Right now, only a few Democrats stand between preserving norms and destroying them. Let’s hope they don’t fold.
Right now, only a few Democrats stand between preserving norms and destroying them. Let’s hope they don’t fold.
I t’s always the same these days. With every political setback, Democrats blame the system. Now, with the increasingly fragile state of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, they’re at it again.
“The Senate right now is a very radical, dangerous experiment, and those who refuse to change course would never have designed it this way from scratch,” contends New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, linking to piece in which he argues that our republican form of government is a “Dadaist Nightmare” (and he says it like it’s a bad thing). “No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way,” Klein claims.
Au contraire, the Senate — with a little help from Klein’s main target, the filibuster — is working exactly as designed. By stopping a slim, fleeting majority from instituting wide-ranging, generational policies that half the country doesn’t want, the filibuster is one of the few tools preserving (what’s left of) enumerated powers and federalism.
This new round of progressive anger at the system was sparked by Kyrsten Sinema, who informed President Joe Biden that she wouldn’t consider the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion plan if the House doesn’t pass the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill by September 27. That latter bill, of course, debunks Klein’s contention that the Senate is incapacitated or incapable of passing bills with the filibuster in place. It’s just not passing the bill he desires.
Both Joe Manchin and Sinema, says Klein, “have pledged their undying fealty to the filibuster.” This, I suppose, is preferable to an undying fealty to partisan power. But the duo has, to this point, consistently supported a norm that’s been in use, in different iterations, since the 1830s. Until very recently, in fact, most Democrats — Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Chuck Schumer included — have championed the filibuster as a crucial tool in preserving the deliberative nature of the Senate. And those 30 Democrat senators who signed a letter pledging undying fealty to the filibuster in 2017 made as good a case as any to save it.
The filibuster is especially important in an era of polarized politics when a consensus often is impossible to reach. The healthy organic state of a divided nation with a widening ideological split is gridlock. What’s “dysfunctional” is allowing one side to lord it over the other. Our legislative body was specifically designed to avoid such things.
Indeed, there is nothing radical about a filibuster in the Western governing tradition. It certainly isn’t abnormal for a senator from a conservative state such as West Virginia to back long-standing — politically neutral — institutions. It would, on the other hand, be quite odd for him to back the most expensive welfare expansion in American history or help pass an election-overhaul bill that empowers a one-vote Senate majority to unilaterally dismantle the nation’s voting systems, overturning thousands of existing state laws for political gain.
When Obama’s agenda was being blocked by the GOP, Klein couldn’t stop writing about the alleged iniquities of the filibuster. But he went largely silent on the issue from around the election of Trump until the election of Biden, even though its usage went into hyperdrive. The Senate GOP had to end debate on judicial nominees and break filibusters over 300 times in Trump’s single term. To put that in perspective, all other presidents in American history faced 244 roll-call votes over a filibuster, combined. Yet we were treated to very little criticism of the “radicalism” of the Senate during those years. When Donald Trump took Klein’s position (both have similar views on the use of state power if not the goals), Mitch McConnell, who could have gotten rid of the legislative filibuster if he wanted, defended the institution. I can’t find any Klein columns praising the president for taking on the “Status Quoists,” as he calls them.
Malleable principles are nothing new in politics. What is new, however, is the progressive inclination to destroy governing norms when things don’t go their way, whether it’s the Senate, or the Electoral College, or the Supreme Court (“the way we choose Supreme Court nominees is broken,” Klein explained, and not after Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor was elevated to the High Court). It’s one thing to disagree on issues — the size, scope, and philosophy of policy — and quite another to weaken the Constitution whenever convenient.
Klein also notes that reconciliation is one of the “baroque parliamentary tricks that few understand.” It’s actually quite straightforward. Reconciliation was created to allow senators to rely on a simple majority when passing budgetary items to control debt. It was not created to allow Bernie Sanders to waste unfathomable amounts of money on his socialistic obsessions. A good way to fix this thorny issue would be to eliminate shortcuts that circumvent genuine debate and that allow politicians to shove (often fake) budgetary concerns through with a simple majority. Bring back the normal rules of order and deliberation for all bills and end the madness.
As a contemporary political matter, Klein’s arguments do not make much sense, anyway. It’s Democrats, not Republicans, who are holding back the passage of the reconciliation bill and an array of other agenda items, including gun restrictions and “voting” bills. They would be unlikely to pass even if the filibuster were gone. Then again, some of us believe that the glorious messiness and gridlock of D.C. speaks to the true diversity of American life, a state of affairs that must be torture for the statist and technocrat to observe.
And right now, only a few Democrats stand between preserving norms and destroying them. Let’s hope they don’t fold.