Two Senate Seats Shy of Radicalism

W hat did Chuck Schumer’s failed attack on the filibuster accomplish?

When the Senate majority leader pushed ahead with a doomed vote on the nuclear option — using a simple majority to set a precedent contrary to the Standing Rules of the Senate — he was mostly acting to placate progressive donors and activists.

Pushing his caucus to the brink without succeeding will not help Democratic incumbents in battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and New Hampshire, but it might help ensure that Schumer will not have to face a left-wing primary challenge this year from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or some other AOC-backed candidate.

Schumer’s charge against the filibuster didn’t substantively move the ball forward for opponents of the filibuster — he simply made something clear that was always true. At the beginning of Schumer’s anti-filibuster crusade, there were only two Senate Democrats — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — firmly opposed to ending the 60-vote hurdle to cut off debate for most legislation. Schumer’s crusade merely forced weak supporters of the filibuster and senators up for reelection in battleground states to publicly make clear that they would never stand up to a concerted effort to get around the 60-vote rule. Perhaps the only thing that progressive opponents of the filibuster gained was momentum for a 2024 primary campaign against Sinema.

Schumer made it clear to the public that if Democrats hold the House of Representatives and gain a couple of Senate seats, they would be able to enact radical policies on a number of different issues.

They would have the votes to enact the radical House-passed bill to enshrine in federal law a nationwide right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

They would have the votes to enact the Equality Act, a heavy-handed “LGBT rights” bill that would, according to one liberal law professor, “crush” religious dissenters.

They would have the votes to make two new states out of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and then enact the most extreme immigration policy that 50 Senate Democrats and 218 House Democrats would support.

Abolishing the filibuster is a necessary precondition to packing the Court, and although I think Democrats wouldn’t actually pack the Court because it would be irrational and counterproductive, the threat would certainly be more credible if the filibuster is abolished. When it comes to Court-packing, the threat is greater than the execution, as the saying goes.

If the election were held today, Democrats would have almost no chance of holding the House and picking up a couple seats in the Senate, but the election is nine months away, and that feat isn’t out of the question.

Will the prospect of being two seats away from unchecked Democratic governance rally the progressive base, or is the high-profile failure going to demoralize them? The latter seems somewhat more likely than the former. And the prospect of a 52–48 Democratic Senate and a Democratic House will surely turn off independents and motivate Republicans to turn out in 2022.

Given the odds against Democrats in 2022, the 60-vote rule will likely remain intact for the next several years. It’s still extremely unlikely that Senate Republicans would abolish the 60-vote rule for legislation if the GOP controls the White House and both the Senate and House after the 2024 elections. The current Senate terms of many staunch GOP supporters of the filibuster — such as Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Ben Sasse, Thom Tillis, and Bill Cassidy — don’t expire until January 2027.

But eventually, Democrats will hold a trifecta in Washington and accomplish what Chuck Schumer could not. They will enact the entirety of their agenda without having to compromise. When Republicans take back power after that, they will surely respond in kind.