The Filibuster Deserves To Die
The filibuster was never supposed to exist and all it has done is erode our democracy.
by Justin Rosario
With Kyrsten Sinema’s announcement that she is not going to help Republicans win a Senate seat in Arizona, the chances of Democrats holding control of the upper chamber of Congress have significantly improved. Combined with the House GOP’s impossible task of maintaining their majority, as well as Donald Trump’s mounting money problems, increasingly erratic behavior, and terrible primary showing, it’s not looking good for Republicans. There is a very real possibility the beginning of 2025 will see Democrats in control of the White House and all of Congress.
Absent Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin’s vote, Democrats will again have the opportunity to kill the filibuster and end over a decade of Republican gridlock. This is freaking people out and the propaganda push to stop them has already begun.
The radical status quo
Jason Willick of the Washington Post popped out an overwrought column lamenting how much trouble the filibuster is in. He describes Manchin as a “pillar of centrism.” That’s a nice way of saying “conservative obstructionist.”
What about Sinema? Her “steadfastness,” according to Willick, saved the filibuster in 2022, protecting the “rights” of the minority. Willick takes a whole paragraph to praise her speech about how the filibuster is a guardrail against extremism. This speech, in Willick’s estimation, is a large part of what ended her career. Well, at least he got one thing right.
Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, is a “partisan warrior” but even he, again, according to Willick, knew better than to eliminate the filibuster under Trump. Because Mitch McConnell is known for respecting the rules and traditions of the Senate. Just ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland.
Missing from all of this praise for the people who have defended the filibuster is…the filibuster itself. When highlighting the significance of the filibuster, the media consistently downplays the relentless abuse of it by Republicans since 2010.
The use of the filibuster had been increasing over the years, but the real abuse was yet to come. It started with a doubling of cloture votes (how one ends a filibuster) when Republicans took over the Senate after the midterms. It has only gotten worse since then as Vox explains:
From 1917 to 1970, the Senate took 49 votes to break filibusters. Total. That is fewer than one each year. Since 2010, it has taken, on average, more than 80 votes each year to end filibusters. And even when those votes succeed, they are not costless: The cloture process consumes more than 30 hours of floor time, which is one reason a strategy of constant filibustering is so appealing to minority parties: The simple act of breaking constant filibusters paralyzes the Senate majority, ensuring they have less time to legislate, and thus can get less done. That’s why filibusters are routinely launched against nominations or bills that ultimately pass unanimously.
For a very brief time, the press had things to say about this unprecedented misuse of the filibuster. And then they just stopped talking about it. It became accepted wisdom that Republicans were playing “hardball” instead of grinding Washington to a standstill. Every bill needing 60 votes to pass was “normal.”
A cynical person might wonder why the press was so on board with this radical disruption to the status quo. After all, contrary to the “liberal media” myth, the press is a very conservative institution that tends to view change in Washington with great disdain. But then a cynical person might point out that the filibuster radically preserves the status quo. And which party does that benefit the most? Hint: Not the party trying to make things better for the average American after four decades of Reaganomics.
Suddenly, the party trying to remove the filibuster and the heretofore unseen obstruction it enabled was out of line. The press was aghast when Democrats bypassed the filibuster to appoint judges, calling it “The Nuclear Option” as if Democrats were the ones blowing up the institutions and norms of the Senate.
Worse, the press started to retcon this new obstructionist paradigm as if it was how the Founding Fathers intended the Senate to be. But it wasn’t. At all. Take a few minutes and read this brief history of why the filibuster even exists in the first place. Surprise! It’s not in the Constitution or a single piece of legislation ever passed anywhere. It’s a self-inflicted wound the Senate has not mended for well over 200 years.
So why is it so threatening and “dangerous” to remove it? Why is the filibuster so necessary now? It’s actually quite simple: Republicans desperately need it to continue existing so they can continue to exist.
The filibuster is vital! (To protecting the Republican Party)
There are several things Democrats would like to do to increase democracy in the United States. Curiously, they would also have the immediate side effect of fatally wounding the Republican Party. Here’s a short list:
Enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Act: This would protect the voting rights of minorities. It would end partisan gerrymandering. It would stop voter roll purges. In other words, it would strip Republicans of most of the weapons they use to rig elections.
Statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico: Both of these state hopefuls are overwhelmingly not Republican. Statehood would give five House seats to Puerto Rico and one to DC. Both would get two Senators apiece. This would seriously dilute the power of the GOP which has a disproportionate number of Senators from sparsely populated red states.
Expand the Supreme Court: The Republicans on the Court have made it clear they have put politics and partisanship ahead of the Constitution. Expanding the Court is the simplest solution to their corruption. Barring that, eliminating the filibuster, adding four Democratic Senators, and removing Republican voter suppression means that within a decade, those corrupt Republicans will be replaced by a Democratic president. Same effect, longer timeline. Still a death sentence for the GOP.
