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What? More Reasons For the U.S. Senate to Bemuse and Befuddle?

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Normally, my opposition to the continued existence of the U.S. Senate concentrates on how it hilariously distorts representation at the Federal level.  Now, TPM has a decent overview of the twisted procedural gymnastics necessary to pass decent health care reform here.  Most of this will not be foreign material to regular readers of LGM.  
Short version:

“But that doesn’t change the underlying dilemma. The path of least political resistance is beset by procedural obstacles; and the path of least procedural resistance is beset by political ones.”

Longer version: the 3/5 super majority requirements of the filibuster / cloture rule can, oddly enough, make it difficult to get things done.  In order to overcome this obstruction, bills can be passed using the reconciliation procedure, but this is regulated — a bill needs to involve a significant budgetary footprint, and it can not violate the Byrd Rule by increasing the budget deficit beyond the period covered by the reconciliation bill in the first place.
This has several ramifications in terms of representation and translating preferences into stable majorities in a legislative assembly.  To begin, the filibuster / cloture malarkey immediately creates a preference aggregation environment where the outcome will always be significantly to the right or left of the median voter in the assembly.  Regarding Health Care Reform, this point is clearly to the right of the median voter: the filibuster would force a more conservative bill on the country than the majority of the Senate (and the House) would otherwise support.  Reconciliation provides a perfectly appropriate tactic to get around the anti-democratic obstruction of the filibuster (and as has been pointed out, Republicans are happy as hell to exploit reconciliation except for when it’s used against them), but the Byrd Rule creates an interesting unintended consequence here: in order to be cost neutral, it’s rather possible that the public option would be to the left of the median voter in the U.S. Senate.
Of course, while I’m clearly in favor of the public option, I’m having almost as much fun in watching the U.S. Senate violate most norms of representation, small-d democracy, and preference aggregation.
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