Biden’s success depends on end of filibusters
If you wanted to compile a list of the most absurd moments in the history of the U.S. Senate, here’s one for your consideration.
In early 1971, with a Capitol Hill consensus in favor of loosening the Senate’s stringent filibuster rule (which, at the time, required a 2⁄3 vote to stop that parliamentary maneuver), a group of senators launched a filibuster to prevent a vote on the filibuster rule.
You couldn’t have a more perfect demonstration of the Senate’s chronic procedural dysfunction. Reformers who hoped to change an obstructionist rule couldn’t vote on that rule because obstructionists were keeping the issue off the Senate floor.
Seven weeks passed. Four votes to end the filibuster-withina-filibuster all fell short. Finally, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield gave up.
This is the United States Senate. Nothing gets done, no big issues get addressed, and the legislative constipation is sold to us as a virtue. The filibuster, after all, is a tradition, so it mustn’t be tampered with.
Segregation was a tradition in the South for a full century after the Civil War. Did that make it justified?
While we’re contemplating the prospects for the new administration of Joe Biden, we should direct all of our attention to the Senate’s filibuster rule.
Even though Biden’s Democratic Party holds a majority in both houses of Congress, without a change in the filibuster rule, he will be reduced to a signer of executive orders (which can just as quickly be repealed by a successor) and the face of U.S. foreign policy.
For many Republicans, that sounds like a good thing. But the filibuster is an arbitrary weapon that has been wielded by — and against — both major parties. Its loyalty extends only to the cause of gridlock.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump, the Republican who moved out of the White House a week ago, advocated during his presidency for the elimination of the filibuster.
“With the ridiculous Filibuster Rule in the Senate, Republicans need 60 votes to pass legislation, rather than 51,” Trump tweeted on September 15, 2017. “Can’t get votes, END NOW!”
Trump was right. Filibuster defenders will argue that the Senate was devised by our founding fathers as a place where the coffee cup cools; a legislative body where the heated passions of the House give way to careful deliberation.
Even so, our constitutional framers didn’t call for the creation of a Senate filibuster. They viewed the inherent makeup of the Senate — with equal representation for every state — as a sufficient impediment to rash legislative blunders.
“No law or resolution can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people, and then, of a majority of the States,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers.
Notice his emphasis on the word “majority”?
Under the rules of the Senate, a majority is worthless, unless a 60-vote super-majority can overcome a filibuster.
For decades, the filibuster was the tool employed by Southern segregationists to stymie civil rights legislation.
Even in 1964, when thenpresident Lyndon Johnson muscled through the historic Civil Rights Act, he had to overcome a 60-day filibuster to do it.
In 2013, with this country reeling from an elementary school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., national polls showed 90 percent support for tougher background checks on firearms sales.
A solid majority of senators supported a background-check bill, but a filibuster destroyed it.
Adam Jentleson, a former Senate aide whose new book, “Kill Switch,” examines the history of the filibuster, recently told NPR that the episode “was just so, so profoundly misaligned with how we think our government is supposed to operate.”
Up until 1917, the Senate had no mechanism for stopping a filibuster. That year, President Woodrow Wilson successfully prodded the Senate to allow a two-thirds super-majority to shut down a filibuster.
The 1958 midterm elections ushered in 16 new U.S. senators, 13 of whom supported the loosening of the filibuster rule.
Clair Engle, a California Democrat, put it this way: “There is no sense in tying up the Senate body with one set of vocal cords.”
John F. Kennedy, after getting elected to the presidency in 1960, came out in favor of curbing the filibuster.
But nothing happened until 1975, when the Senate lowered the threshold from 2⁄3 to 3⁄5.
In recent years, we’ve seen Democrats eliminate the filibuster for federal court appointments and Republicans do away with it for Supreme Court confirmations.
Given all these changes, how can anyone make a case for the sanctity of the filibuster tradition? Besides, filibusters aren’t even filibusters anymore. One senator simply can submit an email objection and the gears come grinding to a halt.
Biden and his fellow Democrats likely will have a two-year window to achieve substantive legislative change. If they allow themselves to be blocked by a nonsensical procedural rule, they deserve whatever the voters hand them in 2022.