Dysfunctional Senate seems to me to be redundant. Nevertheless, there are those who, with noses held closed, continue to try to deal with a legislative body that is, by its very nature, undemocratic, and by long habit, works in ways that are infuriatingly inappropriate to the creation of good public policy. What choice do we have, though, in trying to further serious, essential ends like a federal price on carbon and a national renewable energy standard? (Hint: There are several, but wait till the end of the post.)
George Packer has a depressing but nonetheless compelling article, The Empty Chamber, in The New Yorker this week. “Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.” Packer writes about how these arcana thwart legislation being moved forward. It’s all compounded, of course, by the insatiable need to raise campaign money, eating up half, by some calculations, a Senator’s time; by the malign influence of lobbyists; and Republican partisanship on steroids. (Sorry, folks, but that’s the way it is: The Republican Party has been in thrall to an ultraconservative agenda for some time and there’s no end in sight. Packer reports on this as well.)
What’s the result of all this dysfunction? Important legislation, like climate and energy, dies on the vine. “Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.”
Solution? Reform. Likelihood of it happening? Miniscule.
US Economic Recovery Endangered by Paralyzed Senate is another take on this, from CleanTechnica. “A Peterson Institute study found that annual investments in the electricity sector would go up 50 percent within ten years if a cap on carbon was passed.” Investment means jobs, folks, and these are jobs that are not being created because of the US Senate and the ability of a minority to block progress.
The good news, of course, is that the Obama Administration, unlike the Cheney-Bush regime before it, is moving briskly on any number of fronts to deal with climate and energy. Plus the world is hardly standing still on renewable energy and energy efficiency, among a number of other clean tech fronts.