What did Congress do and WHY? If the other senators said "sure Robert" then we need a better system where trains are determined by ridership and revenue and not who's in charge of the Senate. I'll start campaigning Congress when civilians get to vote for who the Senate Majority leader is.
Well, if you've seen my writings regarding best practice in designing democratic (aka republican) systems of government, you'll know that the US Senate is an unmitigated disaster and should really be abolished entirely. When US experts are asked by foreign dignitaries what their advice is regarding constitutional reform, they say many things, but they all say "Do NOT have ANYTHING resembling the US Senate". I can list a catalog of the problems with it:
-- most importantly, it's malapportioned, and so essentially undemocratic
-- it's effectively gerrymandered by the state borders
-- it creates a dangerous veto point which can shut down the government, and encourage "lawless" action by the executive
-- it has ridiculous power over government office appointments, which has the same problem of destroying functioning government
-- it has similarly ridiculous power over treaties...
-- supermajority rules for impeachment mean a tiny minority can prevent impeachment of criminals in high governmental office, leading to ever-increasing governmental corruption
-- it's damn near impossible to amend the Constitution to fix it, because amendments need a supermajority in the Senate, so it'll probably require revolution to get rid of it
-- there is a second method to amend the Constitution, but the "convention to propose amendments" has been requested by most of the states and Congress refuses to call it, so...
-- and that's *before* we start looking at the Senate's internal rules, which are garbage
-- the filibuster has no constitutional basis and is used as a scheme for Senators to lie about their voting records, basically
I expect the US Senate to be one of the key factors which will cause the collapse of the US constitutional system. It was so once before in the leadup to the Civil War, after which the constitutional system was patched back together by strongarm force.
My proposed Constitutional amendment would read as follows:
Article. As of the date of ratification of this article, all the powers and duties of the US Senate are transferred to the House of Representatives. The US Senate shall retain no powers other than the power of debate and parlimentary privilege.
This is rather carefully constructed to evade the Constitutional prohibition on changing the composition of the Senate to make it democratic.
