Joseph Britt

2. #Senate rules, and procedures guided by precedent, have been around for a long time. They're arcane and baffling to most people.

3. But they work. They work, that is, if they are treated with respect, as the means by which the less democratic of 2 legislative houses

4....operates. In a governmental system like ours, it's vitally important that the Senate (also the House, I suppose) does operate.

5. No functioning legislature = no representative democracy. "Functioning" cannot mean doing whatever today's majority wants. It never has.

6. Neither can "functioning" mean using Senate rules to block all action on anything. The problem of what measures must be acted upon...

7...what measures must be blocked, and what delays are necessary/permissible has been a staple of Senate life, literally for centuries.

8. The present Senate Majority Leader, with the nearly always unanimous support of his party caucus, chose to use the Senate's rules...

9...to block anything the last President was interested in: nominations, yearly appropriations bills, ordinary legislation.

10. With a Republican President, the Majority Leader (& nearly his entire caucus) is striving to stretch the Senate's rules to...

11...give his President a victory on health care, through a massively consequential piece of legislation. All the normal procedures...

12...customary on major pieces of legislation have been contemptuously ignored. No informational hearings, no committee referrals, ...

13...no mark-ups have been held. The content of what Senators will be asked to vote on has been changed so many times few of them know...

14....what their party's bill, this desperately urgent priority, will do. The Majority Leader has promised his President a victory;

15...he's promised his party's donors, its media supporters & most zealous partisans a bill free from the taint of minority input.

16. The Senate Majority Leader is attempting to continue in a path he set out on years ago. To him, the campaign is the main event;

17...the results that matter are the one's each Election Day. What happens in the Senate, to him, are means to that end.

18. His view has supporters among the lowest elements of American political culture, some of whom now occupy very high office.

19. But let's be clear about this: Mitch McConnell has betrayed the Senate. He's broken precedents that others may not be able to restore

20. He's treated his fellow Senators with naked disrespect, and the institution with brazen contempt. He's damaged the Senate, even if...

21...his monstrous abortion of a health care bill fails. I've noted that the vast majority of Republican Senators are fine with this.

22. They won't defend the institution. Even most Democratic Senators focus their objections on the substance of health care -- ...

23...fair enough as far as it goes, but they're not really defending the institution either. There's nothing automatic about American...

24...representative democracy. If its institutions aren't defended against attacks such as that Mitch McConnell has mounted on the Senate,

25....American representative democracy will be damaged -- in ways we have already been given cause to regret, and will again. [end]