The Senate has often slowed us down in the past 40 years. When one thinks about what we've learned about the American electorate and the powers of corporate persuasion of masses of people in just the past four years, that's probably a good thing. Looking back farther takes more patience but the lessons are there as well, even if sometimes only in the Senate's failure to exercise its powers to Slow.Things.Right.The.Hell.Down.
I mean the tendency in our commercialized entertainment and corporate-hive existence has been to go ever faster and get there (wherever) sooner. Report the bottom line faster. Dump the whole TV season online at once. Answer the email faster. Forget the email, ship a text. Go to war and worry about funding it later.
As for news distribution, forget world news, that's probably made up, focus on what your own social media timeline suggests because that's right in your living room so how can it possibly be wrong, you can see it for yourself...
And regarding presidential action on legislation, what about a president
approving legislation that was
passed by a unicameral legislature full of the proverbial hotheaded representatives of "the people"?
Let's not have any income taxes any more!
Let's have the federal government run the elections!
Could go full five-year-old Trump: "let's say a good idea is whenever I have it and tell you to vote for it or else!"
But even in McConnell's day, we still do have more than half a Senate's worth of elected officials ready to put a thumb down on that one. The GOP side of the chamber was too craven back then to see a national interest in convicting and removing Trump for at least abuse of power. It's possible now some Republican Senators have had second thoughts about the wisdom of McConnell's having treated us to a sham trial of serious charges levied against Trump, even if those Senators do at least for now keep their own counsel. What they learned becomes institutional memory.
The Senate's longer term of office and more distributed accountability is what tends to make them a more deliberative body. Even if we like the idea of term limits, there is usefulness in memory that goes back farther than a few years.
The other upside of a legislative official like a US Senator --who is ostensibly accountable to an entire and often still mostly rural state-- is that he's likely also accountable to some urban donors, not just farmers or whatever blue state residents think red states are all about besides low population density and a history of [traditional] conservatism.
A Senator is a little further away from populist pressures, whether those come from the right or the left. And what's the matter with populists? Well, a lot of them are authoritarians themselves. If they all happen to point the same way on a given day, they're like a school of fish perfectly willing to swim into the shark's mouth. The Senator is a fish who maybe remembers the last time the school nearly did that. Today's right leaning populists are not actually conservatives and some of today's Senators remember that also.
