UK: For the People...or for the party?

The Economist

Rules of engagement
An arcane row with big negative consequences

THE Senate likes to think of itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Of late, however, much of that deliberation has been devoted to its own rules. On October 6th Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority, set tongues wagging with an unexpected manoeuvre that limited the minority’s ability to demand symbolic votes on doomed amendments. This, wailed Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, risked turning the Senate into the House of Representatives—a very bad thing, in senators’ eyes. He hinted at dire retaliation, should the Republicans win a majority at the next election. In short, the Senate’s usual procedural trench warfare has resumed.

The trigger for the latest barrage was the jobs bill Barack Obama submitted to Congress last month. The Republicans were trying to force the Democrats to put it to a vote in its original form, presenting it as an amendment to a completely unrelated bill, in the hope that many of them would shy away from it, thus embarrassing the president. The Democrats, in turn, wanted to embarrass the Republicans by forcing them to use a different procedural manoeuvre, the notorious filibuster, to block a slightly different version of the jobs bill that had more Democratic support. (They got their wish this week.) All of this, naturally, is mere posturing, since neither jobs bill stands any chance in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.
In this section

Rising Cain
An Iranian bomb plot in America?
Don’t hold your breath
Down or out
»Rules of engagement
Who’s afraid of the dragon?
Dead or alive?
Top dog for ever

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Democratic Party (United States)
Republican Party (United States)
Harry Reid

In foiling the Republican scheme, Mr Reid, by a simple majority vote, established a precedent that will make it harder to attempt such ruses in the future. That, Republicans complain, goes against the spirit of the Senate’s rules. But Mr Reid argues that it is the Republicans who are undermining the Senate’s long-established ways by obstructing the majority at every turn. Some frustrated Democrats have even suggested doing away with the filibuster, a much bigger step towards simple majority rule. The Republicans retort that Mr Reid has often prevented them from submitting amendments, leaving them with no other means to be heard.

The dysfunction is likely to persist, argues Sarah Binder of George Washington University. In the past, she says, the Senate has overhauled its rules dramatically only when under immense popular pressure, or when a big bipartisan majority gets fed up with the chamber’s slow pace. Few protesters are burning senators in effigy, as they were a century ago, and a voluntary armistice between the two parties seems an even more remote prospect than that.

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