This is a response to Saturn Smith's "Government for Grownups" thread. (Forget the guac, where are the chips?)

The two-party system is entirely post-Founder. So are the realities of campaign finance. Last weekend on NPR Bob Edwards interviewed Robert Kaiser on his book “So Much Damn Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government,” in which Kaiser mentions that the average member of Congress (either branch) spends at least one day per week doing nothing but raising money for re-election. Since this is the main reality that determines the behavior of both houses of congress, let’s look at how it alters the realities of 1787.

There seems to be a sense at the Constitutional Convention that over time geographical loyalties would trump all others; that southern planters would vote with southern planters (for low tariffs and a gag rule on discussions of slavery), northern merchants with northern merchants (for high tariffs and against incipient labor unions), rough-hewn, tobacco-chawing coonskin-cap wearing frontiersmen with others of the same ilk (for keeping the Mississippi free to American commerce and annexing any and all land still in the hands of native Americans and Mexicans). So the founders sought to divvy up responsibilities between the two houses of Congress as a means of crossing these natural divides.
            The House is the money chamber (Article I, section 7). Appropriation bills must originate there; the dirty work of raising and spending tax money get done there, and this has to a large extent determined the chamber’s character and structure. Competition between districts (even within a single state) for federal spending—the other white meat—makes this a more fractious body than the Senate, perhaps requiring the more elaborate leadership structure that has evolved in the House. (By the way, it’s only pork if it’s in your district. In my district it’s farsighted economic development.)

Today's Senate is somewhat more like a late 18th century legislative body than today's House is. Its leadership structure is, of course, just as determined by members’ partisan identity as that of the House, but the Senate historically has had a veneer of muted partisanship about it. This is probably due in part to the fact the Senate must give its “advice and consent” to all presidential appointments, and ratifying all treaties. Interestingly, although the House has the sole power of impeachment, “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation.” In other words, when deciding whether to remove a public official from office, the Senators are empanelled and sworn in like a jury; the House, whose function in voting whether or not to impeach is more like that of a grand jury, has no such requirement. Add to this the fact that the Senate, not the House, must ratify judicial appointments, and you get some interesting judicial resonances in the Senate’s role that are missing altogether from that of the House.

The high-minded ideal seems to have been that having more responsibility for the people’s money would cause Representatives from the different regions to think outside their regional boxes (Hey, we’ve got a budget to pass here, people), while having more to do with constituting the nation’s judiciary and overseeing the President’s foreign policy (death to Barbary pirates!) would bring the Senators together despite their territorial interests. Does this still work, even residually? These days geography is destiny to a far less extent than it used to be. When the bulk of money for the campaigns of some senatorial and congressional candidates is raised outside their states, clearly a new dynamic is in play. The fact that all of two GOP senators crossed party lines to vote with the Democratic majority on the stimulus package, and that party discipline was enforced within House GOP ranks, suggests that regionalism is far less important than it was for our founders. After all, the sovereign states of 1787 are far less sovereign today.

Should Senators, or some number of them, be elected at-large, or by region, or in some rotating manner, like the U.N. Security Council? Should House districts be larger, and multi-member, so that Louisiana (for instance) has a chance of electing more than one African-American congressman at a time? Remember, the founders’ ideal was to acknowledge human venality and defeat it as well as possible with checks and balances. So what’s the best way, now, today?

 P.S. I rented Bulworth (1998) the other day. An uneven film, but it still packs a pretty good punch. And Warren Beatty is at least as good a rapper as Michael Steele.