Normal people have no reason to understand or appreciate the extraordinary individual and collective self-regard traditionally enjoyed by the Senate. Created by the Founders for the explicit purpose of restraining popular control over policy-making, the upper chamber has forever valued long, windy debates; operated according to arcane rules that limit the prerogatives of the majority; and treated individual senators as though they wear actual togas and defer to no one other than the gods (and occasionally constituents, though six-year terms provide quite a bit of job security). Senators typically look down on their theoretically co-equal House counterparts as grubby lilliputians stampeded through party-line votes by all-powerful leaders and spending every waking hour running for reel

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