Heidi Alexander: “Thank you, Mr. President. This situation recalls the debate we had at the beginning of the year when a number of…”

“Thank you, Mr. President. This situation recalls the debate we had at the beginning of the year when a number of Senators felt as though we needed to make the Senate a more effective institution, which is always a noble goal, but we had some differences of opinion about how to do that. One group of Senators, including Senator Udall, Senator Harkin, and others, renewed the effort to basically say the Senate would be a majoritarian body which would decide questions with 51 votes. To most Americans, that sounds like the normal order of business, and it is. We grow up in the first, second, and third grades selecting the class president. If someone gets a majority of the votes, that person wins. But in the Senate, over its history, we have had a different process because the Senate serves a different function. The House is a majoritarian institution. If a party wins a majority in the House, a freight train rolls through the House and the bill is passed and sent to the Senate. The Senate, throughout its history, has been the saucer into which the tea is poured to cool it a little bit. In other words, it takes a little more deliberation here to pass something. That can be very frustrating. It can slow things down, but the process was designed that way. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any need for two different bodies. So we have one body which can change with every election every 2 years and pass something such as the health care law by a majority vote.…”