As my crazy post a few days ago pointed out too, the Senate is anti-majoritarian. There are also problems with the Committee system, as Ezra pointed out on agriculture, and Matt Yglesias pointed out later in his blog. Yglesias is right, the Committees do serve as veto points. They are sorely understaffed. They create poor results.
In some sense, they both harken back, progressives as they are, to the Progressive Era. Back then, the legislatures were seen as too beholden to special interest. When anything positive did come out that moved us forward, the Courts blocked it. See e.g. Lochner. So they had a crazy idea. They created these entities called administrative agencies. They would seek to rise above politics. They would have legislative powers and enforcement. It essentially created a fourth branch that would not have guidance from politics, but instead free to make policy. Congress would delegate to these agencies by writing broad mandates, and act they would.
It seems to me that everything old is new again in this regard. There are some significant concerns about these tampering. First, given that most agencies fall under the Executive Branch, and are not so-called independent agencies these days, it moves towards concentrating power in the Executive. Perhaps one would argue that this could be a good thing, because the Executive is the only one accountable to everyone in the country, and Congress with its committees is unable to act. See generally Kagan, Elana, Presidential Administration, 114 Harvard Law Review 2245 (2001) (trying to eliminate agency ossification through expanding the President's control over agencies, but making it explicitly accountable and transparent, and hence differing from the Bush Administration).
Unfortunately, as many have argued with this notion, while the President is elected, he is removed from the people. Indeed, the only institution that is linked to the people is part of Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, Senators are directly elected. However, as anyone who lived through Hayes-Tilden in the 1800s can tell you, and those who saw the Bush-Gore election play out, the President is still not an entirely democratic institution.
Furthermore, these agencies are supposed to make sound policy. But, then again, what is sound policy? At the end of the day it is a value judgement. For example, I want to create a regulation that says you should prefer to live in a house where you have a 1% greater chance of getting cancer. However, as a result of eliminating that chemical we choose another one where you have a 30% chance of horrific diarrhea (I had to be gross). The agency would have people throwing their hands up angry, because the "c-word" (and I do not mean the really nasty one that I hate) cause people to miscalculate risk, and freak out.
One of the bones of contention I have is the sort of general Congress hatred, and the evisceration of the branch. First off, Congress was always hated more than everyone else. However, the Framers did think highly of it. Note that it is Article I of the Constitution. It is the most explicit in its powers. Unfortunately, Congress must be involved in the end with the details of legislation, as it is there job. Even delegating to agencies often requires Congress to act, and sometimes just the action of delegating can lead to the veto point activation.
In the end Yglesias has a fascinating idea of committee appointments for special ad hoc ways of getting legislation through. One concern of course is the matter of who appoints it. If it is leadership, it could serve as favors for a certain set of campaign contributions and whatnot, or seek to bolster weaker members. Furthermore, I doubt that if you appointed an ad hoc Committee to fix up our messed up food system, that somehow you would not have a whole lot of agriculture interests in there. Leadership who appoints also knows who butters their bread, and a lot of those people's votes are needed for them to keep their position.
One day I will talk in greater depth about the weirdness that is the U.S. Senate, but that requires a bit of history. What I just hope to do here is to critique. I am so ingrained in the system I cannot do positive policy. As a weak legal realist, situationist, and critical theorist though, the goal is not always to come to solution, but to critique what is out there, and perhaps douse water on people's flames as a Debbie Downer (wow too many metaphors). Finally, perhaps, in some odd way, this sort of strange dysfunction is what the Framer's themselves intended. And having a whole lot of veto points and preventing large scale change from happening often sucks, but it does give you certainty, and that has huge value.
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