A tale of two (second) chambers

Marking the synoptic paper for the Edexcel American Politics route this summer I was struck by the extent to which students apparently feel that the US Congress is a far more effective institution than the UK Parliament. Whilst it is undeniable that the American legislature possesses far more power, it is not necessarily the case that it exercises these powers more responsibly or intelligently than its UK equivalent.

I am not going lay out a lengthy case for and against here, but I would ask readers to consider a couple of recent items in the press regarding the House of Lords and the US Senate.

Today’s Guardian reports on the government’s highly controversial plans to extend the number of days a terrorist suspect (and who knows, some time in the future it could be someone suspected of something other than terrorism) can be held without charge by 50%, and the cumbersome arrangements by which this extension would be granted.

‘The government’s “42 days” counter-terror legislation faces fresh criticism today, with peers warning that a “quasi-judicial” role for parliament to debate each use of the new detention powers risks undermining the independence of judges and the chances of a fair trial for suspects.

The report from the all-party Lords constitution committee, which includes the former lord chief justice Lord Woolf and the former Labour attorney-general Lord Morris of Aberavon, demolishes ministers’ claims that MPs and peers are not being asked to vote on whether particular individuals should be locked up for 42 days without charge.

The critical report will fuel the determination of peers to throw out the government’s controversial proposal to extend the current 28-day limit on the pre-charge detention of terror suspects when parliament returns in October.’

Reading this I was reminded of the Lexington article contained in this week’s Economist about the scandal surrounding Alaskan Senator, Ted Stevens.

‘On July 29th Ted Stevens, the senior senator for Alaska and the longest-serving Republican in the upper house, was indicted on seven counts by the Justice Department. The department accuses Mr Stevens of falsely reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of services he received from an oil company that had helped to renovate his home.

The Stevens affair poses some awkward questions about the Senate. Its seniority system gives extraordinary power to people who can get in early—perhaps because they have a family name like Kennedy or a powerful patron—and then stay around for as long as possible. This gives a disproportionate amount of power to people from small states with non-competitive political systems (Mr Stevens was chairman of the Senate’s most powerful arm, the cash-dispensing Appropriations Committee, for seven years.) It also encourages states to keep voting for incumbents and incumbents to hang on until they drop. The current Senate contains 26 people who are 70 or over.

Mr Stevens has also become a national symbol of out-of-control spending. His voluble support for a $400m “bridge to nowhere”—in fact, to a sparsely populated island where his friends owned land—helped to create a huge backlash against “earmarks”, particularly among fiscal conservatives. Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, tried to divert the largesse from Alaska to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.’

I am in no way implying that the British arrangements are in any way superior to those on the other side of the Atlantic, but it does make one wonder about the inherent dangers of tampering with constitutional furniture which - despite any inherent faults - provides certain comforts whilst avoiding problems on a scale other systems seem bound to generate.