Constitutional Government in the United States by Woodrow Wilson

Author:Woodrow Wilson [Wilson, Woodrow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Constitutions, Civics & Citizenship, Political Ideologies, Democracy, American Government, National
ISBN: 9780765808660
Google: ug9hRdjQmHsC
Goodreads: 2144046
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

V

The Senate

IT is very difficult to form a just estimate of the Senate of the United States. No body has been more discussed; no body has been more misunderstood and traduced. There was a time when we were lavish in spending our praises upon it. We joined with our foreign critics and appreciators in speaking of the Senate as one of the most admirable, as it is certainly one of the most original, of our political institutions. In our own day we have been equally lavish of hostile criticism. We have suspected it of every malign purpose, fixed every unhandsome motive upon it, and at times almost cast it out of our confidence altogether.

The fact is that it is possible in your thought to make almost anything you please out of the Senate. It is a body variously compounded, made many-sided by containing many elements, and a critic may concentrate his attention upon one element at a time if he chooses, make the most of what is good and put the rest out of sight, or make more than the most of what is bad and ignore everything that does not chime with his thesis of evil. The Senate has, in fact, many contrasted characteristics, shows many faces, lends itself easily to no confident generalization. It differs very radically from the House of .Representatives. The House is an organic unit; it has been at great pains to make itself so, and to become a working body under a single unifying discipline; while the Senate is not so much an organization as a body of individuals, retaining with singularly little modification the character it was originally intended to have.

As I have already said in a previous lecture, it is impossible to characterize the United States in any single generalization; and for that very reason it is impossible to sum up the Senate in any single phrase or summary description. For the Senate is as various as the country it represents. It represents the country, not the people: the country in its many diverse sections, not the population of the country, which tends to become uniform where it is concentrated.

Most of the leading figures among the active public men of the country are now to be found in the Senate, not in the House. This was not formerly the case. Before the House became an effective, non-debating organ of business, it shared quite equally with the Senate the leading politicians of the country; but it has not been so of recent years. Organization swallows men up, debate individualizes them, and men of strong character and active minds always prefer the position in which they will be freest to speak and act for themselves. The Senate has always been a favorite goal of ambition for our public men, but it has become more and more the place of their preference as the House has more and more surrendered to it the function of public counsel.

Of course, there are fewer senators than members of

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