Dear Editor,
The average voter in the United States has become fed up with Congress because lately it has accomplished little or nothing in the way of legislation during a time of economic crisis and lack of jobs. Polls show the approval rating of Congress to be the lowest it has ever been, now less than 10 per cent.
The Senate, for example, is set up with an archaic rule, the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes out of a total of 100 votes to even take up a bill or an appointment, rather than the simple majority of 51 votes. The Republicans in the Senate have used the filibuster some 80 times in the past four years to stifle almost all of what President Obama has submitted. The right wing has been doing this for no other reason than wanting to prevent Obama from having any perceived success, even on proposed legislation which they themselves had presented in the past.
To understand what is happening, we need to look at the makeup of the Senate and how it was created. When the Founding Fathers were seeking to draft the governing structure in Philadelphia, in order to secure the support of officials from the smaller states, they proposed the Senate which would have two senators from each state, regardless of the size of the state in terms of population.
This supposedly would be offset by a House of Representatives which would have members elected according to the number of citizens in the states. A census is held every 10 years to determine the population of each state, and the number of representatives in the House is adjusted upward or downward, depending on what the existing population figures reflect. Massachusetts lost one representative recently because its population, in comparison to the other states, went down.
Because of the makeup of the Senate, however, Wyoming for example, which had a population of 550,000 in 2009, has the same number of senators as New York or California which had 19.3 million and 36.9 million, respectively in 2009. (Wyoming is so small that it has only one member in the House of Representatives.) Moreover, those small states like Wyoming, which are primarily rural in nature, usually elect Republicans to the Senate (both Wyoming senators are GOP right wingers).
Since Blacks and Hispanics, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, live in large cities such as Los Angeles and New York City, their votes for senatorial candidates represent a tiny fraction of the value of the typical white voter in Wyoming. Thus, in terms of popular votes for all senators on the national level, Democratic senators, mostly from larger-populated states, have many times the total popular votes than do Republicans, but still only two senators from each of those states.
But to compound this situation, the Senate has had the disgraceful filibuster rule by which any bill must have at least 60 votes, out of the total of 100 senators, to be allowed a vote on the merits of the bill, which would require only 51 votes for passage. Thus 41 senators can prevent a bill from even being advanced for consideration.
Since Obama became President, the Republicans as noted above have used the filibuster rule repeatedly to prevent legislation he proposed from going forward. In the past, the filibuster was used only in exceptional situations. In the 1960’s, the rule was used only eight per cent of the time, whereas in the past few years it has been employed 70 per cent of the time.
Obama and Democrats in Congress have proposed increases in taxes on the wealthy, but the GOP absolutely refused to consider any such increase, even to the level the wealthy paid before the Bush tax reduction in 2001. Note that in 2007, the top 25 hedge fund managers made an average of $900 million, but paid only 15 per cent in taxes. From 2002 to 2007, high-income Americans averaged increases in income of 10 per cent each of those six years, ending with average income of $1.34 million in 2007. Yet the taxes they have paid are lower. (Romney paid only 14 per cent on the millions he made.) The members of the middle class, on the other hand, averaged $52,000 in 2007, but only $50,000 in 2008.
On the bill to increase jobs Obama submitted last year, which included a five per cent surcharge on the wealthy to fund the programme, Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s dogged minority leader, was able to herd together even mildly moderate Republicans to join him in lockstep to filibuster the bill, preferring to help reduce the deficit not through any increase in revenue, but rather by limiting the benefits of Social Security and Medicare for the elderly and programmes for the poor. McConnell reportedly told his colleagues in caucus that they could “either hang together or hang separately,” a rather obvious threat.
Those Republicans who will be up for re-election in 2014 probably believe that their support of filibuster on the jobs bill, for example, will not be recognised for what it was, namely, a vote against helping the jobless. They could, and surely will, piously claim that they did not vote against the creation of jobs, which of course, is a total distortion of how they defeated that particular bill.
No, the Founding Fathers did not always use wisdom and foresight in setting up our government as reflected by how the Senate operates. Actually, their original plan for the Senate was even worse. The plan, as first adopted, provided that members of the Senate would be elected by the legislatures of the individual states and this was how senators were first elected.
It soon became apparent, however, that successful applicants for the Senate were wealthy individuals and that financial contributions (bribes) were often made to influential state officials to secure appointments. The law was finally changed in 1913 by way of the Seventeenth Amendment so that the position depended, as it does now, upon winning the popular vote.
The purpose of this article was to identify some of the reasons nothing gets done in the Congress, particularly the “do-nothing” Senate. A Republican Senator from a small, rural state with a vote in the Senate equal to another senator from a state with 40 or 70 times more voters can totally offset the vote of that Senator on any bill. Many Republicans are elected in rural states with smaller populations. Thus, in proportion to the total votes which Democratic candidates receive nationally to be elected Republicans senators, as a group, receive significantly fewer votes.
But, that presumes a vote on the merits which does not happen because, as we have seen, the right wing uses the filibuster to prevent this. So, not only are Republicans able to control the Senate in this fashion with only 45 seats, but they can do so even though they have, compared to Democrats, far fewer total votes supporting them as a group on the national level. Ah, the wonders of a Democracy.
Stephen A. Hopkins
