By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, March 05, 2021
Ezra Klein writes:
If Democrats won Senate seats
roughly in proportion to how many people voted for Democrats to win Senate
seats this would all look very different.
The “center” of the Senate is well to the right of the center of the country. And today is the result.
Klein writes this because the Senate rejected Bernie
Sanders’s plan to impose a $15 minimum wage on every state in the union. The
vote ended up with 42 senators in favor and 58 senators against — or, put
another way, it ended up 18 senators away from a filibuster-proof majority and
eight senators away from the simple majority that Klein favors.
Klein also writes this because he doesn’t understand how
the American system of government works.
Klein’s operating assumption seems to be that the federal
government is the only government in the United States. But it’s not — and,
moreover, it’s not by explicit design. The federal government is staffed by
representatives who are supposed to consider only questions of national import, while leaving
everything else to the states. There is nothing in the American system of
government that prevents the Democratic Party from winning elections in the
majority of the states, and passing into law — at the state level — all of the
things that Ezra Klein covets. By contrast, there are many provisions within
the American system of government that make it more difficult for a simple
majority to do this nationally: among
them, the enumerated powers doctrine, the structure of the Senate, the
filibuster, and the presidential veto. These are not flaws or loopholes or
anachronisms, they are wise and logical rules that were not only established
from the country’s inception, but to which everyone involved in today’s vote
has consciously sworn an oath.
If it were the case that Wyoming was able to prevent
California from setting its state minimum wage at $15, I’d agree with Klein
that we had a problem. But it is not. On the contrary: Wyoming has no say over
California’s own laws, but it does
get to weigh in as an equal on the matter of what California’s voters may force
Wyomingites to do.
And that is exactly how it should be.
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