Lizard-Musings about the Way We Live Now

First: the last few decades suggest that we want the benefits of a modern, advanced society but we refuse to align our governmental practices and our tax base with that desire. We want things for which we (especially the middle and upper classes) have no intention of ever paying. The services we want are good things to have (access to health care, for instance) and in my view there's no problem with government at all levels being part of implementation; the trouble is that we refuse to pay for what we want. This is a problem that really could sink the republic: when government fails to deliver the goods demanded, Americans may then turn to extremists who make wild promises and promptly forget all about them when they attain power. Rich as we are collectively, it seems as if the slice of our material means that we are willing to dedicate to the social goods we want isn't sufficient.

Or consider the following if you don't like the above argument about percentages: neither do we seem very resourceful in finding ways to come up with the necessary money without resorting to painful taxation – how about doing away with most components of "the war on drugs," at least insofar as that benighted effort focuses on possession and use of marijuana? (I don't use the stuff – never have; I just don't consider its use socially destructive, especially compared with alcohol. And I don't say this in wide-eyed innocence of the so-called drug culture: hard drugs like heroin and meth leave a trail of individual and collective destruction in their wake. They should not simply be legalized.) My guess is that refraining from such foolish, doomed pursuits would net us a sum in the tens of billions per year, perhaps enough to pay for a huge chunk of our health-care needs. Furthermore, if we simply adopted the philosophy that only the violent and otherwise most despicable of offenders belong in a cage, we could save an even greater sum. Spending thousands to try and then incarcerate someone for stealing a few items from a convenience store makes no sense whatsoever – surely there are better ways to deal with such bad behavior without condoning it. Our obsession with such nonsense stems less from stinginess and antigovernmentalism than from a failure of both common sense and compassion, and it costs us dearly. And I'm not even considering the elephant in the room, our military spending habits – I am all for a strong and thoroughly modern military, but we spend as if we are preparing for a combined full-scale Klingon - Borg invasion.

Second: the federal legislative branch is scarcely up to the task of dealing with the above problems of social will. Cloture in the Senate has gone from an occasional procedural tactic to a deadly weapon wielded by the minority party against the hopes of the majority. Those of us who live in California are now suffering through an extreme version of this debility: it takes a 2/3 vote in California to pass a budget. And since it's almost impossible to attain a 2/3 majority in today's polarized environment, nothing can be done most of the time. There are a few procedural tricks, but evidently they don't work very well. The Governator and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes in a time of recession (which is understandable), and the Democrats are set against gutting education and key social programs (also understandable). So here we are, waiting for inveterate opponents to come together and agree to a compromise they both loathe. We are now issuing IOU's that the major banks no longer want to redeem before maturity. The more fragmented and uncivil towards one another we become, the more damaging are all demands for legislative supermajorities.

My question, then, is as follows: might it best suit a weakened republic (one perhaps, alas, in a period of decline?) to quicken its upper legislative branch, making it a 51/49 proposition to pass legislation in both houses? Or at to least make cloture a 55/45 or 53/47 proposition? We need to do some big things in near-desperate times, and the way congress presently works, I'm not confident that we can do them, Big Al and Old Arlen notwithstanding. It is well and good to imagine wise men in periwigs playing the role of Lords to a mercurial House, but I'm not convinced that the Senate, as it now behaves, won't be the republic's ruin. What do you think? Is 60/40 cloture antiquated, or sort of like giving a box of loaded rifles to a roomful of lunatics? Or is it still possible within that constraint for an effective president to do some old-fashioned LBJ-style bully-pulpiting, arm-twisting and wheeler-dealing, thereby getting some big things done when he knows he has nearly 2/3 of the people on his side?