BTW, Senator Graham is right more often than he's wrong.... ....something that cannot be said about Senator Reid. The
real problem with the Senate, particularly with senators that have served for a very long time, is that they begin to transfer their allegiances toward the senate in the name of "collegiality," and away from their constituencies. This is largely true for both parties.
I was in a discussion just yesterday with a business acquaintance who happens to be a liberal democrat. It was a respectful discussion, but there is no doubt that we disagreed. Here is what we disagreed about, and I will try to represent his side as fairly as I can:
I made the point that, like it or not, it was Tea Party
sentiments (not necessarily actual membership in any local group) on the part of a majority of voters in the 2010 cycle that resulted in a significant majority in the House of Representatives for conservatives. Like it or not, that means that a majority of voters sent the majority of those elected officials to Washington DC to effect significant changes in the economic policies currently in place, and to significantly cut back the size of government and its intrusions into our lives. You are certainly free to disagree, but when you are in the significant minority and your views have been marginalized by a large majority of voters, then that majority is no longer extremist.
You are. The "sense of the people" at this point is that Tea Party values in economic policy are the right way to go.
So when Harry Reid stands up and says that Speaker John Boehner is in thrall to extremists in the party, then he is necessarily calling all of the millions upon millions of voters who elected representation that is sympathetic to Tea Party values a bunch of extremists. He then goes on to admit that it is
ideology, and not numbers which is causing the impasse, and he
specifically names abortion as an example—without saying that it
isn't abortion per se that is keeping them apart, but rather the conservative insistance that taxpayers shouldn't be required to fund it that is the
real impasse. Why does he do that? Because he knows that on a
national level, taxpayers
don't support the idea of federal funding for abortion. Now, I don't want to start an argument on whether or not abortion is moral. But, the fact remains that while a majority of voters continue to support its
legality, it is also true that a majority of voters don't want to have to
pay for federally funded abortions because on an
individual and personal level, they are troubled by the moral implications. Calling that majority of the people "extremist" is divisive, insulting, and it serves no purpose toward solving the government's fiscal crisis, and dragging the abortion issue into the debate at this moment is a cynical tactic to redirect the argument more than it is an actual point to address of the spending issue at large. Harry Reid should be ashamed of himself; and he
would be if he didn't have the moral sense of a turnip.
OK, now, the other guy I was talking to, the liberal, admitted the point that calling the majority of voters extremists was an incorrect action.... ....and then went on to
support it by arguing that the purpose of the senate was to dampen the extremist tendencies of popular opinion—a classic "black
is white, if you look at it hard enough" kind of argument.
I pointed out to him the fallacy of that in actual practice. I don't vote for a senatorial candidate because I want him to offset the enthusiasm for a platform showed by the
representatives that I vote for. That's idiotic. I vote for the senatorial candidate that comes closest to supporting the same agenda supported by the candidates for representative that I vote for. If any democrat (or libertarian or republican or malthusian or anarchist) tells you any different,
they are lying! They simply don't want to admit the truth because it isn't convenient to their argument. So, when a sitting senator acts to "dampen" the support of his state's constituents back home for a particular viewpoint, then he is no longer acting in
their interest, he is acting in some kind of fictitious
national interest which only he (and his buddies in the Senate smoking room) get to define. That is when it is time for that person to be gone from office.
The
true purpose of the Senate isn't to protect the nation from the House of Representatives. The
true purpose of the senate is to protect the interests of states with smaller populations from the competing interests of states with larger populations. When seen from
that, more
truthful point of view, then the need for a sitting senator to closely hew to the interests of
his state's voters, and not to cave in to the competing interests of another state's voters. And when viewed that way, then there is no room for
any kind of collegiality which interferes with that more noble (and constitutional) purpose.
In the interest of harmony and because this was a business networking meeting, not a political rally, I didn't ask this gentleman (and he
was a gentleman, I'll give him that and gladly have a beer with him) if he felt the same way when republicans held the majority in the senate and democrats in the judiciary committee did all they could to hold up judicial nominations during George W. Bush's presidency, quite successfully, I might add. There is no limit to hypocrisy in politics.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
"Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many." --James Madison, Federalist No. 62, 1788
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." --James Wilson, Of the Study of Law in the United States, 1790
(I would argue the same standard for interpretation of the Constitution.)
"It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated." --James Madison, Speech at the Virginia Convention, 1829
"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them." --Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
How far have we strayed from these thing? Sometimes, I lose hope for this nation because the steady trend has been away from these kinds of first principles. We haven't seen anything like a return to first principles since then. Not really, and not lasting. And yet it is those first principles which made us a prosperous nation. And as we squander our principles, so goes our prosperity.
(I can't complain, I run a website much bigger than this one and my stuff seems to have an endless list of "need to fix" items 
)