There are good arguments for and against getting rid of the legislative filibuster in the Senate. I’m generally in agreement with Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawai’i, a progressive who opposes the change, saying, “No, we’d turn into the House.” What I am more firmly against is postponing the debate, which is why I really do not like Bernie Sanders’s comments below:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another potential White House contender, gave a nearly 30-minute speech on Thursday touting his plans to tax the wealthy. But he wasn’t quite ready to have a debate on how to pass it in the Senate with 41 senators able to block it: “Very good discussion. But not for today, OK? First of all we’ve got to take back [power]. You’re too far ahead.”
I could not disagree more with this response. The key context of every Democratic promise made by every Democratic contender for the presidential nomination is whether or not they have any realistic plan for actually succeeding. If they don’t, then their promises are so deceiving as to be irresponsibly dishonest.
Some of the senators queried in this Politico article are actually responsive to the question. For example, Elizabeth Warren notes that the Republicans passed a tax cut using budget reconciliation rules, which is one way to get around the filibuster. This can be used for things that directly impact the budget, but it’s not a magic trick for escaping the need to get sixty votes for most substantive legislation.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut isn’t running for president, but his response is almost as bad as Sanders’s.
“I would be shocked if the filibuster sticks around for the entirety of my second term in the Senate,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who was re-elected last year. “It is very hard to figure out how you do a major health care reform without changing the rules.”
Murphy said he’s open to changes to the rules but said his party shouldn’t get ahead of themselves: “We’ll win first and worry about how to get stuff done second.”
You’d think the presidency of Donald Trump would provide a big warning about winning first and figuring out how to govern afterwards. If you go out on the campaign trail and make a bunch of promises that you can’t keep, you’re going to suffer some nasty consequences and the already monumental cynicism and distrust of the electorate will only grow more intense.
It’s not that I think the candidates need to spend a lot of time explaining complicated Senate rules and procedure to the public. What they ought to do instead is to craft their policies realistically, and if their plans are ambitious and likely to run into a legislative filibuster, they need to explain some theory of how they can overcome this. In 2016, Bernie Sanders kept resorting to some vague promise of a revolutionary change of consciousness on the part of the American public. In a way, he’s lucky he didn’t win and have to explain to his supporters why his policies were dead on arrival in Washington DC. Maybe he’d be the one on the verge of declaring a phony national emergency in a desperate effort to keep a core campaign promise. We don’t need 27 candidates competing to outdo each other with a laundry list of progressive reforms that they’ll have no chance of implementing.
If they think they can get these things done with a Democratic House and Senate if they eliminate the legislative filibuster, then they should own that. And they should explain how they’re going to convince the Senate to make the change. Because, it’s not just Republican senators who are opposed to doing away with the filibuster entirely, but also Democrats from every band of the party’s ideological spectrum.
On the left, there are opponents like Mazie Hirono, in the middle skeptics like Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and on the right dissenters like Doug Jones of Alabama and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Maybe enough of them can be convinced to make the change possible, but I highly, highly doubt it.
I think what is more likely to happen, if anything happens at all, is that a new Democratic administration will be stymied in their efforts to do much of anything. They will do what they can through budget reconciliation, just as Obama did to pass health care reform and Trump did to get his tax cuts. And maybe eventually, the Senate Democrats will come around to the conclusion that they have to eliminate the filibuster to address something critical like climate change or gun violence.
It might help if the candidate actually ran on getting rid of the filibuster and explained precisely why this would be a necessary move for implementing their agenda. If they are not willing to advocate for the change then they shouldn’t be making big promises that could never happen without it.
The worst thing to do is to say that you’ll win first and figure this all out later. People are desperately tired of politicians making promises they have no plan to keep.
It has to be eliminated. There’s no option unless another Republican leader takes over and drops McConnell’s scorched earth tactics. Unless people begin coming up with some creative ways to using reconciliation, we have no choice. There is no progressive case for the fillibuster.
We need to get rid of the Filibuster immediately in 2021 or all our children will die in a Global Warming desert. It’s that stark and simple. Almost every month our senior scientists release new climate estimates that boil down essentially to a cry of “Woah! We were way too optimistic about how quickly the oceans are warming up! Our worst case scenarios where human civilization will utterly collapse as our food producing regions turn into giant replicas of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s are looking more and more likely!”
