In his talk, Sean Theriault was presenting a current work in progress, which was interesting because there were still some unanswered questions and date yet to be filled in. Even so, I feel like I learned a lot about why we have so much political gridlock. This talk was about the decline of bipartisanship in Congress. He started off by telling us about how unique the senate is because it takes 60 votes to get anything done. This means that Congressmen must consult with people outside of their party in order to get anything passed. Thus, bipartisanship is required in Congress. I think this decline in bipartisanship is related to the lowering public opinion of the Senate. Only 25% of people believe that the senate is going a good job. Surveying has shown that the language used to describe Congress is almost never positive never positive. Furthermore, people said they prefer head lice, traffic jams, the country of France, and root canals to Congress.
Party polarization has grown overtime and become a problem for our Senate. In the 1950s senators were senators before they were members of a political party. Now senators are so concerned with the wants of their political party that fewer laws are enacted because compromises cannot be made. Too much partisanship and narrow thinking does not lead to practical problem solving. Few senators are able to exercise free will because there is a lot of pressure from their party and constituents to act one way. Theriault pointed out a couple really interesting ways we can see that people in Senate are getting along less with members of the opposite party than they used to. There is less and less participation in events like seersucker Thursday and secret santa. Previously, these used to be activities that members of both parties would participate in.
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