One Source of Hyperpartisanship, and the Solution

I know, I know, I know. . .

The government has too much gridlock.

Nothing is getting done.

If we accept this premise as true, then where is the greatest source of gridlock in the federal government today?

The President of the United States has actively campaigned and complained -- to his party, to his caucus in government, to the opposition, and to the voters. He talks a lot, seeks to persuade many, has issued commercials, YouTube announcements, and he has issued executive orders coupled with the signing statements which Geroge W. Bush enhanced at length.

The Supreme Court has issued a  number of telling and influential decisions, including Citizens United, along with ruling on the constitutionality of Arizona's immigration enforcement laws. The ObamaCare decision created a number of problems for voting blocs and interest groups, both on the left and the right, yet the decision helped maintain the non-partisan, counter-majoritarian status of the Court in the midst of the growing partisanship suspected to be taking over the country.

I submit that no one will claim that the House of Representatives is stalled to a stand-still. The House majority has pressed through a number of bills on budget cuts, spending cuts, revenue increases, military issues, and a host of other matters which are pressing on the American people.

The Senate is the site for the greatest set of stalling. The upper chamber has not passed a budget in over three years. Filibusters, threatened or enforced, are stopping legislation from getting a much-needed vote.  Judicial appointment and other federal nominations are facing an increasing amount of resistance. In 2005, the Gang of Fourteen struck a deal in order to advance a majority of President Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court and the federal circuit courts. Numerous vacancies remain to this day.

What has contributed to this bitter, unrelenting opposition in the Senate? The filibuster is the easiest target, a parliamentary tactic which has permitted a diligent minority to slow down unpopular or controversial bills or nominations. The arguments for or against the filibuster have been advanced frequently. I appeal to maintaining the parliamentary measure, for the most part because the United States Senate is an institution based on equal representation, in which states with larger populations can be adversely affected by a majority vote from a bloc of senators who represent states with the minority of voters in the country. The top ten states comprise nearly half of the people in this country, so it is unjust or unacceptable that a majority of small state would be permitted to enact policy which would harm the states with the greater number of people in the country.

The filibuster in itself, then, is not the biggest culprit for the inconstant and volatile politics eating up the upper chamber and killing nearly every bill that leaves the house. When the Framers of the Constitution first enacted the charter, the legislators who composed the Senate were not elected by the voters in each state, but by the legislatures. The representation in the Senate was meant to respect and maintain the power and integrity of the states, not the people, and therefore a more conservative bent would emerge in the Senate to begin with. However, since the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, Senators pay less attention to the needs and the demands of their legislatures and more time seeking the votes of the people. The volatile nature of populist passions has now infiltrated the selection of federal judges and executive officials. The party system has also contributed to the clash of passions and policies at the expense of the well-being and well-functioning of the federal government.

By repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, the pressure which Senators face to gain the votes of their state would no longer push them to make decisions which conflict with the better interests of the country. The states need a proper number of federal judges, the states need a properly-staffed federal government. More importantly, the states deserve to retain and return to themselves the powers which have been slowly usurped by the federal government. The growing centralization of the United States is due, in part, to the populization of the Senate. As long as Senators depended on the legislators for their election into Congress, then in no way would Senators  adopt legislation that wasted state revenue at the expense of the federal government. More importantly, Senators would respond to state legislatures' pressure for pragmatism and compromise to confirm judges, pass timely budgets, cut spending, and return unneeded revenues and ignored powers back to the states.

The alarm about taking power from the voter and returning the power back to the states would seem counter-intuitive to restoring the limited nature of the federal government as well as ending the partisan gridlock in this country, but any steps that we can take to restore the proper role and scope of the Senate, to represent the states as separate entities instead of the people, then the filibusters will be more pragmatic as opposed to partisan, and the Senate will enact legislation that regards the needs of the individuals and the states without descending into populist pandering.