This has been a busy weekend for us, so we just got around to watching Thursday’s Daily Show (I record it every night on my computer). Stewart’s guest was Professor Richard Beeman, who just wrote a book about the Constitutional Convention called Plain, Honest Men. You can watch it below if you like.
Stewart marveled at the fact that these guys could write the entire Constitution (less the Bill of Rights) in 4 months, when, according to him, it takes our present day Congress four months not to pass anything. Far be it from me to argue that the general run of Congressfolks today measures up to the Founders, but it always seems odd to me that we can (and we all do it) at one and the same time glorify the founders while disparaging the way in which the government they designed works. If they had done the crackerjack job we all claim they did, the government would work well and respond effectively to our needs. It doesn’t.
The sad fact is that many of the compromises embedded in the document are serving us very poorly. Whether intended or not, we now have a government in which one house of Congress is disproportionately influenced by sparsely populated states. That situation is made even worse by the operation of the filibuster, but even if there were no filibuster the fact is that the Senate would still be overly influenced by a relative sliver of the population. This affects national policy, which has become badly skewed precisely because the Senate is not responsive to the settled will of the majority.
The fault, of course, is neither in our stars nor (at least wholly) in the framers, but in ourselves. They were well aware their handiwork was not perfect, and fully expected that improvements would be made. We haven’t done that. Right now we have 40 senators who can stop just about anything from being done to address a truly serious national crisis. They probably represent 20% of the people in the country. There’s something wrong with that setup. Sure, the people in Congress today are a particularly squalid bunch, but the Framers expected that too. The government they designed no longer works, but we are blind to that fact. If you want to know why we don’t have a decent health care system you need look no further than the United States Senate. The same holds true on a host of issues. If we stopped thinking of them as demi-gods, and acknowledged that they were human beings who created a flawed product that is badly in need of updating, we’d all be better off.
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