The president is quintupling down on his demands that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act. Voter ID has supermajority support but the Senate just won’t pass it. Senator Mike Lee has taken to delaying the Road to Housing Act’s passage, asking on X to 30k likes, “Raise your hand if you’d rather have the Senate debate the SAVE America Act than the 21st Century Road to Housing.” Lee has accordingly continued his quest to pass the bill at a simple-majority threshold at the same time the president is explicitly saying that, if Republicans don’t abolish the filibuster for this, they will be up the creek without a paddle.
In other words, the base demands this bill and the people at large support it, but the Senate just won’t act. This is why the president and his GOP base are increasingly frustrated with the Senate for blocking what they see as the popular will. They don’t want excuses about the pointless traditions and norms that get in the way of necessary policy.
The Senate, of course, sees things differently. One senior Republican senator has summed up the traditional Senate perspective well, observing, “Power is not found in mere majorities, but in carefully balanced power.” He explained that the Senate is “where consensus is forged, as senators reach compromise across regional, cultural, and partisan lines” opposed to the House which is “the body most reflective of current majority views.”
But how is this consistent with the democratic rule of the people? Aren’t these counter-democratic institutions an obstacle to good policy? Not so, according to the senator: “Congress’s failure to pass sweeping . . . conservative . . . legislation in recent decades is a signal that neither party has won the necessary support from the American people to pass it.” He went on, “That does not indicate a flaw in the system, but flaws in the two parties’ agendas. This is a feature, not a bug.”
As every sitting Republican member can tell you, though, that may well be the case, but Chuck Grassley can’t post about his trusty vacuum cleaner without getting ratioed on the SAVE America Act. Surely Senate Republicans should take this popular anger into consideration.
Not according to this senator; what matters are our republican systems, not partisan passion. “Only in a constitutional republic,” he said, “are Americans’ individual rights and cultural diversity given their proper position atop our political order, over and above even majority will. Even above the tweets of social media outrage mobs.”
“Thank goodness,” he concluded.
Who is this senior Republican senator? The very same Mike Lee of Utah, writing in October 2020 for the conservative religious journal, First Things.
Lee had previously caused a row by tweeting, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” He wrote the piece in response to the outrage his (obviously correct) position caused.
He also warned, “Rest assured, every single critic who attacked me for correctly crediting America’s political success as a republic, not a democracy, supports counter-democratic checks and balances on majorities he disagrees with.”
Indeed.