It’s not chaos: This is how debate in the Senate should look
“A lot of the dysfunction we see, not only with the coronavirus debate, but also more generally, it stems from a fact that there’s too much comity, too much civility, and not enough conflict in our politics,” says James Wallner on the latest Political Theater podcast.
Wallner, a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a lecturer and fellow at American University and former senior aide to Sens. Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., sees the spectacle of senators disagreeing on the floor, and hashing things out on the fly, as exactly the kind of thing we should expect from our politics. In his view, Congress should not be seen as a factory that has to produce something, anything, to look productive. It’s an important gathering place for people to resolve how we live together.
