I’ve long thought that calling the U.S. Senate was an American conceit. Now we are seeing it as one of the world’s greatest political games. It is more fixed opinions than it is deliberative.
The polarization seems to grow by the day. Have all these Senators stopped reading the Constitution? Are they even paying attention when they have their ritual reading of “Washington’s Farewell Address”. Among the many admonitions are his warnings about “overgrown military establishments” and the forming of factions.
If Senators have already declared their positions on almost every issue, they are really putting lie to “deliberative body”.
For more on the Senatorial dysfunction, see “On the death of the world’s greatest deliberative body”, Paul Kane, Washington Post, 2017-01-31.
