Two Are Better Than One

Our style is to make the D-NY small: in a recent interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) evaded a question asking for her opinion on a call to abolish the U.S. Senate, which the Democratic Socialists of America recently adopted in their platform. “I’m not running for any larger office presently,” Ocasio-Cortez answered irrelevantly. “That is, of course, a constitutional question.” The interviewer followed up, “But, you support the institution of the Senate itself, as part of the Constitution?” Again, Ocasio-Cortez chose to dodge and weave, “I mean, we’ve all got our complaints. I don’t support the filibuster. I don’t support elements of the institution that we know were founded on Jim Crow.”

It’s understandable why public officials punt on no-win questions. If Ocasio-Cortez condemned the plan, she would break with her DSA allies; if she endorsed it, she would provide further fodder for her many domestic critics to further undermine her reputation with “middle America.”

Reporters should ask tough questions of ambitious politicians, such as asking them to endorse or repudiate the extreme positions held by candidates they have endorsed.

Last month the DSA’s National Political Committee approved a platform titled “Workers Deserve More!” Among the radical agenda items in the document, the DSA expressed its desire to “abolish the Senate.”

The term “radical” is appropriate here because any attempt to abolish the Senate would strike at the very root of the U.S. Constitution. The Senate is established in Article I, Section 3 as one of two legislative branches, and its duties are mentioned throughout the whole document, so that abolishing it would require amendment to nearly every part. Even the process for amending the Constitution (Article V) would have to be amended, where it requires all amendments to win the approval of “two-thirds of both Houses,” as well as three-quarters of the states.

Rightly did Ocasio-Cortez protest that abolishing the Senate “is, of course, a constitutional question.” By contrast, the leftist plan to abolish the Electoral College seems downright cosmetic.

Yet even a proposition so radical as abolishing the Senate forms only one small part of the DSA platform. They propose “to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” (It’s unclear whether they mean “win the battle” in the metaphorical sense or, if so, how they plan to accrue the supermajority needed to fundamentally rewrite the Constitution.)

These claims are not hyperbole; the DSA endorses immediate action. “We need a new political system,” their platform declares. “Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Elsewhere, they add, “Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections.”

There is a precedent for the DSA’s vision in the government of Sri Lanka, the only country in the world officially known as a “Democratic Socialist Republic.” Besides the name, Sri Lanka’s government bears more than a passing resemblance to the DSA proposal. Like the DSA plan, its Parliament is “unicameral” (only one chamber); and the Parliament has multiple political parties; representatives are chosen by “proportional representation” (a party receiving X% of the vote gets X% of the seats). At 226 representatives for 23 million people, Sri Lanka also has a higher representation per capita than the United States; the U.S. House of Representatives would need to expand to roughly 3,000 seats to match the same proportion, which would fulfill yet another item from the DSA platform. (The only notable difference is that the president has power over the legislature, not the other way around.)

Sri Lanka has enjoyed regular elections and peaceful transfers of power since its independence in 1948. The effects of the DSA platform are evident. The nation has devolved into a “majoritarian democracy,” where one dominant ethno-religious group dominates the unicameral legislature with no check on its power. As a result, the minority Tamil people resorted to guerrilla warfare, and sparked an armed struggle that lasted from 1983 to 2009 and claimed over 100,000 lives.

“Publius” (either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist no. 62 sketches four “purposes which are to be answered by a senate” in the American system. First, “a second branch of the legislative assembly … must be in all cases a salutary check” against plain, old-fashioned corruption. “It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy.” Publius argues that the tendency of public officials to “forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust,” is less present in a republican government but still present.

Second, Publius observed “the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions,” of which examples “might be cited without number.” The best corrective, he proposed, was a body free from the same propensity by being “less numerous” and possessed of “great firmness,” which he argued was conveyed “by a tenure of considerable duration.”

Third, another potential weakness of republican government was the incompetence of inexperience. Because the whole body of legislators in the House of Representatives is liable to turnover every two years, it could lead to “a want of due acquaintance with the objects and principles of legislation,” without another body that could supply greater experience in the process of lawmaking.

Fourth, “a rapid succession of new members” would inevitably lead to “mutability in the public councils,” which would create instability in public policy. A Senate keeps policy stable over time.

Publius also pointed out that the different compositions of the House and Senate were evidently “the result, not of theory,” but of “compromise” between large and small states, who each refused to give up their sovereignty to the others. There never would have been a “United” States had the Constitution not found some way of satisfying the interests of both a Rhode Island and a Pennsylvania.

“In a compound republic, partaking both of the national and federal character, the government ought to be founded on a mixture of the principles of proportional and equal representation,” Publius suggested.

The DSA’s idealized version of “representation” never says what it plans to do with the various states. In fact, besides endorsing “statehood for Washington D.C.,” it says nothing about states at all. Do they become mere provinces of a national whole? Do they retain their limited sovereignty? Can they keep their own individual characters, legislatures, and laws? That omission in itself is a fatal flaw that shows their ideas have only been worked out in theory, not in practice.

The complications with the DSA’s grand vision explain why, in the short term, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, as an incumbent representative, chose to voice her support for abolishing the filibuster — an achievable goal — instead of abolishing the Senate — the destruction of our Constitution.

Ocasio-Cortez echoes a long line of leftist criticism of the filibuster. A Brookings Institute spokeswoman testified before Congress in 2010 that the Senate created the filibuster almost by accident. “The House and Senate rulebooks in 1789 were nearly identical. Both rulebooks included what is known as the ‘previous question’ motion,” Brookings senior fellow Sarah Binder testified. “The House kept their motion, and today it empowers a simple majority to cut off debate. The Senate no longer has that rule on its books.”

However identical their rulebooks might have been, Publius’s 1788 article makes clear that the whole point of the Senate was to show a more deliberative, stable character than the House, one which preferred extended debate to rapid action. “The improbability of sinister combinations [in corruption] will be in proportion to the dissimilarity in the genius of the two bodies,” Publius wrote.

The Senate history explains that “The tactic of using long speeches to delay action on legislation appeared in the very first session of the Senate. On September 22, 1789, Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay wrote in his diary that the ‘design of the Virginians . . . was to talk away the time, so that we could not get the bill passed.’” Filibusters became an increasingly reliable obstruction tactic because the Senate had no mechanism to end debate until 1917, when it adopted the “cloture” rule “at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson … to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles,” the guide continues.

How ironic that opponents of the filibuster smear it as a relic of “Jim Crow” when in fact the “cloture” motion was backed by the president who re-segregated the government. The process can be used by all parties. The point of mechanisms like the Senate and the filibuster that slow government down is to keep the majority from steamrolling over minority interests without due consideration.

How ironic that minorities like avowed socialists want to destroy the very tools that protect their freedom in America. The genius of America’s Constitution has endured for 237 years. The DSA wants to blow it up and start from scratch — do they really think they can do better?

This article was originally published at The Washington Stand. Used with permission.