Democrats can save the Senate or ruin it

I have studied the Senate my entire professional life. All of my academic leaves since 1975 have been spent in the offices of senators — Democrats and Republicans. I wrote a book that compared the Senate with the House and found the former to be a superior institution because of its historic responsibility to be the more deliberative and thoughtful chamber. One need only think of the Obamacare repeal debacle in the House to appreciate the difference.

Now Democrats want to take a step that weakens the Senate, impairs its ability to temper the impulsiveness of the House and further advantages the presidency at the expense of Congress — a lethal blow to the hallowed doctrine of separation of powers.

I understand the Democrats’ anger at the treatment of Judge Merrick Garland last year based upon a bogus doctrine put forth by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that no Supreme Court nominees be confirmed in the last year of a presidency. I also get the resentment in the party base at President Trump’s recklessness and its desire not to reward him with a court seat, though his nominee falls within the normal range of choices for a Republican president.

But by forcing McConnell to invoke the “nuclear option” of killing the filibuster, which blocks Senate business until 60 of the 100 senators vote to move on, they will lose on Judge Neil Gorsuch and on the next seat if it comes up during Trump’s time in the White House. They will have handed the president two jus- tices, and they will disable the Senate’s emergency brake on all judicial nominations.

What’s painful is that I find myself in opposition to the two senators with whom I have felt the closest: former Senate minority leader Harry Reid, who first invoked the nuclear option in 2013, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the longest- serving Democrat and a revered figure who has agonized over his decision to give the Democrats the 41 votes to block Gorsuch. But I can’t allow my friendships to constrain me from speaking out against what I consider a historic mistake.

The men who wrote the Constitution gave senators terms of six years to shield them from the public indignation to which they are now, apparently, about to succumb. The Democrats are, moreover, yielding to the same fear that has intimidated so many of their GOP colleagues: becoming victims of primary election challenges from the most ideological members of their own party.

It makes a person wonder whether a seat in the chamber is so precious that the overturning of a device that makes the Senate the Senate can be contemplated, much less acted on.

Were the Democratic senators to heed my advice, I could not promise them it would initiate a golden age of bipartisanship. But they’d have the satisfaction of knowing they did not erode the foundations of an institution that has always served as a bulwark against an aggressive presidency — whose encroachments right now are very much to be feared.