us from THEM?

[DJ13]

3. ..... but instead it became the hotplate for corporate influence

How were they to know?

[SeeHopeWin]

5. Excellent point, cheaper and easier to buy 100 people......nt

[brentspeak]

7. Not all the 100 senators are bought off

Only several ones, in key positions, are. See below

[SeeHopeWin]

4. How can fewer number of people (100 Senators) slow down or "cool off" 435 Congress people?

Seems to me that if 435 debated shit for weeks or months or years, and reached a comprimise on something, then it should not be undone by a smaller group of people.

In statistics, a larger sample ALWAYS gives you a more accurate result!!!

[kirby]

11. Let me explain it more fully...

Cool off, means to slow down, to be more deliberative. The Senate was designed to accomplish this in several ways.

First, 2 Senators from each state. That puts a check on the 435 who are allocated by population of the states. In the Senate the smallest states have the same voting power as the largest. This gives the states more power than the people.

Second, the filibuster requires 60 votes to get things done. That further changes the ability of the Senate to move quickly on anything.

Third, the rules allow for much longer 'debate'. In the House, the Rules Committee which is controlled by the majority party, gets their agenda. In the Senate, both parties have much more power and can introduce amendments, etc.

Lastly, since both the House and the Senate must pass something for it to become a law, the Senate is a check on the House. That is how it can 'cool off' the larger House.

The founding fathers did not trust the people to govern themselves. They wanted the Senate to be a safety valve against a majority/mob mentality of the House.

[BlooInBloo]

13. "In statistics, a larger sample ALWAYS gives you a more accurate result" - Just plain false.

[redqueen]

15. Yep... the Senate was intended to be a check on the people's power. (nt)

[brentspeak]

6. There are plenty of excellent ones: Russ Feingold, Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, Sheldon Whitehouse

Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Amy Klobucher, etc. (too many to list)

The outrage should directed at the real culprits, the Corporate Democrats, like Max Baucus, Diane Feinstein, Blanche Lincoln, etc. As well as 98 lb weakling Harry Reid.

[Umbral]

8. Only since the confirmation of Judge Alito. nt

[sinkingfeeling]

9. Today's Senate is a reflection of today's country. Everybody's out for themselves, half educated,

and impatient.

[Ron Green]

16. +1

Bingo.

[omega minimo]

10. BS Flamebait

[WI_DEM]

12. I didn't know Vitter got a big hand? but yes, the senate is all about looking out for the moneyed

interests.

[vadawg]

14. first rule, is you should always hate politicions and never trust them

we should have to hold our nose to vote for them and every one of them should be shit scared of the people getting rid of them...

[Obamanaut]

20. Of the incumbents whose terms expire in any given year, if they

seek reelection most will be successful. 'We the people' tend to vote for the name we know. I rarely vote for an incumbent - especially in the primaries. If his (or her) pockets are not sufficiently lined during one term, then they have not been working hard enough with their hands out. Let some new person have a chance at a little graft and corruption.

[defendandprotect]

17. kick

[EFerrari]

18. America's Crazy Uncles. n/t

[SeeHopeWin]

26. Amen to that....

:rofl:

[cali]

21. tough shit. I don't want to kick out my senators. Don't like Bernie? Too fucking bad.

And I like Leahy and Boxer and Harkin and Brown and Whitehouse and quite a few others. I'd like the Nelson types out, but hey, I'm not from NE or Montana.

[SeeHopeWin]

27. I do love Bernie Sanders....

[BlooInBloo]

22. Interesting Digby's blog post about the change that has come over the filibuster...

over the years...

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/breaking-dam-by-dday-im-going-to-have.html

"I'm going to have to pretty much agree with Thers' take:

Like I said over at the Cerulean Cherub's place, getting a health care bill passed through reconciliation would be great fun even if it were a crap bill <...>

From a democratic (small d) perspective, the Senate has been asking for it for a long time now. The filibuster is not a constitutional tradition, and as we've seen, amply, is a safeguard of made-up Senatorial principles, not democratic principles, and the public good be damned.

Yes, we need sane healthcare, but we need lots of sane things that we're not getting because of the absurdities that the Senate enables -- Max Baucus directly represents fewer than a million people, and has extensive power over the healthcare of over 300 million Americans. Why? Because he's a fucking healthcare maven genius! Or not! It's all amazingly silly.

A case could be made that whatever the content of any specific bill, a punch to the solar plexus of the pudgy, complacent Senate would be good for the nation. The nation's health literally rests at the whim of a very small number of individuals who are only directly accountable to a very, very small percentage of the nation's voters. Whatever this is, it's not democracy.



The Senate has basically gotten completely out of control. It was conceived as a saucer to "cool the cup" of the passions of the House, but there's a fine line between that and freezing the cup and throwing it into a meat locker. If the Senate were instituted after passage of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court would likely have found it unconstitutionally in violation of the equal protection clause. California has 69 times as many citizens as Wyoming, and yet their citizens get the same amount of Senate representation. The Senate was a bad compromise put in by the Blue Dogs of the 18th century.

What's more, it's gotten worse, as runaway egos and peculiar Senate rules have completely paralyzed the legislative process. The filibuster has only recently been transformed from an occasionally used temper tantrum to a de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement. This recent development is a significant intrusion to the ability of the country to govern itself.

The filibuster, however, has undergone little-noticed changes. Even as successive generations have weakened it by creating the option of cloture, the filibuster itself has become more present in everyday legislative maneuvering. The political scientist David Mayhew argues that we've misremembered our own past on this matter. He's written that Senate has never faced “any anti-majoritarian barrier as concrete, as decisive, or as consequential as today’s rule of 60."

That seems strange, of course. After all, the filibuster was stronger back in the day. But it wasn't used to create a de facto 60-vote majority. It used to be more akin to a temper tantrum. Mayhew looked at FDR's court-packing scheme as one of his examples. The filibuster hardly figured into the discussion. “General opinion is that the will pass,” wrote the conservative Portland Herald Press, “and sooner than expected, since votes to pass it seem apparent, and the opposition cannot filibuster forever.”

Its elevation to the decisive rule in the U.S. Senate is a recent development, and one that has taken a countermajoritarian institution (both in its structure and representation) and saddled it with a supermajority requirement. The product is an almost impossibly obstructed legislative body. We tend to assume this will work out fine, as we've had the filibuster forever, and we're still around. But the evidence is that the filibuster did not really exist in this form before, and so it's very hard to say whether it will work out fine. And those who think that the political system will always respond to emergency, and that countermajoritarian rules don't matter, should really take a look at what's going on right now in California.



Hear hear on that last point.

Reconciliation may or may not be able to produce a bill worth a darn; YMMV. But if the fallout from using it produces a demystification of "Senate process" as some kind of holy writ, the effects would be profound. Process changes have often preceded substantive policy changes. Unless you want health care reform and financial regulatory reform and climate change and energy and all the rest in the tender hands of President Ben Nelson in perpetuity, it may be worth breaking the dam that's holding back the country.
"

[dhpgetsit]

23. The real problem is

That the senate (and Congress in general) is flooded with corporate money.

We need real campaign finance reform and we need to ban corporate lobbying.

[jody]

25. If we ban corporate lobbying then corporatists will not be able to establish a Corporate State.

[TheWatcher]

29. You mean we won't have fascism after all?

BUMMER!

[jody]

30. Benito Mussolini: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger

of State and corporate power."

[TheWatcher]

31. Indeed.

A Rose By Any Other Name....

Whatever we call it, it is almost fully upon us, unfortunately.