This Week Round Table: The Senate Is ‘Gelatinous,’ Dysfunctional

The dust from the shift from hosts Jake Tapper to Christiane Amanpour still settling, today’s This Week panel took on the 14th Amendment and the greater topic of the Senate, and weren’t all that enthusiastic about the use of the upper chamber. While the Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson defended it’s use as a neutralizing body, the New Yorker‘s George Packer argued that today’s Senate is “gelatinous” and makes legislating more difficult.

The panel seemed to agree that the debate over the 14th Amendment was problematic, with the Financial Times‘s Gillian Tett calling it “quick fix soundbite politics” and Gerson, the most sympathetic to the debate in the panel, defended the amendment as an “objective standard instead of a subjective standard” of citizenship which made deciding who qualified for citizenship much simpler. Discussing Republican Senator Lindsey Graham‘s decision to bring up the debate at all then turned the panel to the Senate in its entirely, on which Packer had written in this week’s New Yorker. He called the Senate he found “gelatinous,” making it difficult to get anything passed, and told an anecdote of Republicans filibustering a military funding bill in order to push a different bill past the Christmas break.

Today’s round table via ABC below:

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