As the recent historical record shows, the Democratic Party’s about-face on the filibuster is entirely opportunistic and their claims fact-free.
As the recent historical record shows, the Democratic Party’s about-face on the filibuster is entirely opportunistic and their claims fact-free.
S enate Democrats have declared war on the filibuster, claiming it’s a response to a recent barrage of Republican filibusters. Senator Dick Durbin, who expressed strong support for the filibuster in an ABC interview in 2018, now says that he has abandoned that support because since that time “Senator McConnell . . . managed to use and abuse the filibuster so many times and stopped the Senate in its track.” Senator Dianne Feinstein has threatened that, if “Republicans continue to abuse the filibuster,” she will introduce reforms to weaken it. Getting right into the act, California senator Alex Padilla, newly appointed to the seat formerly held by Kamala Harris, says his colleagues’ “patience” with Republican filibusters “is wearing thin.”
One problem: The last Republican filibuster was back in 2014. The new crisis of soaring Republican filibusters is entirely fabricated. As the Senate majority party, Republicans had no reason to filibuster during the period in question. Where are the media fact-checkers?
In fact, it was the Democrats who filibustered more than 100 Senate bills between 2015 and 2020. They not only exercised their minority right to filibuster but celebrated the act as a vital bulwark of democracy. In 2017, as Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer declared the legislative filibuster “the most important distinction between the Senate and the House.” The following year, in that ABC interview, Durbin said that ending the legislative filibuster “would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our Founding Fathers.” President Biden called a 2012 book defending the filibuster “required reading” for senators.
So what changed? How did the legislative filibuster transform from a central tenet of democracy and minority rights in 2017 and 2018 into an anti-majoritarian, racist relic of Jim Crow in 2021? All it took was Senate control flipping from Republicans to Democrats. That’s it. As soon as the minority became the majority, in January, the Democrats decided that this key minority right is actually bad. And they didn’t even wait for Republicans to filibuster a single bill.
Even by swampy political standards, the shameless hypocrisy is astounding. A party that aggressively attempted to filibuster hundreds of Republican bills secures the majority and immediately seeks to ban the GOP from using that same tool. Nothing else changed in the meantime. What Democrats celebrated as “resistance” is now tarred as “obstructionism” as soon as the shoe is on the other foot.
Yet Democrats are deflecting their hypocrisy with three claims that are demonstrably false.
First, they claim that Republicans began the practice of restricting filibusters. Hogwash. It was then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats who in 2013 killed the filibuster for executive nominations. Senate Democrats also killed the filibuster for most judicial nominations — exempting only Supreme Court nominations. Reid carved out the SCOTUS exception not based on any principle, but simply to wait for the next vacancy and see whether he’d either be filibustering a Republican-nominated justice or banning the filibuster to ram through a Democratic-nominated justice. When the next SCOTUS vote turned out to be for a GOP-appointed nominee, Republicans refused to allow Reid’s partisan double standard on judges and undid his SCOTUS exception.
Now, Democrats are once again the aggressors — taking aim at the most important type of filibuster, the one for legislation. And for all their claims that “Mitch McConnell would do the same thing if given the chance,” Republicans did have the chance to kill the legislative filibuster in 2017 and 2018, when they controlled the Senate along with the White House and House. Instead, Republicans defended Democratic rights to aggressively filibuster key GOP priorities. There is no “both-siding” this.
Second, Democrats claim to have been provoked by the “extreme GOP obstructionism” of the Obama years. This lazy talking point has become such conventional wisdom that few reporters have bothered to inspect its absurdity. Even a cursory examination of the 2011–16 period of divided government reveals a deluge of center-left and center-right compromise laws. Republicans and Democrats teamed up to approve $631 billion in “round two” stimulus provisions, enact a payroll tax holiday, and extend emergency unemployment benefits three times. They enacted the $2.1 trillion Budget Control Act to cut defense and domestic spending. Lawmakers aggressively expanded the child credit, the earned-income tax credit, veterans’ benefits, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits for kids. On education, lawmakers cut interest rates on student loans several times, and replaced the controversial No Child Left Behind Act with the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act. Congress and the president extended the 2001 tax cuts for most but raised taxes on the rich.
