The Senate Doesn’t Need a Change in Rules. It Needs a Change in Behavior

Every few years someone in the Senate rediscovers that the place is broken and writes an op-ed about it. This one at least gets the diagnosis right: it's not the filibuster, it's not the cloture rules, it's not some arcane procedural knot that a clever fix could untangle. It's that senators don't talk to each other anymore. They talk past each other, at cameras, for clips. The actual work of legislating, the kind that requires sitting in a room with someone you disagree with and finding out what they'd actually accept, has mostly stopped happening.

That's not a both-sides platitude, it's a description of how the institution now functions. Committee markups are theater. Floor time is scheduled around messaging votes designed to fail. Amendments get filed as press releases. None of that requires a rules change to fix, because none of it was ever required by the rules in the first place. Senators chose this. They chose it because it's easier and safer than the alternative, which is putting your name on a compromise that both bases will hate.

We'd add something the piece is too polite to say outright: this didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen evenly. A Senate that spends its energy on messaging votes and procedural gamesmanship is a Senate that outsources actual governing to unelected agencies and to whoever's in the White House at the moment, because somebody has to make decisions and the Senate has stopped volunteering. That's how you get a body that debates less and delegates more, then complains when the executive branch fills the vacuum.

So sure, change the behavior. Talk to each other. But behavior change requires senators who think the Senate's job matters more than their next thirty-second ad. Until enough of them believe that, the op-eds will keep getting written and the floor schedule will keep looking exactly the same.