Bring Back The Awesomeness

I am someone who obsesses over politics. I am someone who finds the mechanisms of politics fascinating. I am someone who finds American electoral politics fascinating. I am someone who finds, slightly less than the other two things mentioned, the nuts and bolts of public policy fascinating.

And yet, I cannot deny that recently American politics has been lacking very much Awesomeness. You know what I mean. Here's a good day in American politics: a rather mediocre piece of legislation that is nevertheless the best we're likely to get any time soon passed. You don't need to hear a list of bad days, but one of them goes like this: "Senate rejects health care for 9/11 heroes, citizenship for innocent children who go to college or join the military, and tax cuts for the entire nation, with solid majorities in favor of each item." Bad day in politics.

But one of the interesting things about this year was that there were two instances of Genuine Awesomeness, one at either end of the year. And I think we can learn from them. On January 29th, President Barack Obama went into the lion's den, to the Republican House caucus conference in Baltimore, and... took questions! And he gave answers. And they were tough questions and they were tough answers. Who won? No one was really sure; obviously both sides thought they did, and I obviously thought Obama did, but Who Won wasn't even really the point. Everyone started realizing, hey, this was kind of Awesome. Our head of state and his opposition engaged in dialogue with one another, actual literal dialogue, and the nation got to watch! Wouldn't it be great if that happened once in a while?

And today, on December 10th, Senator Bernie Sanders, the only Socialist in the history of the United States Congress and the longest-serving independent in our nation's history, launched the Best Filibuster In The History of the World. What made it that? Well, it wasn't in support of segregation of any sort, it wasn't about blocking a policy that most people like, it was Bernie Sanders, and, well, it wasn't actually blocking anything. But more to the point, Senator Bernie Sanders, with two brief respites provided by Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, held the floor of the United States Senate from 10:25 a.m. until 7:00 p.m., and then took the presiding officer's gavel and called the day's work to a close. That's right: a filibuster. (A mock filibuster; there wasn't anything else on the schedule today.) One Senator stood up for eight hours and thirty-five minutes and gave an impassioned, impromptu speech in opposition to a shadowy back-room deal that he and much of the country believed was being shoved down our throats. Now, never mind that I support that deal, more or less. Here's the point:

This is what a filibuster is supposed to look like!!!

So that got me thinking that it's time to put the awesomeness back in American politics. Let's make the mechanics of governing and politicking into compelling political theater, not in the sense of a scripted farce designed to pull the wool over people's eyes but just in the sense of entertaining. Let's make American politics fun to watch, and not just for the uber-wonks like myself. Let's reduce the facepalm moments, when the United States Senate, supposedly the world's "greatest deliberative body," declares that 41 is greater than 59. Or when all 40 failed filibusterers then vote for the underlying bill. Let's change the practice of having our elected representatives spend the majority of their time begging for money. And let's get our politicians to actually engage with us, and with each other.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that eternal paradox, said that the death of a Republic would be marked by political apathy in its citizenry. One is always well advised to take anything Rousseau said with a grain of salt, but this point at least has some truth to it. Most people don't like watching American politics. I don't think that's because they don't care, I think it's because our politics suck. Our system is absurd. The last time this nation decided to actually think out in careful detail about how we wanted our government to operate was, well, 1789. And most of the decisions we made were about accommodating the South and slavery. Since then we've been making it up as we go along, inventing ad-hoc rules to address the immediate short-term problems of the day. That's no way to craft a government!

I don't think we need a constitutional Amendment to bring back Awesomeness to our politics, except maybe something on the subject of campaign finance reform. We shouldn't so much abolish the filibuster as reintroduce it. Get rid of shadow filibusters, and make what Bernie Sanders did today the standard procedure again. I like Merkley's proposal to have a gradually increasing requirement of filibustering Senators on the floor at once; that would make a substantial chunk of the obstructing minority have to be very flagrant about what they were doing, and it would turn it back into a test of wills and an appeal to public opinion. We should definitely create a Question Time sort of thing, possible a dozen or so a year, when the President takes questions from both Houses of Congress, both parties. (Shouting, maybe not. Although, who knows, Democrats seem to have gotten into the let's-all-shout-at-Obama thing...) And it should be televised, not just on C-SPAN (though they'd love to have it; it'd boost their rating a whole frickin' lot!) but on all the major news networks.

There are probably other ways of Bringing Back Awesomeness that I haven't thought of here. But I just think it's worth noting that this very very un-awesome year began and ended with peculiarly awesome moments, and we should try to learn something from that.