
Make the Senate Great Again - chub500
https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-the-senate-great-again-11599589142
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commonturtle
It's behind a paywall so I can't read it. But has the Senate ever really been
great?

Robert Caro's Master of the Senate discussed the history of the institution in
some detail. My takeaway from the book: The Senate basically never really
worked as it was intended. The Senate was designed to be more deliberative
than the House, and to slow down the pace of political change, primarily by
having longer and staggered terms for Sentators and giving them a lot of
negative power: the ability to vote down legislation even if the house wanted
to pass it. But throughout American history it seems to have slowed down
things far too much. The only time it worked was when LBJ was majority leader.
Once he left the Senate it reverted to being the bottleneck for political
change yet again.

