Collective Conscious

I would very much like to see the Senate’s health care debate devolve into some­thing so ugly that it prods actual pro­ce­dural reform in the cham­ber. It’s not even the 60 votes needed on almost every that both­ers me most at this point; if we truly want to have a gov­ern­ment based on super­ma­jor­ity rules, and if we want to con­tinue deal­ing with the pol­i­tics that con­fig­u­ra­tion implies, as it seems we  do, so be it.

What really upsets me about the way the floor is man­aged is the immense waste of time that it takes, pro­ce­du­rally, to move on leg­is­la­tion. Rules minu­tiae such as the def­i­n­i­tion of “pro­vi­sion” and the time it takes for clo­ture to “ripen” mean that days can be spent wait­ing for pro­ce­dures to be trig­gered. Holds, points of order, and unan­i­mous con­sent rules allow sin­gle Sen­a­tors to delay just about any votes or debate seem­ingly indefinitely.

There is no momen­tum; there is no way to develop momen­tum. There is no way to actu­ally get things done in the Sen­ate cham­ber. And Amer­i­cans pay the price.