Even Biden losing faith in filibuster
No one in Washington disputes Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell’s cleverness, his understanding of Senate rules or his skill at tying Democrats in political and procedural knots.
But this time, the Kentucky Republican’s cleverness may have caught up with him. By risking economic havoc in refusing to give Democrats a clean chance to suspend the debt ceiling, Mcconnell may destroy the very arrangements that have afforded him so much power.
Until this week, Mcconnell could count on President Joe Biden’s affection for Senate traditions to keep in place a filibuster that vastly enhances the minority party’s power by requiring 60 votes to pass most measures, and not the simple majority our Constitution’s authors envisioned.
As long as Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, opposed filibuster reform, there was little chance that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — the adjudicators of just about everything in today’s 50-50 Senate — would reconsider their embrace of it.
But late Tuesday, Biden met Mcconnell’s hard ball with some hard ball of his own. Asked by a reporter if Democrats should consider altering the filibuster rules to get a debt-ceiling vote through, the president replied: “Oh, I think that’s a real possibility.”
Bang! With seven words, Biden brought home the profound irrationality of our current governing system.
It’s not just that the debt ceiling is a useless relic of the debates around the financing of World War I. It’s also that the filibuster of old has been transformed through abuse into a barrier to normal governing.
Just look at the numbers. From 1917 through 1970 (53 years), there were only 58 cloture motions to shut off filibusters. From 1971 to 2006 (35 years), there were 928 cloture motions. From 2007 to now (14 years), there have been 1,410 cloture motions.
Today’s filibuster is far removed from Senate “traditions.” Manchin and Sinema want to restore some comity to the Senate. Good idea, and changing the filibuster rules is the right path to that end.
By Wednesday, Mcconnell seemed to feel the heat. To take pressure off his caucus, he offered Democrats a path to raise the debt ceiling temporarily into December. Senate Democrats saw the move as Mcconnell
blinking.
Right now, Senate rules are a bizarre hodge-podge. A simple majority is OK for judicial and executive appointments and for certain kinds of spending bills — like the “reconciliation” package that contains much of Biden’s social and climate program. But the need for repeated requests for rulings from the Senate parliamentarian as to what is and is not possible under reconciliation procedures shows how Senate practices have been reduced to a barely comprehensible form of abstract expressionism.
If I had my druthers, I’d get rid of the filibuster altogether. But at the least, it should be pared back to make it, at worst, a highly unusual impediment to action.
And it must be set aside altogether for certain emergencies that include not only the debt ceiling but also the need to keep our democracy from crumbling.
If Mcconnell has been engaged in procedural radicalism in the Senate, an even more dangerous radicalism is visible in the voter suppression and election subversion laws being enacted in an increasing number of Republican-led states.
Since defending free elections is as important as preventing economic chaos, the filibuster should not be allowed to inhibit national action that’s required to preserve democratic rules and norms. That’s why it must be lifted to enact the Freedom to Vote Act, voting rights legislation crafted to Manchin’s specifications.
And let’s be clear about what has been going on with the debt ceiling. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., his party aren’t seeking a single Republican vote to raise or suspend it. They have been asking Republicans simply to let Democrats do it themselves and take all the political heat.
As Washington Post congressional correspondent Tony Romm wrote: “GOP lawmakers could simply stand aside, refrain from a filibuster and allow Democrats to address the debt ceiling entirely on their own.”
That’s what Mcconnell has been refusing to do.
Biden’s firmness clearly forced Mcconnell to engage in a tactical retreat. But this doesn’t solve the problem. And it doesn’t disguise what the Republican leader has dramatically revealed: that the Senate’s current rule book privileges obstruction over achievement.
The long-reluctant president has acknowledged that there are better ways for the Senate to do business. It now falls to Manchin and Sinema to face the same reality.