Hooahguy might appreciate this article, or maybe you already know all of this. Even after reading it (twice), my head still spins over the convoluted way we do democracy here in the US:
https://www.vox.com/21424582/filibus...-abolish-trump
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If Joe Biden wins the White House, and Democrats take back the Senate, there is one decision that will loom over every other. It is a question that dominated no debates and received only glancing discussion across the campaign, and yet it is the master choice that will either unlock their agenda or ensure they fail to deliver on their promises.
That decision? Whether the requirement for passing a bill through the Senate should be 60 votes or 51 votes. Whether, in other words, to eliminate the modern filibuster, and make governance possible again.
Virtually everything Democrats have sworn to do — honoring John Lewis’s legacy by strengthening the right to vote, preserving the climate for future generations by decarbonizing America, ensuring no gun is sold without a background check, raising the minimum wage, implementing universal pre-K, ending dark money in politics, guaranteeing paid family leave, offering statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reinvigorating unions, passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — hinges on this question.
If Democrats decide — and it is crucial to say that it would be a decision, a choice — to leave the 60-vote threshold in place, that entire agenda, and far more beyond it, is dead. All those primary debates, all those grand ideas on Joe Biden’s “vision” page, all those mailers and press releases and speeches and vows, will be revealed as promises they never meant to keep. All it takes to eliminate the filibuster, and to unlock that agenda, is 51 votes. All it takes to annihilate that agenda’s barest hope of passage is to do nothing. And doing nothing is always the easiest choice for politicians to make.
The arguments for and against eliminating the filibuster:
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The founders envisioned a system of checks and balances, of pluralistic competition and deliberative government. That system had, and has, nothing to do with the filibuster. If anything, it is imbalanced by the filibuster: When Congress can’t pass laws, pressure mounts for the president to stretch executive authorities, as happened after the DREAM Act failed despite receiving 59 votes in the Senate, pushing President Obama to do through executive action what the filibuster prevented Congress from doing through legislation. Similarly, the Supreme Court grows in power as Congress gridlocks, in part because it becomes impossible for Congress to alter provisions of bills that fall to constitutional challenge, and in part because the paralysis of the legislative branch pushes movements to try and achieve their goals through the courts.
This is the historical truth of the filibuster: It is a weapon wielded by the racial majority against racial minorities, cloaked in the rhetoric of protecting minority rights.
[...] the US Senate is “the most powerful force for structural racism in American life.” The Senate grants unusual power to small states, and small states tend to be whiter than big states. In the New York Times, David Leonhardt calculated how many senators each racial group gets per million people. White Americans — the racial majority — get 0.35 senators per million people; Black Americans have 0.26; Asian Americans are right alongside them, with 0.25; and Hispanics are last in senatorial power and representation, with 0.19.
It is a woeful abuse of history to claim the filibuster protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. As a weapon of the status quo, the filibuster is wielded by those who’ve already secured political representation and power, and so is often a tool the powerful use to protect their existing privileges. That the filibuster’s defenders cloak themselves in the glittering language of minority rights even as they’re using the filibuster to deny minorities rights is one of America’s more grotesque rhetorical inversions.
At the core of the debate over the filibuster, then, is this simple truth: Members of both parties prefer the problems of paralysis to those of governance. They are more eager to block the other party from governing than they are committed to governing themselves. Or, to put it even more directly, given the choice between keeping the promises they made to the American people and sabotaging their opponents’ ability to keep their promises, they choose the latter.
What is possible vs what is:
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What we are facing, then, is a trade-off: Should we prefer a system in which parties can, occasionally, govern, or a system in which they can’t?
Answering this question requires ridding ourselves of the cramped psychology of the Senate and prizing, instead, the vantage point of the voter. How, from a voter’s perspective, is American politics supposed to work? In theory, something like this: Parties propose agendas during elections. Voters choose the agenda — and thus the party — they like most. The newly elected party passes a substantial portion of their agenda into law. Voters judge the results and choose whether to return that party to power in the next election or give the opposition a turn at the wheel.
This is, of course, not how American politics works. Even in the absence of the filibuster, the American political system is thick with veto points and clashing institutions. It is also deeply undemocratic, with Republicans currently holding the White House and Senate despite winning fewer votes in the relevant elections. And then, layered atop all that, is the filibuster, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority requirement.
