Time's up for the filibuster

Okay, so Democrats won the election big time. Fifty-five U. S. Senators so far and one more from Alaska to go ...

But this victory isn't going to mean anywhere near as much if those elected Democratic Senators aren't willing to end or at least curtail the filibuster. The filibuster is their own house rule that they have to line up 60 votes to pass anything except a restricted menu of items that have to do with budgets and expenditures. And to confirm judges nominated by a President; they do that by simple majority. Republicans aren't going to give the winners any votes, so these elected leaders are going to have to stop handcuffing themselves.

Why don't they just do it? Basically, they are scared? Or have only a tiny vision of what they could accomplish? What if the nasty Reps get back in power and squelch them with 51 votes? Have a little confidence, guys and gals -- if you make it so you can do something, do something for the country that majorities want and sell it vigorously. You will not be rewarded for your timid faithfulness to procedural niceties!

I'm so old that I remember a time when the primary use of the filibuster was to protect legal segregation and repress Black people in southern states. President LBJ crashed through that barrier in 1965 to pass the Civil Rights Act. For the past 20 years, Republicans have leaned on the filibuster to make the passage of any civically useful legislation both compromised and tortuously difficult.

Jamelle Bouie makes the case he has been making for years:

... The current rules of the Senate make productivity impossible. As long as the filibuster exists, Democrats will be bogged down in endless negotiations to try to win the minimum of four votes necessary to invoke cloture. Worse, the 60-vote threshold gives every Democrat leverage over the entire agenda. 

If, for example, John Fetterman does not want to pass a new Voting Rights Act, then a new Voting Rights Act will not get passed. Looking at the Senate landscape, it is hard to see where Democrats would pick up additional support. At no point in the last 20 years have Republicans shown any desire to work with Democrats to pass the party’s priorities.

I have made the case for abolishing the filibuster before. The supermajority requirement for legislation has bogged down and undermined the legislature’s ability to govern, weakening Congress and empowering the presidency and the courts. The filibuster impedes bipartisanship by killing most legislation; why work together when there’s almost no chance that the bill will pass? And Democrats should understand by now that the filibuster does far more to impede their program than it does the Republican agenda, which rests almost entirely on items — tax cuts and judicial confirmations — that can be accomplished with a simple majority vote.

He concludes:

... as Senator-elect James Talarico of Texas said earlier this month, just before the election: “The majority has the right to govern in this country.”

The filibuster makes that impossible in the name of an illusory bipartisanship. And while I understand those Democrats who want to reach across the aisle in good faith, they should know that the most important, transformative political programs in the history of this country have been partisan.

Put differently, the voting public did not vote for bipartisanship; they voted for Democrats to govern as Democrats. The least the next Congress could do is to respect that choice and proceed accordingly.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points out that Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) who is challenging Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for the leadership has indicated he would be open to sensible changes in the filibuster rule. Let 'em compete for who would make sensible modifications that empower majority rule. Marshall likes that:

... The standard argument [against change] is that the filibuster drives compromise. But that’s demonstrably false based on the record of the last quarter century. It creates gridlock. Majorities, even large ones, can’t pass the legislation they promised on the campaign trail. 

But there is a logic to saying that really important legislation shouldn’t barrel through the Senate before the public has gotten a chance to know what’s happening. The best argument for some kind of slow-rolling mechanism is that it gives the minority some time to draw public attention to something the public may not really support.  ...

But after that pause -- just vote, for crying out loud.