There is currently no chance whatever that the Dems will have more than maybe 51 Senators in 2021, if that, maybe 50. The GOP might even hold onto the Senate which will simply be the end for us.
It will be almost impossible to get really effective global warming policy through the Senate anyway, given the power of money, but a Progressive President with a big popular vote mandate will at least be in a position to try and do something big and have a mandate to accomplish it.
If the Filibuster is in place there is simply ZERO chance that GOP climate deniers will agree to anything and they will have maybe 49, maybe 50 votes. Then we’d need 15 or 16 old white fossils who think Global Warming is a myth invented by Al Gore to force progressive big gummimint policies on their white Christian Conservative base voters.
They are utterly useless and recalcitrant and we just don’t have time to argue with them while they fight a reactionary rear guard action against accepting any real change.
If we don’t break the entire political establishment there is simply no viable future for humanity at all. I wish it weren’t like that but if you read the scientific literature it’s blindingly obvious by now. We’ve screwed around for 20 years now since Al Gore ran on a promise to do something about this problem and we’ve run out of time.
We have maybe 10 or 12 years to FIX the problem or else it will simply be too late. Not debate about what we might do to fix the problem. Fix the problem. Period.
The filibuster needs to go and it needs to go starting in January 2021. And any Democratic candidate for President needs to address this issue before we elect him or her.
To say nothing of other progressive policy proposals.
Hard to argue with this. Everything pales in comparison to Climate Change. And if there is another devastating hurricane in 2019 and/or 2020, maybe the public is ready to hear it.
This is so self-defeating I can’t even. I just tried, but I can’t. Campaign in poetry, govern in prose.
“We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!”
Whoa, whoa, back up there Winnie. ‘Never?’ Realistically, there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll surrender. I mean, if things get bad enough. You don’t want to make people cynical. How about, “we shall strongly prefer not to surrender!”
If a candidate feels targeting the filibuster will open himself/herself to challenges in the primaries and general election, the desire to deal with it later is understandable. The question becomes whether skeptics could then be brought around.
The way I see it there are risks both ways. I don’t want to unnecessarily expose the flanks of our candidates. Winning will be hard enough as is. Just as we abolished the filibuster for cabinet and most judicial appointments, we could do the same down the road. For most voters, it’s incomprehensible anyway. And there’s a great argument to be made at the time that goes: “Hey look, those bastards won’t let us do what we were sent here to do. They’re not playing fair so we have no choice.”
You know what virtually no-one in the country cares about? The minutiae of Senate rules.
The rules are supposed to allow the Senate to function. People care about the policies that might be made law. They want make sure their kids have safe and effective schools, that they can get health care when they fall ill, that they won’t be left penniless in retirement. And they expect their elected leaders to figure out how to accomplish all that.
People don’t care about the details, only the results. The filibuster isn’t written into the constitution. It’s a formality. Senators makes can’t complain about an obstruction when they could simply remove it.
It’s a commonplace to hear that “the people are ahead of the politicians!” I have to wonder where the ordinary schmoe is on something like abolishing the filibuster.
Probably 75% of the population could not explain it or utter a coherent sentence about it. But should its proposed abolition be turned into a “Libs Win!” talking point by Fox & Fools, then one could envision it becoming yet another huge item of hysteria for what is (at bottom and for centuries) a very reactionary society/culture.
Fox and Friends will always incite hysteria. That’s their job. They spent years telling us that Obama was a secret Muslim (and that’s a bad thing!). They told us that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was synonymous with “Kill all Cops”.
We might as well pick our own battles.
I think I’m pretty receptive to the idea that the filibuster is an important weapon that shouldn’t be denied a Dem minority in the future, but I think the degradation of both the political and natural environments puts us in big risk/big reward territory here.
I think there is a pretty simple political calculus that points towards getting rid of it:
Yes, Dem pols need to explain how stuff could get done, but a realistic plan could really motivate people, and this is the time. We dare not be timid.
Not every policy advocated by a politician should be construed as a promise. That’s ridiculous. And I listened to Sanders quite a bit in 2016, and in every rally and interview I can remember, he said “As President, I won’t be able to do any of this without Congress being forced by voters to enact these things.”
And I’ll add that when I look at the policies being advocated by the 2020 Democratic candidates, I have to believe that Sanders has achieved quite a lot, as opposed to a lot of opinions about Sanders I hear.