As a result, the feedback loop of American politics is fundamentally broken. Parties propose agendas during elections. Voter choose the agenda — and thus the party — they like most. That party may or may not win power, depending on the vicissitudes of gerrymandering, geography, and the Electoral College. Even if the voters’ chosen party does win power, it can’t enact the agenda it has promised, as it is almost impossible to win 60 Senate seats, and otherwise, the filibuster blocks most of what parties promise to do. As a result, rather than judging the results of the agenda they voted for, voters are left assessing why so little has happened, and trying to understand who is to blame for their problems going unsolved.
The removal of the filibuster will also have a disciplining effect on politicians themselves, who now have the luxury of promising voters all kinds of policies they know can never pass. In his comments above, Barrasso threatened Democrats with the anti-abortion bills Senate Republicans push routinely now, knowing they will die in the Senate. But does the Republican Party want to stand behind that agenda, knowing it might actually pass, and voters might actually see and judge them on the results? How differently would politicians act if they couldn’t use the filibuster as an excuse for disappointing their base?
“It changes the dynamics when people are playing with live ammunition,” says Eli Zupnick, a former Senate staffer who’s now spokesperson for Fix Our Senate, a coalition of progressive groups pushing to abolish the filibuster. “In 2017, McConnell knew that without the filibuster, they’d have to pass things that would be politically catastrophic for Republicans. Instead, he was able to say, ‘Democrats didn’t let us pass this.’”
An important note on Biden's past view of the filibuster:
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In 2005, in a speech condemning the Republican majority’s threat to extinguish the filibuster against judicial nominees, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said, “At its core, the filibuster is not about stopping a nominee or a bill, it is about compromise and moderation. … It does not mean I get my way. It means you may have to compromise. You may have to see my side of the argument. That is what it is about, engendering compromise and moderation.”
There is, as Jonathan Chait has written, an obvious answer to this argument. “The simplest rebuttal to this claim is look around you. Do you see a lot of legislative compromise?” There are more filibusters than ever, and more partisan gridlock than ever.
But this argument is dominant enough that it’s worth unpacking precisely what in the logic is flawed — because it is both subtle and important. The theory is straightforward: A 60-vote threshold in a Senate means that the majority will always have to win over members of the minority to pass legislation. The filibuster therefore gives the majority party an incentive to win over members of the minority. That is, it gives them an incentive to moderate and compromise, just as Biden said.
This idea is dominant because, crucially, it’s half right. If you look across the Obama era, for instance, Democrats were desperate to find Republicans who would vote with them on health care, stimulus, or anything else. What it gets wrong is assuming that the majority party is the key actor here. The implicit logic, stated transparently, is this: If the majority party is willing to compromise, the minority party will be eager to compromise. It’s there that the logic falls apart, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proved to such devastating effect across Barack Obama’s presidency.
What McConnell understood was simple and obvious: The party in power will get electoral credit for bills passed with big, bipartisan majorities. But by the same token, the party in power will get the blame if Congress is paralyzed, if bills die amid partisan bickering, if the problems of the nation go unsolved. Compromise isn’t a gift the majority offers to the minority. It’s a boon the minority offers to the majority.
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After the Civil War, Republicans were the dominant party for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats were the dominant party for decades. Our current era of seesawing power is the historical aberration, and as political scientist Frances Lee argues in her book Insecure Majorities, it has reshaped Congress and made bipartisan compromise nearly impossible.
Lee’s argument is that close competition, where “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” breeds all-out partisan combat. When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s the only realistic shot at wielding power. Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents. In the modern era, neither party is perpetually dominant, and the minority’s best shot at wielding power is to ensure the majority fails to govern effectively. That makes bipartisanship effectively irrational.
And I had no idea about this:
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The budget reconciliation process was created in 1974 as a way to expedite the completion of appropriations bills. It’s a fast-track that avoids not just the filibuster but a normal amendment process and a normal committee process. It can only be used for one legislative package a year, and it includes a host of restrictions: Every provision that goes through budget reconciliation needs to certified by the parliamentarian as primarily related to taxing and spending, it can’t increase the budget deficit in its 11th year, and it can’t make any change at all to Social Security.
In recent decades, senators from both parties have abused the budget reconciliation process to pass legislation they knew would otherwise fall to a filibuster. First, note the illogic of that: They are unwilling to get rid of the filibuster, but they are willing to avoid it by mangling another Senate procedure instead. Worse, because the budget reconciliation process in not meant for normal legislating, only certain kinds of initiatives can fit within it, and even they end up battered and bruised.
