How can senators make every day count? They must talk to each other about hard issues.
How can senators make every day count? They must talk to each other about hard issues.
T he most important lesson I learned as a United States Senator was that it’s hard to get here and hard to stay here, so while you’re here, you might as well try to accomplish something good for our country. In other words, make every day count.
Today, President Trump and his allies are doing their best to convince senators that the way to make every day count is to change Senate rules, nuke the filibuster, and fire the parliamentarian.
This is not especially creative. Presidents Obama and Biden had the same idea on eliminating the filibuster. Changing the rules would allow Trump’s proposals on elections, immigration, guns, abortion, tariffs, and taxes to roar through Congress like a freight train, just as they do through the House of Representatives. But when power shifts, a Democratic majority could make Washington, D.C., a state, ban guns, allow leaky borders, create government-run health care, and abolish state right-to-work laws.
For a president, the filibuster — the rule that 60 of 100 senators must vote to end debate before a bill can proceed — is the biggest inconvenience. It is also the Senate’s best-known tradition, described in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as “democracy’s finest show”; each senator can exercise the “right to talk [their] head off” until they come to an agreement that most of them can vote for and most voters will accept. That is the reason the Founders created a Senate.
The Founders did not want a king, but they did not want too much democracy either. Many were schooled in John Calvin’s theology and did not trust human nature. Because they did not want to rely solely on divine intervention to restrain behavior, they created a republic with checks and balances, a messier operation than majority rule.
“Every tin horn dictator in the world today, every president for life, has a Bill of Rights,” said the late Antonin Scalia, among the Supreme Court justices most revered by Republicans. “That’s not what makes us free; if it did, you would rather live in Zimbabwe . . . What has made us free is our Constitution . . . Constitution means structure . . . Once power is centralized in one person, or one part [of government], a Bill of Rights is just words on paper.” After visiting the young American democracy, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the “tyranny of the majority.”
Today, it is hard to win a Democratic primary unless you oppose the filibuster — which is counterintuitive given that the 60-vote requirement is the Senate minority’s main check on Trump. As for the president, his weakest argument is, “If we don’t do it, Democrats will.” It perverts the Golden Rule and various Bible verses to say, “Do unto others BEFORE they do it unto you.” And most of us learned as youngsters that two wrongs don’t make a right. The wrong here would be to end the Senate’s incentive to force senators to keep talking until they find agreement at a time when our democracy is so polarized. Surely, Republican senators do not want to be remembered for doing that.
The filibuster is not the cause of Senate dysfunction. Even with a filibuster that once took 67 votes to overcome, the Senate produced Social Security, Medicare, and civil rights laws, ratified treaties, and authorized war. The real trouble today is that senators object to voting on each other’s amendments, making the Senate like a Grand Ole Opry with members not allowed to sing. The Senate needs a change of behavior more than a change of rules. In the 1980s, when Senators Robert Byrd and Howard Baker were party leaders, senators routinely voted on hundreds of amendments and hashed out agreements on hard issues.
That still can happen. In 2015, Democratic Senator Patty Murray and I wrote a sweeping education bill that our committee of 22 senators from Rand Paul to Bernie Sanders unanimously approved. The Senate amended it over 100 times. President Obama called it a “Christmas miracle,” and Newt Gingrich said it was “the biggest conservative education law in 20 years.” Eleven years later, it is still the law providing stability in policy for 100,000 public schools.
That’s a better way to accomplish something good for our country and to make every day count.