Ending the flow of money into politics: Passing very detailed laws not subject to judicial review to end the abuses unleashed by Citizens United would cripple the Republican Party. Billionaires would lose the ability to almost comically bribe elected officials and foreign money (cough Russian cough) would no longer flow into the coffers of Republicans as easily.
There’s a lot of other stuff like codifying Roe, strengthening unions, implementing some form of universal health care, raising taxes on the rich, and so on that would not directly destroy the Republican Party but it would certainly hasten its demise. There’s a long conversation to be had about why expanding democracy is so toxic to one of the two major political parties but that is for another time.
It should be noted that all of these except for expanding the Court, enjoy wide public support, even among Republican voters. When Sinema (and the press) talk about how ending the filibuster would enable extremism, they are lying.
But what about the flip side of this? Wouldn’t Republicans be able to pass any law they wanted when they’re in charge? Sure. But would they? Well…no. Unless it’s a tax cut, Republicans don’t enact their extremist agenda in Congress.
This is why the argument that Republicans will kill the filibuster is garbage. They’ve had the opportunity to do this more than once and didn’t. Their policies are so unpopular they would legislate themselves out of existence, and they know it. Remember, Senate seats are statewide elections. They cannot be gerrymandered which makes it dangerous to really piss off voters with extremely controversial federal legislation like, for instance, a national abortion ban or privatizing Social Security. Ask George W. Bush and his “mandate” how that went in 2005.
This is the explicit point of the Republican assault on the judicial branch. They don’t have to pass laws if they can rule the country by judicial fiat. And even if unpopular rulings cost them elections, those judges and justices will be in place for decades. All Senate Republicans have to do, even in the minority, is block Democrats from fixing the damage and that requires the filibuster.
McConnell did not preserve the filibuster because he believes in the norms and institutions of the Senate. He saw, accurately, that the historically corrupt and incompetent Trump would probably lose the 2020 election and cost them control of both chambers of Congress. Killing the filibuster would have handed Democrats the knife that would slit the throat of the Republican Party.
So…should Democrats pick that knife up themselves? Absolutely.
The filibuster deserves to die and so does the GOP
The filibuster was never supposed to exist. It was an accident that the Senate didn’t use for decades and once they started, it was still a rarity. Today, it has been weaponized by a party whose only goal is to hold on to power at all costs. Republicans even filibuster bills they agree with and ultimately vote to pass simply to slow everything down and prevent other business from being conducted. Even defenders of the filibuster cannot argue that this how it should be used.
Regardless, the defenders of the filibuster are not arguing in good faith. They never are. Claiming that one side or the other will pass legislation that is “too extreme” is arguing that democracy does not deserve to exist unless it can be kept in perpetual gridlock. If Republicans are legitimately elected on a platform of ending Social Security and Medicare, well, that’s what the people voted for and that’s too goddamn bad. Maybe stop whining about Biden’s age and vote next time.
But that’s not the real threat here. The real threat is what Democrats will do free from interference from the GOP. We’ve already gotten a taste of it. The strongest economic recovery in the world. The largest investment in fighting climate change and a sustainable future in history. An IRS politely knocking on the door of millionaire and billionaire tax cheats and forcing them to pay the hundreds of billions (with a “B”) of dollars they’ve stolen over the years.
This terrifies both the Republican Party that has spent decades carefully crafting the narrative that the government cannot solve America’s problems and a press that has spent just as long blaming both sides for those problems. Problems the press damn well knows that Republicans have inflicted on us by breaking the very same government they tell us doesn’t work.
A Senate free of the filibuster means Republicans will lose their power to perpetually cripple the country and strip it for parts to sell to their billionaire owners. The press, on the other hand, will lose its most valuable resource: The constant circus of Republican corruption and clownery that wins them awards and book deals. Reporting on Democrats fixing roads and bridges and building homes is dull. It’s just not exciting! And certainly not lucrative.
The filibuster deserves to die. It has been holding this country back for years. It has enabled a fascist minority party to hobble progress for truly evil reasons. It has allowed the press to peddle a destructive lie about both sides being responsible for the state of the nation. The filibuster was never supposed to exist and all it has done is erode our democracy. The filibuster and all of the parasites that feed on it have got to go.
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When I read, " Maybe stop whining about Biden’s age and vote next time." I loudly whispered "YES!" and all my office mates perked right up. This article was so invigorating to read, Justin!
“how the filibuster is a guardrail against extremism”
Saw what now? Mr Smith has not gone to Washington in a very long time. Instead of “guardrail against” it should be “tool of”.