On topic…it’s hard to see how the Senate survives in its present form when within a few years 30% of voters will be choosing 70 senators. Eliminating the filibuster isn’t going to solve that problem.
Exactly so. Fixing senate rules is like fixing the transmission again on the car with 300k miles on it.
What, if anything, would be a good replacement?
I must be having a nightmare, but, for once, I agree with Orin Hatch, who said in opposing 🚽’s cry to eliminate the filibuster to build the WAH: “It’s what’s prevented our country for decades from sliding toward liberalism.”
The modern filibuster is designed as a tool to obstruct legislation that favors anyone but the rich donating class. Republicans gleefully utilize it to quash progressive legislation at the drafting stage, as do the ‘centrist’ (which just means one who shills for the donating class on every issue) Democrats, who hide behind the threat of a filibuster to immunize them from criticism (and primary challenges) from the Democratic base… “Not my fault. I liked the legislation, but, you know, it needs 60 votes.. hands are tied” (while he/she is high-fiving lobbyists in the back room).
The filibuster renders democracy a farce and has no footing in the Constitution.
The filibuster turns the legislative process into a cryptic sham, where voters have no idea who truly supports what, or how they should vote to achieve their goals… And that is exactly how the donating class wants to keep it!
Yes, there will be some very adverse consequences to eliminating the filibuster. At some point, the Republicans will be able to enshrine into law even their most regressive and fascist wet dreams. But those laws will invariably be VERY unpopular, and the public will actually know whose fault it is when they feel the consequences of such legislation. Then the Republican brand will be trashed and Republicans will lose the next election… When the Dems take power again the filibuster will no longer pose an obstacle to the repeal of such legislation.
On the other side of the token, Dems would not only be enabled to pass legislation that is VERY POPULAR, but also legislation that expands voting rights and makes Election Day a national holiday, thus making it more difficult for Dems to actually lose, and for regressive Republican legislation to be foisted upon the public in the first place.
“No, we’d turn into the House.”
With all due respect to Sen. Hirono, the Senate has been like the House since April 8th, 1913. (I don’t view this as a bad thing; elections help provide accountability to political actors.) If you think that growing population disparity between the state is making the Senate more antidemocratic, congrats! You can eventually follow this logic to abolition of the Senate.
You’d think the presidency of Donald Trump would provide a big warning about winning first and figuring out how to govern afterwards. If you go out on the campaign trail and make a bunch of promises that you can’t keep, you’re going to suffer some nasty consequences and the already monumental cynicism and distrust of the electorate will only grow more intense.
I’m not sure if I agree. One thing that’s clear about the electorate is that they respond to candidates who best represent their values. That’s why base turnout is so important- discouraged voters are worse for a campaign than party-switchers.
Adam L Silverman over at Balloon Juice lays out his view of the 2020 environment. From this perspective, the debates over norm violations are silly because McConnell is willing to break the government to secure his own power. The filibuster was undone for some judges, and then Supreme Court justices. In both cases, the side that broke norms first “won”. The same logic holds true for the legislative filibuster. Republicans don’t believe that the government should be used to help people, and that’s why they prefer the filibuster remains. (It also means that GOP Senators don’t actually have to pass the crazy bullshit that the House Freedom Caucus dreams up.)
I think that’s a key point. Politicians will hawk ideas they personally oppose, because they know someone else will bail them out.
Yes. This is true for Republicans only… The Rep House majority will pass absolutely ludicrous legislation that would devastate their constituents knowing the Senate filibuster will bail them out.. it has the opposite effect with Dems… The Dem House majority will pass excellent legislation that actually would HELP PEOPLE and the `centrist’ Dems in the Senate hide behind the filibuster to let it die, pleasing their owners. Abolish it, already!
That Atlantic article is extremely good. Dingel is right, the problem is baked into our Constitution. Don’t really see any solution other than Civil War, though we definitely have the numbers. We’re coming Kentucky! Can’t wait to pilige Buffalo Trace distillery!
In 2008 Mitch McConnell, fresh off a major loss that left him with 41 Republican Senators, managed to cripple the American recovery effort simply by declaring that nothing would pass.
Legislation would get through the House only to die on the Senate floor. Most people didn’t understand why a party with an overwhelming majority couldn’t govern and the party paid for it with massive losses in 2010.
