Senate - Procedural changes impede the chamber’s traditional deliberative function

Destroying the Senate — and our liberties

By Orrin G. Hatch

Procedural changes impede the chamber’s traditional deliberative function

Americans hold the Senate in low esteem, but the situation is even worse than most understand. The Senate is dysfunctional today because its current leadership has acted to destroy the institution itself.

Job-approval ratings for Congress have been in the teens or single digits for more than three years. A poll last year found that Congress is less popular than head lice, root canals and traffic jams. The “good” news is that Congress is slightly more popular than playground bullies, telemarketers and North Korea.

Polls like these reflect concern over factors included in The Washington Times’ Futility Index, such as the time Congress spends in session or the number of votes taken and bills passed. By this measure, the Senate’s two least productive sessions since the 1940s occurred in just the past few years. We are simply not getting much done these days.

The House has passed 338 bills in the past year-and-a-half, some on subjects of great importance, that have become dead on arrival in the Senate. Far more serious, though, are changes the current leadership is making to the Senate’s design and structure that would prevent it from ever functioning as it should.

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison identified the basic axiom that form follows function and wisely concluded that the Senate’s structure should be determined by “the ends to be served by it.”

The Senate was designed to play a particular role in a carefully designed system of government that is based on two related ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence:


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