During that time lawmakers also averted the bankruptcy of the Social Security Disability Insurance system. They rewrote Washington’s farm, nutrition, and highway programs (and approved additional highway trust-fund bailouts). Bipartisan compromises brought a permanent “doc fix” to prevent huge Medicare cuts, new programs to fight opioid abuse, and the streamlined approval of new drugs and medical devices. Lawmakers spent billions on rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy, loosened discretionary spending caps by $155 billion, and enacted $7 trillion in total appropriations over six years.
And yet this impressive record of bipartisan compromise is completely forgotten by those who fixate on Mitch McConnell’s occasional bragging about blocking a few of the most partisan Obama initiatives. Additional GOP filibusters at the time were invited by Senator Reid’s practice of repeatedly “filling the amendment tree.” This hardball tactic blocks the minority party from offering any amendments to a bill unless they can win a filibuster vote to reopen the debate. Most reporters and pundits simply ignore this inconvenient fact, preferring to parrot Democratic talking points.
As for the hard Left, they dismiss these centrist compromises because their definition of “bipartisanship” is Republicans’ rubber-stamping of the entire progressive agenda while getting nothing in return.
The most common examples of supposed Republican obstructionism are the GOP’s opposition to the 2009 stimulus, Obamacare in 2010, and this year’s stimulus. All three bills represented trillion-dollar expansions of government drafted in private by Democrats, who then rejected virtually every idea presented by Republicans. During the 2009 stimulus debate, Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as reported by Bob Woodward, responded to a modest list of GOP ideas with “We have the votes, f*** ’em.” In the latest stimulus debate, Republicans made counteroffers and expressed a willingness to move further. Democrats responded by cutting off negotiations without having moved an inch.
And yet no one screamed “obstructionism” when Democrats — with equal justification — unanimously opposed partisan GOP bills like the 2017 tax cuts, tighter immigration curbs, and repealing Obamacare.
Everyone remembers the 2011 budget-deal negotiations when President Obama slammed Republicans for conditionally accepting “only” $800 billion in new taxes (he wanted $1.2 trillion). But does anyone remember Obama ceding ground on any major GOP entitlement reforms during those negotiations, such as Medicaid per-capita caps, Medicare premium support, or Social Security reform? Of course not. Compromise for thee, not for me.
The Democrats’ third claim is that they must kill the filibuster because hyperpartisan Republicans have not endorsed major Biden initiatives like $2 trillion in new taxes, at least $2 trillion for climate and infrastructure, or legislation that would fundamentally alter the U.S. election system. But bipartisanship doesn’t mean unilaterally surrendering to the other side’s most partisan initiatives (again, Democrats almost never unilaterally endorse GOP initiatives, either). Nor does it mean slightly watering down far-left proposals. It means a mutual willingness by both parties to negotiate and compromise, to find common ground, with each side enjoying some legitimate policy victories on its priority issues.
If Democrats continue to go behind closed doors and design historic expansions of government with absolutely no Republican input — and then assert that any “good faith” negotiation must begin with the GOP conceding 90 percent of the Democrats’ opening offer — then Republicans will be absolutely justified in filibustering those bills. Just as Democrats have consistently done when the roles were reversed. This is true especially if Democrats also resume filling the amendment tree and banning Republican amendments to bills.
Let’s be honest. Partisanship is a feature of politics, and each side compromises only when necessary. But only one side eliminated the nominations filibuster, began dismantling the judicial filibuster, and now hypocritically seeks to eliminate the legislative filibuster that they had celebrated when they were in the minority. This is not a response to recent GOP filibusters (of which there have been none since 2014) or some mythical obstructionism surge under President Obama. It’s a naked, shameless, dishonest power grab. And, like nuking the judicial filibuster, it’s a move that Democrats will likely regret the next time they lose power.