I am not an American, but I’ve been watching senate sessions past few days and I was amazed with how slow and careless everything and everyone looks.
For example these days they are talking about important inauguration related things, so you would think that everyone would be motivated to debate and stuff or at least be in the actual room, but instead everyone just leaves the room and they only come inside when there is the roll call voting thing.
That voting system is even more weird, instead of having buttons to press and have the results (with names or anonymously, doesn’t matter) appear right away and save a lot of time, they call all senators one by one to vote and since everyone always leaves the room like children, the voting goes on for at least half an hour even with the least important things like whether to continue the session today or tomorrow.
Why is it like that? Why don’t they just close the damn door after the session started and you’re either in or out…? What these senators do in a week is what most of other country’s parliaments do in half a day and I just can’t understand how the US can be so successful with sloppy senators like that.
Because nobody thinks the presence of a senator or a sharp, insightful question or a long, impassioned speech is going to change the thing that matters: the votes. The partisan lines have been drawn and nobody is willing to cross the aisle for fear of getting primaried like Eric Cantor.
So they rationally spend their time doing something other than listening to pontificating speeches, showing up to get their soundbite for the news networks and cast their vote, and spend that saved time doing productive things.
The fix to that is to change the voting system to avoid extremism, but a first past the post system will inevitable degenerate to the factionalism we have now.
The reason for that is the Senate is very traditional and view their role as gentlemen debaters (hence why the filibuster still exists). They still have spittoons for for the Senators although it was (relatively) recently reduced from dozens to two.
Because senators are going back and forth from other important things, from meetings with constituents and other senators, to committee hearings, and everything else that they do.
I realize that other countries may do it differently, in which legislators may expected to be on the floor more often, but each system has advantages and disadvantages. For example, the committee system in Congress is relatively powerful compared to committees in some other legislative systems. If you want a powerful committee system in a legislature, you’ve got to allow time for that to work.
The Senate was never, ever, ever designed to function efficiently. It was designed to function deliberately. Over the years, one can probably point out many policy proposals that were killed by the deliberative nature of the Senate. For example, drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve was killed for no other reason than the deliberative nature of the Senate. It’s fair to say that good policies have also been killed by the Senate, as well, but I guess you’ve got to pick your poison.
I can get the traditional yay nay voting thing, but still having 20 minutes voting for every single voting is just a painful waste of time, there should simply be a rule that there can be no voting unless there is at least 2/3 of senators in the room and that would pretty much speed up things by 100 times, their presence during debates is not important, but if they were there during the actual voting, everyone would just vote right away and a 20, 30+ minute chaos would be solved in less than 5 minutes, many, many more laws and treaties could be agreed on and so on, but I guess that that’s not the goal.
In the UK parliament, where MPs actually have to walk through an Aye and No Lobby, we have a system of pairing. This allows them, in all but the really serious votes, to pair with a member of an opposition party and both agree to not vote, because they cancel each other out.
Sadly, one of the most important things Senators (and Representatives) do is fund raising. It’s very organized, and the more junior one is, the more time one is expected to spend on the phones. I recently listened to a fairly in-depth piece about this on one of the NPR shows…it was very disheartening. In Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Rouke wrote about how more often it is congresspeople calling lobbyists (to put the onus on fund-raising on the lobbyist) rather than lobbyists calling congresspeople. While O’Rouke is a humorist (and a conservative one at that), he does extensive research and finds the humor in what actually happens rather than exaggerating and embellishing for effect.
1991, and yes, you are right. The NPR piece (can’t remember what show featured it) was in the last year. We basically elect congresspeople to go to Washington DC to fund-raise for the next election. And if they find the time, to vote on a bill or three, often written by special interests groups and designed to screw anyone who isn’t a part of their group.
Are there any national legislatures where members do spend a lot of time in the chamber? People speaking to an empty room (and the cameras), then having to be summoned from elsewhere if there happens to be a vote, is a pretty common feature.
The Spanish Parliament and Senate don’t meet in their respective hemicicles every day they’re in session, but when there is a hemicicle session they’re supposed to be there. The whole reason to have “hemicicle days” and “general days” is for reps to be able to split their time accordingly. There have been times when the behavior relaxed; those pics of people voting for their seat-neighbors with hands and feet were more athletic than I’d expect a body composed mostly of middle-aged men to be.
That isn’t always so, or at every level: Navarre currently has a four-party Government which can’t agree with itself on anything except “no UPN!”, and a lot of their members are skipping Parlament sessions, so UPN is actually getting more parliamentary resolutions passed than when they were in power.
One salient point is that the Senate did not allow itself to be televised until the mid 1980’s. If the Senate were being organized today I suspect they would have rules that made them more TV friendly.
But the fact is almost nothing is decided inside the Senate Chambers. The voting is just a formality.
In Aus we don’t do named votes, because we have tighter party discipline. But we have faster and slower votes: on the voices or by division.
I won’t say that the whole point of divisions is to slow things down, but it is definitely one of the points. When one of the parties wants to be crazy and just prevent government, they demand a division on very point.
Remember, it’s not a parliamentary system, where the government’s position is going to pass because they have a simple majority. The Senate votes no on lots of things, and in those cases the votes are typically symbolic.
The slow pace of congress is a feature not a bug. Also the economy tends to do better when the president is in a different party than congress precisely because it’s so hard to get things passed.