Worse, both parties find themselves reaching for tax-and-spend solution when regulations would work better, because you can’t pass most regulations through reconciliation. You could easily pass, say, a carbon tax through budget reconciliation. But you couldn’t pass a renewable energy standard that reshaped private behavior, or new regulations on building materials and automobile construction, even if those would be more effective, or cheaper. Bills that go through budget reconciliation are worse bills, because they are written without the full range of tools and flexibility normally allowed to legislators.
Budget reconciliation also warps the priorities of the two parties. It creates an incentive to prioritize bills that can be crammed into the budget reconciliation process, and to neglect priorities that cannot. You can, for instance, pass a Medicaid expansion, or a tax cut, through budget reconciliation. You cannot pass a voting rights bill, or a gun control law, or a serious climate change package, or abortion restrictions. Parties sensibly focus on what they can pass rather than what they can’t, and so the agenda is endlessly tilted toward the narrow set of issues that can be coaxed into budget reconciliation.
This, then, is the bizarre equilibrium the Senate has settled into. The filibuster has broken the normal legislating process. But rather than fix the filibuster, both parties have broken another Senate rule so they can pass a worse version of a limited subset of bills on a fraction of the issues that face the country. Either the filibuster is a worthy rule that the Senate should honor or it isn’t, and it should be abolished or reformed. But the status quo they’ve instead settled into, where senators don’t have to make the hard decisions about the future of their institution and the American people pay the price through badly written legislation and a vast range of neglected problems, is indefensible.
Probably the point that scares the Dems:
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A 2019 Data for Progress analysis by Colin McAuliffe found that the Senate has a 3 percentage point tilt toward Republican candidates. In an electorate as closely divided as America’s, that’s a powerful advantage. “The 1.5-percent penalty in the Electoral College was enough to elect the popular vote loser in 2016, but the penalty in the Senate was twice as large,” writes McAuliffe. A more recent FiveThirtyEight analysis pegged the bias at a startling 6 to 7 points.
Behind the tilt is the Senate’s over-representation of small states — small states tend to be whiter and more rural than big states, with fewer immigrants and more Republicans. In this way, the Senate doesn’t just favor Republicans but also pushes the GOP toward being a more ethnonationalist party, as it gives them a path to political power in which white votes are over-represented and immigrants are underrepresented.
So it is true that the Senate tilts Republican, but it is also true that if they eliminated the filibuster, Democrats could try to fight for the democracy they claim to believe in. They may lose that fight, but they should look around: They are losing that fight now, and the surest way to lose it in the future, too, is to refuse to actually fight back.
The final argument:
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In 2014, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech titled “Restoring the Senate.” In it, he leveled a blistering critique at the degraded state of the institution in which he served, and explained how, if he won back the gavel, he’d lead the Senate back to greatness.
“Without some meaningful buy-in, you guarantee a food fight,” McConnell said. “You guarantee instability and strife. It may very well have been the case that on Obamacare, the will of the country was not to pass the bill at all. That’s what I would have concluded if Republicans couldn’t get a single Democrat to vote for legislation of this magnitude. I’d have thought, maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”
But just because McConnell is a hypocrite doesn’t make him wrong. In a country this polarized, perhaps he’s right: if you can’t secure bipartisan support, maybe you shouldn’t move forward.
The logic is appealing because it inverts the basic case against the filibuster even as it accepts most of its premises. Yes, the filibuster paralyzes governance and leaves terrible environmental, social, political, and economic problems to fester. But in a bitterly divided polity, that’s a feature, not a bug. If we can’t agree on what to do, maybe it’s better we do nothing than do things that half the country will oppose, or that will just be undone when the other party takes power in a few years.
The filibuster, in other words, traps us in the most polarizing and disagreeable phase of legislating: the partisan conflict phase. Ideas emerge, they become polarizing by virtue of being jammed into a zero-sum political system, and then they typically fail. The public experiences endless conflict but rarely sees its problems solved, or its material interests improved. If the two parties could legislate more effectively, more proposals would pass into the judgment phase, and either rise in popularity as they worked to better people’s lives or fall into disrepute as they proved themselves to be failures.
I don’t believe that reform or elimination of the filibuster will solve all the problems that face America, or even reliably lead to outcomes I support. There is no utopia on offer, no end to our disagreements and debates and disappointments. While a 51-vote Senate would have a better shot at solving the problems that bedevil the country, it will not solve them all, and it may make some worse.
Sorry for the long-winded post, but my copy/paste Cliff Notes are only a small part of the entire article:creep:
