The Senate is the most important legislative body in the United States. It is the upper chamber of Congress, and is also the body that confirms all of a president’s nominees. By design, the Senate was meant to exist to give smaller states equal representation in Congress and encourage bipartisanship, but America’s increasing partisanship is slowly eating away at the principles of how the Senate once worked.
Currently, the Senate is very narrowly held by the Democrats. There is a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which means that Vice President Kamala Harris, acting in her capacity as president of the Senate, can break ties. It also gives the Democratic Party the majority.
As America has gotten more partisan, so too has the Senate. As of writing, in the 117th and current Congress, there are just six senators who represent a state which voted for the opposing party in the 2020 presidential election. Compare this to when Barack Obama took office in 2009: during that year’s Congress, the Democratic Party held well over 250 seats in the U.S. House, while the party held 59 seats in the U.S. Senate (even 60 seats — a filibuster-proof majority — for a brief period of time). Of these 59 seats, 23 were held by senators whose states voted against their party in the 2008 presidential election — a far cry from the six remaining today.
(For reference, in the current Congress, the six aforementioned senators are Democratic Sens. Jon Tester (Mont.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who represent states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and Republican Sens. Pat Toomey (Pa.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), and Susan Collins (Maine) who represent states that voted for Biden in the same election.)
Increasing partisanship in the Senate is bad for a large number of reasons. One of the most important reasons why is that if a party believes that they can easily recapture control of the Senate in the next election, there is no incentive for the party to work with the opposing party and help the president pass his agenda, if the presidency and Senate are controlled by the same party.
Since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, about 40 years ago, the House has changed party control eight times, while the Senate has seen party control flip-flop five times. In no period in American history has Congress seen such flip-flop of control between parties: a wave year in support of a president comes one year, then two years later people repudiate against the president and the opposing party sweeps into power — a story all too familiar in the modern era of politics.
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt won in a landslide during the Great Depression in the 1932 presidential election onward, throughout the rest of the 20th century up till 1995, the House stayed in Democratic control, save for two nonconsecutive two-year periods during 1947 to 1949 and 1955 to 1957 when the Republican Party briefly controlled the House. The Democratic Party also controlled the Senate in this period for all but the first six years of Reagan’s presidency.
In fact, during the 25-year reign in which the Democrats had control of the Senate between 1955 and 1981, the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in that chamber of Congress numerous times, despite the White House switching control four times.
Most of the legislation passed back in the day also used to be bipartisan, too. Each party had a liberal and conservative wing, and political ideology used to be based on home state far more than party identification: if you were from the North, you were more likely to be liberal; if you were from the South, you were far more likely to be conservative.
Since each party knew that it would be difficult for the opposing party to gain control of Congress once it had flipped one, members of different parties usually worked with the other party in order to get legislation passed. The most consequential acts of the 19th century, including the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (which created the Interstate system), Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (which created Medicare and Medicaid), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and lots, lots more were bipartisan.
Of course, this neglects the fact that parties had both liberal and conservative-leaning members, while this is hardly the case today. But the point still stands that bipartisanship helped many acts pass Congress. Compare that to the modern day, when most major acts, like the Affordable Care Act, President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package) were all passed on party-line votes, indicating the increasing refusal of senators to work across the aisle, despite what many might say.
The upshot of all this is that it is getting increasingly difficult for the Senate to pass anything under the current rules, since the current rules mean that most bills need to garner filibuster-proof majorities in order to pass. That simply isn’t happening for most legislation divided along party lines like health care, gun control, government spending, abortion, green energy, and more, so unless something drastic changes in the Senate or the rules are changed — something which is getting more popular by the day — hyperpartisanship is slowly destroying the original intention of the Senate, which is to ensure bipartisanship.
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