Support for super-majority requirements like the filibuster assume that all parties are acting in good faith. The Republican party abandoned that years ago – and profited greatly at the expense of the rest of the nation.
I don’t know why you want to sustain the fantasy that the deliberative Senate is somehow superior to the chaotic House. At least in the House you know who to blame for failure.
Nailed it. Wish I could give you a 10! This (and `bipartisan committee’ Obamaism) is exactly why we got destroyed in 2010. And it will happen again and again and again if we don’t eliminate the filibuster…
Marduck apparently believes we can `fix’ the Senate with a Bipartisan commission! Maybe Simpson and Bowles are still available…
Do you need to get schooled again on your fantasy political history?
If it makes you feel big to think you `schooled’ me, have at it, bud! Anyone who was sentient during the first 2 years of Obama’s tenure (Geitner, Bipartisan healthcare committee (whose Rep members extracted concessions/held up the legislation while not one of them voted for the ACA), Simpson/Bowles’ catfood commission) knows exactly what I’m talking about. Your recollection of the Lieberman/Lamont fiasco is cherry picked and intentionally avoids the big picture… The Dem establishment simply did not forcefully oppose Lieberman because he was a member of their caucus. Period. If they did, he would have lost. It’s CT, not AL, and Lamont is now Governor of the State! I won’t accuse you of being a liar like you did to me because I don’t need to stoop to your level… Perhaps you are just misremembering.
Look, Obama is a good man, but he was naive and aloof. I’m not a `Go Team!’ political type. I care about policy and accomplishments. If you judge Obama against this rubrick, he was generally a poor President…. obviously, 8 million times better than McCain or RMoney would have been, but he just didn’t seem to comprehend the political landscape and the implications of Republicans’ seething hatred of anyone not Republican. And, for that, liberals suffered many policy losses during his term and the Democratic Party was decimated at the state level.
Take off your blinders. Obama was a nice guy, but acknowledge his faults or we’ll just wind up replaying the same failures again.
Still lying! Amazing.
If they forcefully opposed him, as you incorrectly claim, why did he remain in the Dem caucus after the election?
Are you serious?
“Hey that independent ended up beating our guy but he says he’s willing to vote with us.”
“No, fuck him! Who needs votes in a Democracy? The last thing we want is the 51st vote in the Senate. The really important thing is to avoid the taint of ever making a single compromise.”
The thing is that there was concern that the party’s history with Lieberman would cause them to support him over Lamont once the primary was over. Everyone who was invested in seeing Liberman ousted was worried about that possibility. But it didn’t happen. The party responded admirably to the voter’s decision. With a few predictable minor exceptions like Ben Nelson & Harold Ford They backed Lamont unreservedly. Lieberman was elected by Connecticut Republicans.
And frankly the fact that you tried to blame Obama for Lieberman’s victory shows quite clearly that you aren’t making any sort of good faith analysis here.
Obama was a Dem superstar after his `04 convention speech and endorsed Lieberman. You are wrong. https:/ctmirror.org/2018/10/01/obama-picked-lieberman-lamont-06-makes-amends
Like many Democrats, Obama supported Lieberman in the Primary.
But like the rest of the party, Obama endorsed Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman in the general election. You embarrassing liar.
Your credibility is shredded. You should go mope in a corner somewhere. Yet you keep digging that hole!
2006 Endorsements, per Ballotpedia:
Lieberman
Democratic U.S. Senators
Tom Carper, Delaware
Mary Landrieu, Louisiana
Ben Nelson, Nebraska
Mark Pryor, Arkansas
Ken Salazar, Colorado
Lamont
Democratic Senators
Daniel Akaka, Hawaii
Evan Bayh, Indiana
Joe Biden, Delaware
Barbara Boxer, California
Robert Byrd, West Virginia
Maria Cantwell, Washington
Hillary Clinton, New York
Mark Dayton, Minnesota
Chris Dodd, Connecticut
Dick Durbin, Illinois
Russ Feingold, Wisconsin
Dianne Feinstein, California
Tom Harkin, Iowa
Daniel Inouye, Hawaii
Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts
John Kerry, Massachusetts
Herb Kohl, Wisconsin
Frank Lautenberg, New Jersey
Patrick Leahy, Vermont
Patty Murray, Washington
Barack Obama, Illinois
Jack Reed, Rhode Island
Harry Reid, Nevada
Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia
Chuck Schumer, New York
Debbie Stabenow, Michigan
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Now go get your shine box.
