The U.S. Senate has been called “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Over it’s history, it has conducted long, in-depth debates over complex and tumultuous issues.

Indeed, that’s just what the Founders intended. In setting Senate terms at six years, James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution wanted to create a legislative body that would be generally unaffected by the popular whims of the moment. They reasoned — correctly — that the House of Representatives would be more responsive owing to its members being compelling to stand election more frequently.

But the days of the great and thoughtful debates between men like Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun are long behind us, and the Senate of today seems to most closely resemble a daily playground fight.

This week, eminent columnist Bob Novak, who has been covering the Senate since the Kennedy presidency, turned his attention to Majority Leader Harry Reid’s use of a previously arcane procedure known as “Filling the Tree” to stymie debate. Novak could have selected a dozen other such tactics, the threat of which in years past would have forced Senators to find another solution, lest they demonstrate in public a terrible breakdown of the Senate’s historic comity.

For while the Senate has been the home of great debate, it has also been the birthplace of great compromise (like this one, for example). Senators in ages past used to forge deep friendships with one another that transcended partisan labels. When all else failed, there were always a few who could sit down quietly and look for a solution to a thorny problem.

But today’s Senators, surrounded as they are by all-too-often sycophantic staffers, lobbyists and donors, don’t have the incentive to form those relationships. Meanwhile, the pursuit of media appearances and campaign funds has dramatically limited the amount of social time that members spend with one another.

The result? A breakdown of dialogue, both official and unofficial. Leaders on both sides use the Senate’s rules to score political points rather than finding ways to shape important legislation.

But the worst part, as Novak observes, is that the rest of us are either too apathetic or too ill-information to care. Behavior that would have sparked outrage in the past barely registers a footnote in most daily newspapers.

It strikes me that this is an area where we bloggers could really help. To be sure, most bloggers are strong partisans, but surely we can hold our own party leaders to account when they behave in a way that disgraces the institution in which they serve. Because — and let’s be honest here — if the Senate is in a death spiral, as James says, there is more than enough blame to go around.