The Senate Is the Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things
Why the $15 minimum wage failed—and why it’s so damn hard for the Senate to get anything done
When we were little kids, Schoolhouse Rock! made it seem like the process of passing a law was pretty simple: Someone wrote a bill, worked with her colleagues to build support for it in committee, and made her case for it. The bill’s opponents got to have their say. Voters weighed in via letters and phone calls (now emails and social media posts), and then everyone voted. If a majority voted yes, it passed.
Oversimplified as this vision of legislative democracy may be, it isn’t actually that far from the truth of how a bill gets through one of the houses of Congress, the House of Representatives. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with how a bill gets through the Senate.
Over the last 40 years or so, getting legislation through the Senate has become a remarkably complicated, confusing, and difficult-to-understand process, one that gives the minority party in the Senate tremendous power and that brings new meaning to the word “byzantine.” The result has been that the Senate has become the place where good ideas, even good ideas that are popular with people from both parties, go to die.
