Elie Mystal, writing in the November 29 issue of The Nation, argues that it's time to abolish the United States Senate, describing the Senate as "the place where the popular will goes to die. The Senate's primary function is to do nothing, then congratulate itself for its restraint." Mr. Mystal views the Senate, possibly correctly, as continuing to serve its antebellum role "of propping up white power today," and he notes that the Black population of New York City is larger than the entire population of North Dakota and South Dakota combined, yet the residents of the Dakotas get four senators and the Blacks of New York City get perhaps a 10% say in selecting two senators.
The Senate originated in a reasonable idea, which is that one of the two houses of Congress should be insulated from the passions of the moment, both by having six-year terms and by being only indirectly selected by the people. (State legislators picked senators until the election of 1914, after the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified.) The Senate may have been "the world's greatest deliberative body" when Henry Clay and Daniel Webster debated on its floor, and possibly still, more than a century later, when Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon gave up their Senatorial careers to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Today the quality of Senatorial discussion only rarely approaches that of a good college debate contest, and consistently falls short of that of the Oxford Union.
What, then, is to be done with the Senate? Mr. Mystal says that we should abolish it altogether, and replace it with "a democratic institution of government," in essence, a smaller version of the House of Representatives, allocated among the states by population, and perhaps still chosen with longer terms. I'd like to suggest that we do the opposite. Put plainly, I propose that we return the Senate to its historical roots as a chamber of stable and stately privilege, in the hope that it will return to its intended function of serving as a proper deliberative body that can moderate, but not stop altogether, the will of the people.
The United States designed its bicameral Congress on the model of Parliament, in which the House of Commons comprised a multitude elected, more or less directly, by constituencies across the nation. The members of the House of Lords were hereditary members of the peerage, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and an assortment of other high clerics of the Church of England. Various reforms have set the number of church officials at 24, limited the number of hereditary peers to 92, and allowed the monarch to create life peers with the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords, without the right descending to their children. Quite a bit of pomp still attends the House of Lords, even if most of the 750 or so hereditary peers of the United Kingdom no longer have the right to attend and vote, sharing only the right to choose the 92 peers who will sit in the House of Lords.
That leaves about 660 hereditary peers who don't have anything to keep them occupied from the end of the fall grouse season until Royal Ascot the following June. Here, then, is the Laquedem Plan to improve the United States senate. Each state may elect two of the underemployed peers to be its representatives in the New and Improved United States Senate. The lucky peers will receive a reasonable salary, a travel allowance, and a wardrobe allowance.
Think of the improvements! With its members dressed in fur-trimmed capes and robes, the Senate will be more telegenic than ever. The State of the Union will truly be a television spectacle. Unhappy witnesses before Congressional committees can truthfully say that they don't understand the legislators' questions, if only because of the thick accents that our new Senators will bring with them. And as our Senators will never need to run for re-election, once elected they will be beyond the influence of the campaign contributions of lobbyists.
The catch? Once elected, our imported peers will have a lifetime job, terminable only by death, impeachment, or resignation. Choose well, voters of the Dakotas, for you're going to be living with your four choices for decades. As for Oregon? We could do no better than to elect as our new Senator the actor Tim Bentinck, who beyond his many notable acting roles also holds a fitting hereditary title: he is the 12th Earl of Portland.
Recent Comments