Collective Conscious

The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has lost its for­mal leg­isla­tive power. It’s no longer able to pro­pose bills in a strict sense due to the pro­ce­dural hur­dles of the Sen­ate; the obvi­ous exam­ple is health care, but every other bill that’s been passed by the House this Con­gress (and that’s quite a few) has been totally rewrit­ten in the Sen­ate to meet the upper chamber’s rig­or­ous demands for passage.

This leaves the House in an odd place. Its obvi­ous power is that it pos­sesses veto power over Sen­ate bills, so pro­pos­als must of course be crafted to be accept­able to the major­ity of its mem­bers. More and more, though, it’s com­ing to resem­ble the rubber-​​stamp Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, which actu­ally lacks the power to pro­pose its own legislation.

Is this a bad thing? I’d say not. Leg­is­la­tors still have to lis­ten to the demands of the lower cham­ber, which rep­re­sents Amer­i­cans fairly by pop­u­la­tion (unlike the Sen­ate). And used prop­erly, the pow­ers of the House are quite impres­sive, as Nancy Pelosi has shown so clearly. She’s got her mem­bers to sign onto very lib­eral leg­is­la­tion in full knowl­edge that it will never be con­sid­ered in the Sen­ate. The state­ment that sends is impres­sive, and it also serves as a very clear sig­nal to the Sen­ate as to what it ought to be doing.

The “people’s House” is going to be more and more a sym­bolic place, as far as I can tell, since it can­not even alter leg­is­la­tion sent down from the Sen­ate because it would not be able to pass there a sec­ond time. It has, how­ever, the power to be a very good indi­ca­tor of true pop­u­lar opin­ion and party coher­ence, whereas the Sen­ate is going to con­tinue to be a state/​land-​​area/​local-​​interest focused chamber.