Shadow1980 said:
SanAndreasX said:
The House of Representatives could theoretically impeach the President as many times as they want, but it doesn't matter when there is no way the Senate will vote to convict. And the Senate has a position called Senate Majority Leader, which is defined entirely in Senate rules and not by the Constitution as the Speaker of the House is, and the Senate has chosen to give him virtually limitless power, which includes single-handedly grinding the entire Senate to a halt by refusing to bring legislation to the floor, refusing to hold hearings for Supreme Court Justices, and possibly even refusing to even hold an impeachment trial. The current leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is honestly one of the biggest problems in government right now. A lot of issues effecting the entire country are being held hostage by a man who is only voted on by the residents of one state with a small population and an even smaller economic footprint.
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To continue from where I was in the other thread, the Senate really does seem to be where good ideas go to die.
For example, here's the final vote for the Civil Rights Act, which didn't die, but was subject to fierce opposition from enough Senators to where its viability might have been in question:
27 "nay" votes, 21 from the former Confederate States. And the bill was filibustered before that, because of course it was. Senate rules at the time required 67 votes to invoke cloture and end a filibuster. The final cloture vote was 72-28. Meaning the cloture vote just barely passed with only five more votes than what was needed. If there had been just six abstentions, the Civil Rights Act wouldn't have passed. It basically took a nearly united from from nearly every Senator outside the Southeast to get the bill through the Senate.
And here's the Senate cloture vote for the 1969 Bayh—Celler Amendment, which would have abolished the Electoral College at a time when there was widespread bipartisan support for doing so, and which passed the House by an overwhelming majority:
The cloture vote failed 54-36. 19 of those "nay" votes were again from the former Confederacy, with another two being from the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia. That's a significant amount of overlap between Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act and Senators (or their successors) voting against the Bayh—Celler Amendment. The remaining 17 "nay" votes were assorted Republicans from outside the South. There was a second cloture vote that failed 53-34.
It always seems like Southern conservatives and those politically aligned to them tends to stand at the heart of opposition to real reform. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Mitch McConnell, along with Rand Paul, is from Kentucky. Even today, the South represents a plurality of the GOP delegation to the Senate, and conservative Southern values still inform much of GOP policy.
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The Senate was created with the purpose of having half of Congress giving equal representation to all states regardless of population, and being originally elected by the state legislature rather than by direct popular vote, the Senate was also supposed to represent the interests of the state, rather than the voters themselves. It was also supposed to be a more self-policing house with greater freedom to make its own rules than the House of Representatives. The Speaker of the House is well-defined in the Constitution. The President Pro Tempore of the Senate is largely a ceremonial position given to the longest-serving Senator. The Senate Majority Leader role is entirely defined by Senate rules and was created in the 1930s, so basically his authority is whatever the Senate says it is.
The Senate has always been problematic. The way Senators were originally picked, which was by being elected by the state legislature, ended up in a few cases with states having no Senate representation because their state governments were so dysfunctional. There was also the issue that many states malapportioned their legislatures to give rural counties with few people the same weight as a city with thousands of people. Hence the 17th Amendment.
The counterargument is that since senators are now no longer beholden to their states through the state government, that federal power has been expanded at the expense of state sovereignty. State legislatures could no longer pressure Senators on their choice of whether to confirm Supreme Court nominees, for example. A lot of people on the right advocate passing another amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment, which would abolish direct election of Senators, and again, this is a popular idea among Southern conservatives.
What you said also highlights a reductionist claim I see from conservatives from time to time that "Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act while Democrats voted against it." Support or opposition for the CRA was defined almost entirely by geography rather than party. In both houses of Congress, almost every Democrat from a non-Southern state voted for the Civil Rights Act. A few Southern Democrats did cross over and vote for the CRA as well. Most of the non-Southern opposition to the Civil Rights Act in both houses, as you noted, came from Republicans, and every single southern Republican in both houses voted against the Civil Rights Act. One of the "no" votes came from Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who was Johnson's opponent in 1964 and who was seen as a moderate.