You can’t publicly oppose someone and switch to endorsing them in a matter of weeks and expect to be taken seriously. But you know this and are just incapable of admitting you were wrong. It’s a real character flaw, you know.
Keep moving those goalposts, buddy.
. . . a false claim as it’s possible for me to imagine!
Of course you can! Happens all. The. Time! How ridiculous does one have to be to be ignorant of that?!
But you compete with yourself for “self-discreditingly ridiculous false claim” when you apply this wrongly to marduk, whereas it’s a perfectly apt description of your, um, “participation” in this exchange (as the noted translocation of goalposts demonstrates):
Indeed. Indeed it is!
And maybe you should stop troll rating me when you can’t get your own facts straight.
You don’t like the ratings, don’t tell lies.
I linked a newspaper article from CT. Keep living in your alternate reality, pal!
The one that says Obama endorsed Lamont in the general? That sure showed me, liar.
The filibuster is yet another aspect of one of those parts of our democracy that hasn’t aged well and needs to be reformed- along with the electoral college, lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court and, oh hell, the Senate itself. The smart Democrats that do want to achieve progressive goals, or probably even just about anything with Mitch McConnell and his ilk in place, I think do realize that the filibuster will have to go.
I do have some sympathy for those that see arguing about it right now as putting the cart before the horse- It is is in no way guaranteed that Democrats will take back the Senate in 2020, and we all know how the press loves to pounce on things like this to show that Democrats are somehow out of touch or unrealistically optimistic about their election prospects. At the same time, there are plenty of Democrats who want to keep the filibuster as a check on not just Trump and his Republicans, but also the progressive wing of the party, and so I agree, having that argument now does help prime the path for effective action if the Democrats do succeed in taking the Senate back. I think really the issue that might force Senator’s hands on this is changing the size of the Supreme court, which depending on the rulings in the next few years, might very well end up being a political necessity if Democrats want to enact any meaningful legislation to actually improve people’s lives that would be counter to the current activist right wing majority on the court.
Sen Hirono needn’t worry that the senate would “become the House” should the filibuster be abolished, since WY and DE will ALWAYS have exactly as many votes as CA and TX, and under our failed constitution that can never be reformed. The senate cannot EVER “become the House”.
So she wants to ensure that an already absurdly anti-democratic institution remain even more anti-democratic than it need be. Great thinking, as the nation and its democracy sink into total non-governance and authoritarianism, as “conservatism” turns to National Trumpalism. And for what, exactly? So that individual senators can continue to command inordinate power over a nation of 330 millions? What is to commend that?
Gravedigger McConnell wrecked his Olde Tyme senate quite deliberately, in order to ensure that a single Dem prez (who won a majority of the popular vote) would have a thoroughly failed presidency. And it was Gravedigger McConnell (not the Dems) who abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, in order to obtain a democratically-illegitimate far right majority for the the next 35+ years. He thought the price was worth paying.
The proper Dem response is to say that after they have rectified all of the historical perversions undertaken by the Gravedigger, such as nullifying the illegitimate Trumper Court and passing all the legislation that McConnell’s filibuster misuse blocked, they would then be willing to go back to the Olde Tyme senate, so long as “conservatives” are willing to allow it to function. But since Repubs broke the Olde Tyme system for “conservative” advantage, Dems have no choice but to break it, too.
All the ill-gotten gains Repubs/conservatives have obtained (both from misuse of the filibuster and its selective abolition) must be swept away before there can be any talk of “returning to norms”; otherwise, we are a party of appalling weakness.
The Repubs are the true Enemies of the People.
against Nancy Pelosi, leave aside Benghazi and Hillary Clinton, why can’t Democrats run against Mitch McConnell?
His popularity in KY is already in the trash bin, and he is deeply unpopular throughout the country – as he really resembles a turtle! All Democratic candidates should make him (and the Orange Baboon) the principle hurdles against progress on all fronts.
Democrats need to see McConnell on the masthead (like Nancy always is), and I think the fraction of the “independent” voters we need to win the White House, and perhaps even the Senate, are not enamoured of the turtle!
The only thing wrong with comparing Mitch McConnell to a turtle is that it is a gratuitous insult to turtles.