By this means, along with advancing requirements for supermajorities when simple majority rule ought to hold, the Senate of the last 20 years has managed to avoid accomplishing almost anything-and the minority is definitely in charge, as it was in 2009, when Senate Republicans represented only 35% of the U.S. Smith Goes to Washington has been replaced by one in which a senator doesn’t even have to be present on the floor. However, when Jentleson arrived at the Senate, those tools “had come to be applied to all Senate business.” Don’t like a piece of impending legislation? Invoke the filibuster, which was not meant to be used by the Senate in the first place-and particularly not as Mitch McConnell and company have honed it down to be, so that the stand-your-ground-and-jabber filibuster of Mr. That fall was “set in motion by senators themselves, who found that suffocating the institution with genteel gridlock served their interests,” especially during Jim Crow, when obstructionism was a handy technique for blocking civil rights legislation. The Senate has been in a long state of decline, writes Jentleson, public affairs director at Democracy Forward and former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Provocative portrait of a dysfunctional-by design, it seems-U.S.
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