The Senate's job is not to be friendly

The Senate's job is not to be friendly

• Mar 16th 2010

PEOPLE seem to agree that David Brooks's op-ed column today is silly, but I am under the illusion that I have something to add to the discussion. The something I believe myself capable of adding is as follows. At the end of the op-ed, Mr Brooks writes:

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

No, we won't. Senators will. Assuming Mr Brooks's apocalyptic vision comes true and inhumanity is pitted against inhumanity (instead of inhumanity cooperating pleasantly with inhumanity, as it presumably does now), I guarantee you that my friends, neighbours and colleagues will continue to be as pleasant and chatty with me as before. Yours will, too. Unless you happen to work in the Senate. Then your working relationships...well, in fact, they'll be just as vicious and partisan as they already are, but if Mr Brooks's assumptions were true instead of false, your working relationships might become somewhat more cliquish and acrimonious.

The thing is, neither I nor any other American voter really care how friendly or cliquish the social atmosphere in the Senate is. What we care about is whether or not the Senate generates good legislation. You could argue the case that more friendly personal relationships in the Senate would generate better legislation, and indeed Evan Bayh does make that argument, with some degree of convincingness. (It's actually easier to argue that the House, with its approximation of Parliamentary-style party-line discipline, has been authoring better legislation faster than the Senate for some years now.) But Mr Brooks doesn't even try to make the case. It's as if he thinks the Senate exists for the social benefit of its members, rather than to serve as an effective legislature for the rest of America. This, to be fair, is an attitude that seems to be shared by many Senators.