San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Feinstein versus the filibuster
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has entered the denouement of a storied political career whether she likes it or not. Nearly three decades after she was first elected to the Senate, she has relinquished her leadership of the powerful Judiciary Committee and endured critical dissections of her capacity to serve. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom had to walk back an awkwardly eager statement about appointing Feinstein’s successor even though she has expressed no intention of resigning.
Feinstein’s work isn’t finished, though. Before she leaves the Senate, she has to help fix it. And there’s no fixing the Senate — or the country — without nixing the filibuster.
Though Feinstein expressed support for the filibuster as recently as last fall, she said she was open to reform in a statement Friday that signaled a welcome and wise shift. The tradition’s staunchest Democratic defenders have been West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, but several other members of the caucus have expressed at least some misguided attachment to the convention.
Feinstein, the Senate’s oldest member and one of its most conservative Democrats despite California’s increasingly left lean, embodies the centrism and bipartisanship that the modern, filibusterdriven Senate only pretends to represent. By joining the enlightened movement to rid the body of the reactionary rule, she can do much to strip it of its false veneer of respectability while performing one of her greater services yet to the institution and the country.
Because the current form of the filibuster allows 40 senators to block most bills, the popular mandate that elected a Democratic president and Congress will be powerless to pass legislation that does not have the support of 10 Republican senators. And let’s recall that Senate Republicans could not even produce 10 votes to convict former President Donald Trump of siccing a murderous mob on their own workplace.
That means that the Senate will be the graveyard of a litany of policies that, besides being sensible, enjoy majority support in Congress and overwhelming popularity among voters, including investing in the nation’s infrastructure, raising the federal minimum wage, reforming immigration, requiring universal background checks for firearm purchases and addressing climate change.
But the most pivotal bill to fall to the filibuster would be HR1, an omnibus of election, redistricting and campaign finance standards and reforms that is the chief hope for countering a crush of statelevel efforts to suppress and disenfranchise voters. Democrats may not have many chances to stop the antidemocratic momentum that could expel them and the people they represent from power regardless of popular will. No wonder even longtime filibuster defenders such as Feinstein, Manchin and President Biden have begun to soften their positions.
The minority of voters represented by Republicans already enjoys disproportionate representation through the Electoral College, gerrymandered House districts and particularly the Senate. The 50 Democratic senators currently in office represent more than 40 million more Americans than the 50 Republican incumbents. Those defending the filibuster are effectively arguing that these builtin Republican advantages aren’t enough — that the underrepresented Democrats still shouldn’t be able to make policy without substantial support from the overrepresented Republicans.
Nor is it an anomaly that the filibuster is furthering the goals of today’s reactionaries. Originally devised by protoConfederate John C. Calhoun, the rule is rooted in efforts to protect slavery and later segregation.
Even if the custom could somehow be separated from its historical and current consequences, the filibuster would remain fundamentally indefensible. A series of revisions has divorced the procedure from the original requirement that the minority engage in debate, changed the number of votes required to end the debate, and made exemptions for executive appointments, judicial nominations and legislation deemed budgetrelated — which, according to just a couple of perplexing recent rulings by the Senate parliamentarian, includes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but not raising the minimum wage.
Feinstein is right to help consign the filibuster to history for the sake of the institution and the country to which she has devoted so much of her life.