(Please see update below.) It's from today's NYT, in the form of an unfortunate account of why so little actual legislation is making its way through Congress:
The chaos reflects the reality that Congress has largely been reduced from a lawmaking entity to a political operation, in which positions are taken and fermented largely in the name of maintaining party unity rather than attracting votes from the other side. In both the Senate, controlled by Democrats, and the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest.
Actually, No. The point of that paragraph is that Congress is suffering from symmetrical paralysis, which is exactly wrong.
In the House, a minority is indeed "largely powerless." Just ask Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, et al about how life has changed since 2010.
In the Senate, it's very different. There a minority is extremely powerful. Just ask Mitch McConnell, who has made 60 votes -- not a simple majority of 51 -- the de-facto minimum for getting either nominees or legislation approved.
Here's one way to think about it: in both the Senate and the House, the minority party has about the same proportional strength. The Republicans now have 46 Senate seats, obviously 46% of the total. And the 201 Democrats in the House are just over 46% of its makeup.
Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that's changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that "60 votes are required for just about everything."
At the core of [the Harvard Journal] argument is a very simple claim: This isn't what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.
In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton savaged the idea of a supermajority Congress, writing that "its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority."
I could go on, but I figure that at this point anyone who thinks about politics has thought about the modern challenge of governing under "super-majority" conditions. And people at the NYT have to be aware of this too, right? I mean, they couldn't not be. So how can a story about Congressional dysfunction in 2013 ignore the starkly different situations of minority power on the two different sides of Capitol Hill?
Time to reflect on that one with a beer. Meanwhile thanks to the dozens of people who wrote in about this one. Hey, you might write to the NYT as well.
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UPDATE: Here is the way the relevant paragraph now reads in the online version of the Times, with no indication that it has been changed from what was there before.
In the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest. Senate Republicans at least have the power to filibuster, which helps explain why they are so adamantly opposed to the Democrats' gambit.
In fairness, the paper also got this change into the printed version that arrived this morning, so the false-equivalent rendering of history was confined to the advance-web edition that appeared yesterday afternoon and evening online. In general, it's good policy to take note of important additions, deletions, or corrections -- but let's assume that the NYT viewed the print edition as the "real" version of the story, and be grateful that the word "filibuster" appeared there.
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