Senator Olympia Snowe's Retirement

Earlier this week, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, a Republican, announced that she would not seek a fourth term. Her decision to retire has received a lot of attention in the press. Her reason for retiring? The dysfunction of the Senate. Basically, she said that the Senate is deeply broken, and that she doesn’t think that it can be fixed from within. This is disturbing. By all counts, Snowe is one of the most reasonable persons in the Senate. If her analysis of the current state of the Senate is correct – and I see no reason to think that it is not – then we should all be concerned.

Senator Snowe wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post yesterday. Here are some highlights:

“...Yet more than 200 years later, the greatest deliberative body in human history is not living up to its billing. The Senate of today routinely jettisons regular order, as evidenced by the body’s failure to pass a budget for more than 1,000 days; serially legislates by political brinkmanship, as demonstrated by the debt-ceiling debacle of August that should have been addressed the previous January; and habitually eschews full debate and an open amendment process in favor of competing, up-or-down, take-it-or-leave-it proposals. We witnessed this again in December with votes on two separate proposals for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.”

"As Ronald Brownstein recently observed in National Journal, Congress is becoming more like a parliamentary system — where everyone simply votes with their party and those in charge employ every possible tactic to block the other side. But that is not what America is all about, and it’s not what the Founders intended. In fact, the Senate’s requirement of a supermajority to pass significant legislation encourages its members to work in a bipartisan fashion."

“For change to occur, our leaders must understand that there is not only strength in compromise, courage in conciliation and honor in consensus-building — but also a political reward for following these tenets. That reward will be real only if the people demonstrate their desire for politicians to come together after the planks in their respective party platforms do not prevail.”

“I do not believe that, in the near term, the Senate can correct itself from within. It is by nature a political entity and, therefore, there must be a benefit to working across the aisle.”

Senator Snowe is not the only member of the Congress who has decided to retire in recent years over the dysfunction of that body. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, also a Republican, is one other example. And more could be cited.

In her op-ed, Senator Snowe says that she will work to help fix the Senate as a private citizen when her term ends. Let us pray that she will be successful in that task.