We have always heard the Senate is an exclusive club and the world’s most deliberative body. Our founders pictured the House of Representatives as a cup of hot tea, while the Senate was the saucer to cool that tea.

That was then. This is now:

Arlen Specter is a senior United States senator who expects to be allowed his say on the Senate floor. So he bristled when Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, brusquely cut him off at the end of the Iraq debate.

“The leadership is setting a dictatorial tone,” Mr. Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Thursday, still furious over his treatment the day before. “Senators didn’t get here to be pushed around.”

It may seem small-minded to bicker over a few words at the end of a 24-hour debate. But the clash between the two veteran senators is evidence of a larger breakdown in relations in the Senate, a deterioration in cooperation that is hobbling the Senate’s ability to get things done. The situation is not likely to improve with a presidential election on the horizon.

To read the full exchange and background on Specter’s remarks go to the Las Vegas Review/Journal.

Some have argued that the problem is caused by having a 51-49 Senate, but we have had close Senates before and we have not seen the lack of comity that we are now seeing.

“The last vestiges of courtesy seem to be going out the window,” said Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who has served as majority and minority leader. “Every time I think the Senate — Republican or Democrat — has gone to a point where you can’t go any lower, we go lower.”

It is hardly startling that members of the two parties do not see eye to eye. And the spirit of bipartisanship in the Senate always rises and falls depending on the subject and the election calendar. But seven months into the new Democratic regime, the environment seems unusually hostile. Occasionally, senators do, too, as exhibited in a Sunday television exchange between Senators Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that looked for a moment as if it might turn physical as the two men argued about the war in Iraq.

It’s sad for me, as an American citizen raised to love her country and respect its institutions of government, to see what this Senate has become.

It’s sadder yet that I make the comment that I would not be surprised to see the Senators come to fisticuffs the way we see it happen in the Japanese legislature and other countries in the world.

This is not the America I want. I want a government I can be proud of—a government that can work together as co-equal branches. Party affiliation should not matter.

What do you want? Bickering for sport or meaningful legislation that is passed regardless of political agendas for the good of the country?