A New Round of Institutional Spring Cleaning

Matt Yglesias has a post noting how the debt ceiling was not designed to give Congress leverage over the executive, but rather to decrease Congressional control over the Treasury Department. It's a point I've made before: the debt "ceiling" is just the maximum amount of aggregate debt that Congress has authorized. Prior to having a debt "ceiling" we had specific, individual authorization of each issuance of debt. So it's not really a ceiling, not originally. But Congress still only authorizes some finite amount of debt, instead of authorizing an indefinite amount of debt as necessary to fulfill the government's obligations as all other governments do. But now, as we've gone quite a few decades without restructuring this institution, what used to be increased flexibility for Treasury is now a potential serial hostage situation.

Likewise, it used to be that any given Senator could talk forever if they wanted to, and no one and nothing could stop from doing so. This gave any individual Senator the power to be a jerk and derail any given piece of legislation, but there was a very strong custom of not doing so. Eventually they figured out that this was a really bad idea, so they set it up so that a two-thirds vote of the Senate would be enough to stop debate. Eventually it became more plausible for one-third of the whole Senate to be brazen enough to use this power to stop things, so they changed it to a three-fifths requirement. Unfortunately, at this point they also changed from "present and voting" to "duly chosen and sworn," which means that, unlike in the past, the majority cannot just out-will the minority; over thirty subsequent years, that's allowed aggressive minorities (read: Mitch McConnell's Republicans) to use the cloture rules, which have only ever been liberalized, to impose a 60-vote threshold on all Senate business.

In both cases we have a situation where the government originally just did things one way. Each individual debt issue needed authorization, and each individual Senator could talk forever. Eventually these institutions were reformed in a modernizing fashion, twice. Then a few decades went by, and now we're in 2011, and both the filibuster and the debt limit are broken and breaking our government. It strikes me that, at some point in the near future, we're going to need to clean out a bunch of these outdated, often unintentional structural features of our government. The U.S. Constitution outlines a process that makes it damn hard to get anything done: you need the Senate, the House, and the President to all agree on the exact same thing. There are a lot of features of the way we run our policy-making branches that either make it even harder to get things done or make it a serious problem to not get things done. Filibusters, the committee structure, the debt ceiling, temporary appropriations, etc. etc. There are just a lot of impediments to competent, good government, at the federal level but also at state and local levels, and it's high time we cleaned them up. It probably can't happen while the current crop of Republicans are running things, but it has to be coming. That, or our government gets so arthritic that we hit a genuine constitutional crisis for only the second time in our nation's history.