Michael Tomasky's Critique of the U.S. Senate

The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains a piece by Michael Tomasky, "The Specter Haunting the Senate," that praises two recent books on the filibuster and cloture as they have been employed by that institution. The "specter" that haunts the Senate is, of course, the unlikely prospect of reform.

Mr. Tomasky clearly is one of those, like last quarter's WAIP guest speaker Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, who thinks of Congress as a "broken branch." The Washington Buckeye commented on Mann's presentation on August 18, 2010, and published an earlier post on the Mann-Ornstein book, on January 31, 2010. Just last month, we noted George Packer's lively critique of the Senate in a recent New Yorker, and all of these accounts of the lamentable condition of the national legislature need to be read against the urgent need of incumbents to keep the campaign contributions rolling in. On January 4, 2010, we wrote about Robert G. Kaiser's book, So Damn Much Money, about fund-raising, lobbying, and Congressional earmarks. It all makes for fascinating reading, parental guidance advised.