Sinema predicts Democrats will remove Senate libuster to consolidate power
“I do think that a future Senate will eliminate the filibuster,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema told me during a recent interview – referring to the 60-vote requirement to pass most legislation – “in order to have a short-term political gain.”
Perhaps sooner than later. Former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in a letter this week to the
“Whenn wde New York Times: retake the House, hold the Senate and reelect Joe Biden in 2024, the filibuster must be pulled aside” to pass election-related bills. Some Senate Democrats are also calling for its elimination to pass abortion rights legislation.
Nor is the filibuster necessarily secure in a second Donald Trump presidency if Republicans win a decisive Senate majority this fall. Trump railed against the Senate norm for blocking some of his agenda in 2017 and 2018. Then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) rebuffed him at the time, but a newer crop of GOP senators might be more amenable.
Sinema, 47, once held the fate of the filibuster in her hands. In the 50-50 Senate after the 2020 election, Democrats advanced legislation that would have rewritten state election codes with no Republican support. Sinema supported the legislation, known as the Freedom to Vote Act – but not blowing up the Senate’s traditional protections for the minority party by proceeding on a party-line vote. In January 2022, she gave a forceful defense of the filibuster on the Senate floor. An attempt by Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to invoke the “nuclear option” to advance the legislation was defeated.
As a result of her thwarting Democrats’ hopes, Sinema’s first term in the Senate will be her last. She changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent later that year, but would have been outflanked in Arizona’s 2024 Senate election from the Republican right and Democratic left. Her path to victory closing, Sinema announced in March she would not seek a second term.
In an April interview at her hideaway office in the Capitol, Sinema reflected on the vote that will define her Senate tenure: “There was never a moment in which I wasn’t prepared to do exactly what I did.”
Sinema’s politics have moved from the left to the center over the course of her career. Regarding the filibuster, she has been more consistent than many Democrats. In 2017, with Trump in the White House, 32 Democratic senators signed a letter calling for the Senate to preserve the 60-vote legislative requirement. With Joe Biden in the White House, the Democratic signatories suddenly “changed their minds,” Sinema noted – “all of them,” except for Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who is also leaving the Senate after this year.
The about-face wasn’t “because of any change to the filibuster itself,” Sinema said, but rather “the circumstances of who had power.”
Once Democrats were in charge, the party’s leaders and donors exerted massive pressure on Sinema to change her mind, too. Activists even pursued her into a Capitol Hill restroom in October 2021. If “anyone thought that I would buckle or fold” Sinema told me, they were simply ignoring what she had “been saying for a decade.”
Sinema was serving her first term in the House when the filibuster began to unravel. In November 2013, then-Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) – over apocalyptic warnings from McConnell – eliminated the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for confirming lower-court judges and executive branch officials.
Reid’s goal was to confirm more of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees to the federal bench, “most of whom were, I’m sure, very highly qualified and deserved to be confirmed,” Sinema told me. But that opened the door for Republicans to blow another hole in the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations a few years later. “That is how devolution works,” Sinema said. The Democrats’ curtailment of the filibuster under Obama ultimately facilitated the confirmation of Trump’s nominees.
Sinema believes that if the Senate hadn’t started hacking away at the filibuster for judges, Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned. Now that it has, Democratic senators want to restore abortion rights (which Sinema supports) by hacking away at the filibuster for legislation – a new norm-violation that might not have been necessary if the Senate held to its norms in the first place.
The most sophisticated critics of the filibuster say that it paralyzes Congress, pushing more policymaking fights into the judiciary and undermining confidence in the courts. Sinema turns that argument on its head: The erosion of the filibuster, she told me, has hurt the courts. Maintaining the 60-vote threshold for judicial nominees would have forced judges to win bipartisan buy-in, she said, and “preserved Americans’ beliefs about the independence of our judiciary.”
As for the argument that the Senate can’t pass anything so long as the minority party can block legislation with 41 votes, Sinema ticked off a list of Democratic-led bills from Biden’s first term that cleared the filibuster threshold, many of which she helped craft – on infrastructure (69-30), gun violence (65-33), computer chip manufacturing (64-33) and same-sex marriage (6136). The Senate also passed a bipartisan bill, the Electoral Count Reform Act, to clarify the presidential election certification process in response to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
None achieved change But “getting everything you want right now,” Sinema cautioned, can be self-defeating if guardrails are weakened in the process. For example, if Democrats eliminate the legislative filibuster, a future Republican majority could limit abortion rights nationally. If Democrats had successfully changed election rules nationally with a narrow Senate margin in 2022, Republicans could have done the same.
One puzzling aspect of the progressive hostility toward the filibuster is that many Democrats also believe they face a “structural disadvantage” in the Senate. That’s the notion that because less-populous states such as Wyoming lean conservative, the GOP can win control of the upper chamber with fewer votes. If Democrats are more likely to be a minority in the Senate for structural reasons, shouldn’t they want to hold on to the norms that ensure that senators in the minority have a say?
I put that point to Sinema, expecting her to embrace it. Instead, she rejected the idea of structural disadvantage altogether: “That is the purpose of the Senate,” she said, appealing to the Constitution rather than democracy in the abstract. “The Senate was designed to be a body where all states had an equal voice.” That’s one feature that distinguishes it from the House.
One of Sinema’s fears about eliminating the filibuster is that it would make the Senate more like the House, where “you don’t have to negotiate, you don’t have to compromise,” and “you don’t have to think about the staying power of your legislation.”
She observed that the Senate has features “to slow it down on purpose.” The upper chamber also rewards investing “time to build meaningful relationships with your colleagues based on trust.” Sinema’s view that Republicans can be negotiated with in good faith is part of what has infuriated progressives. She said that when a senator is being obstinate, “it’s usually because that person has a need that is being ignored.”
Yet today, “there are fewer institutionalists in the Senate,” which is one reason Sinema believes the filibuster’s days are numbered. Instead of trying to protect the chamber’s distinctiveness, members want to wring maximum partisan gain from temporary stints in the majority.
The model of the Senate as a deliberative body standing apart from political passions is hard to sustain in an age of rising populism and declining trust in institutions. Sinema knows that, and thinks American politics “will probably get a little worse” before it gets better.
I suggested that some partisans think that the only way to make politics better is to finally get a majority that enables them to eliminate their opposition. “You’re joking a little bit,” she replied, “but not really,” adding: “I hope that members of both political parties overcome that temptation.”