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The public is rallying around a common sense of sobriety that finds the case for limited government as philosophically compelling as it is pragmatically compelled. And the result could prove to be an incoming class of freshman senators more amenable to the principled skepticism of the Founders than any in recent history.
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| Washington has been beset by a bout of temporary paralysis; which is to say good sense. Forty-one Republicans in the Senate having held up the capitol’s previously regnant liberalism, the District of Columbia is now infested with left-wing columnists, lattes half-emptied, breathlessly claiming that the upper chamber is broken. They are right – and it has been for 97 years.
Liberals locate the Senate’s dysfunction in the anti-democratic tendencies of the filibuster. While they correctly note that the obstructionist device is not located in the Constitution, this is an argument of convenience rather than conscience. Only a few years ago, the device that Harry Reid now laments from the Senate floor was his legislative weapon of choice. He only recoils in horror upon learning that his rod has become a serpent in the hands of the opposition.
What plagues the chamber that now bills itself as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” only to muffled laughter is the fact that it engaged in teleological suicide nearly a century ago. With the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, the Senate abandoned its constitutional design as a chamber intended to represent the states. It did so by erasing the method of effectuating that purpose: the election of U.S. senators by state legislatures rather than the general public. As a result, a cursory survey of the sections of the Federalist Papers dealing with the Senate is almost unintelligible today. The original architecture of the legislative branch as a hybrid of democratic and federalist impulses has been negated. Senate elections are now little more than the NFL draft to the House’s NCAA.
There has been a correspondent decline in the quality of America’s senators since the Seventeenth Amendment’s progressive taint poisoned the waters of the Potomac. There is a reason that the 20th century didn’t produce a Webster, Clay or Calhoun. With states generally forming political entities too diverse to speak with a common voice, the result is usually senators who amplify rather than clarify the cacophony.
2010 may prove to be an exception to this pernicious trend, however. The public is rallying around a common sense of sobriety that finds the case for limited government as philosophically compelling as it is pragmatically compelled. And the result could prove to be an incoming class of freshman senators more amenable to the principled skepticism of the Founders than any in recent history.
In the Sunshine State, former Speaker of the Florida House Marco Rubio has seen his Republican primary challenge to sitting Governor Charlie Crist morph from a 30-point deficit to an 18-point lead. Crist now polls about as well as scarlet fever. During his time as speaker, Rubio pioneered the concept of “idea raisers,” traveling the state to collect the best policy ideas of experts and everyday citizens alike and collecting them into a book entitled “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future.” This son of Cuban immigrants recently asked the crowd at CPAC, “When was the last time that you heard news accounts about a boatload of American refugees arriving on the shores of another country?”
In Connecticut, Peter Schiff, a senate candidate who currently serves as president of Euro Pacific Capital, proves the adage that the most dangerous trait in public life is to be correct before your time. In the summer of 2006, Schiff predicted cataclysmic disaster for the American economy based on the coming implosion of the real estate market. Yet with a gimlet eye produced by fidelity to the Austrian School of Economics, Schiff sees the current crisis as sewing the seeds for America’s rehabilitation. Only in the wake of a comprehensive meltdown can Americans start heeding the market signals to switch from consumption to savings, he soberly explains – if government lets the public feel the pain that comes along with touching the stove. Stimulus packages and an incontinent Federal Reserve can only delay the process – and at greater expense to the broader economy, no less.
In Wisconsin, former Governor Tommy Thompson looks increasingly poised to challenge liberal stalwart Russ Feingold. But unlike most Midwestern executives, Thompson would not simply be a compromise choice selected for reasons of electability. Rather, he is one of the most successful examples of conservative governance that a non-red state has produced in the past few decades. During his time in Madison, Thompson created Wisconsin Works, a welfare reform program that went on to be the national model during the Republican Revolution, and pioneered the nation’s first school choice program in Milwaukee.
In Kentucky, establishment Republican Trey Grayson is wilting under competition from an obscure doctor with a famous name. Rand Paul, a Bowling Green opthamologist whose best qualification for public office is that he has never held it before, is the son of a certain Texas congressman who launched an upstart bid for the presidency in 2008. Paul is not a clone of his father, but he shares his virtue of intellectual clarity. Read his campaign website and you’ll be most struck by the profundity of his simplicity: statements such as “Dr. Paul opposes all federal bailouts of private industry,” “Every dollar we print to service our debt reduces the value of the money in your pocket,” and “Dr. Paul does not support amnesty,” leave little room for mischievous press secretaries to reassemble at the first sign of political inconvenience.
These are not the only shining stars of 2010. Candidates like Chuck Devore in California, Michael Williams in Texas, Rob Portman in Ohio and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania show a path to a future where the U.S. Senate can regain the respect the Founding Fathers intended for it – if only because those hopeful inhabitants might take their lessons a bit more seriously. |
