Title: Kill Switch
Rating: 4 Stars
From the outside, it’s a puzzle. By and large, a majority of Americans hold fairly progressive beliefs. A majority of Americans support ideas like increased availability of health care, a woman’s right to choose, reasonable gun control, paid maternity leave, subsidized child care, and free college tuition.
We currently have a Democratic President and majority in both the House of Representatives and in the Senate. President Biden has indicated interest in moving fast on progressive issues such as these. The House regularly passes progressive legislation. All that’s needed is for the Democratic controlled Senate to take up these bills, debate them, and approve them for the President’s signature.
Seems easy, right?
Well, it turns out that, as illogical as it sounds, it’s actually the minority that controls the Senate. If any given senator decides that they don’t like a bill, they can anonymously put a hold on it. Once the hold is put on a bill, unless the Senate can come up with sixty votes, there is no way that it can be pushed (I’m not talking about reconciliation bills right now). Given the state of our current toxic political environment, the chances of getting sixty votes on anything progressive is essentially zero.
Most Americans that follow politics understand that, as weird as it sounds, this is the way that things work and are pretty much resigned to it. Even though bills are begging to be passed that could benefit tens of millions of Americans and could start redressing the centuries of racist, classist, and sexist wrongs of our history, some random old white guy in a safe Senate seat from a state that takes active steps to suppress minority votes can make a phone call and stop any sign of progress.
How did we get to this place? Is this what the founders envisioned?
In a word, no. The obstructionists love to quote James Madison, the founder that was very concerned with making sure that the minority had a voice in the legislative process. Other than selectively cherry picking his quotes, there is no way that Madison wanted what we have now. Yes, he wanted to make sure that minority voices were heard. However, the goal was that these voices would be give the opportunity to change the mind of the majority. It was in no way in his mind that the minority had some kind of veto power over the voice of the majority.
In fact, all of the founding fathers had experience with this perverse form of government during the Articles of Confederation. Under Confederation rules, any act required the approval by at least nine of the thirteen states. Regardless of size, each state got one vote. These two rules made passing laws virtually impossible and were the primary reasons why the Articles were discarded.
At the Constitutional Convention, the original plan was to only have the population apportioned House of Representatives. The smaller states kicked up such a fuss that the Senate was created as a sop to them. This was known as the Great Compromise. Madison was one of the founders that vociferously fought against the formation of the Senate. He was worried that the smaller states could band together and stop the will of the majority. That problem is even more apparent now. For example, the population of California is now equal to the population of the 22 smallest states.
In the early days of the republic, the Senate functioned pretty much as planned. Senators actually worked at their desk on the Senate floor. Bills came to the floor and were passionately debated. Everyone was given an opportunity to express their views. After everyone had their say, senators voted. It was as simple as that.
And then came John Calhoun.
A fierce defender of the South and its peculiar institution (slavery), Calhoun used Senate rules to thwart any looming threat that he saw to it. For instance, Calhoun saw the attempt to charter a US bank as an attack on slavery. Calhoun organized a group of Southern senators in opposition. This was the first filibuster. Even though it failed, it created a pattern for future obstruction. For those that don’t know, filibuster was a phrase current in the 1840s. It was a term used to describe a group of people that would unlawfully invade a foreign land. They were basically pirates.
After this inauspicious start, Calhoun proceeded to filibuster multiple times over the years. Every single one was in support of slavery. By the end of his career, he had moved so far from majority rule that he believed that any state had the right to ignore any federal law that it didn’t believe.
Fast forward a hundred years.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, Richard Russell of Georgia was a huge force in the Senate. Like Calhoun, he was a master of the Senate’s rules and was able to bend its rules to his whim. And he had a very simple whim: white supremacy. He was very open about it. Any law that appeared to threaten white supremacy was filibustered. For instance, he organized filibusters against anti-lynching bills. He held up progress on civil rights bills for over a decade. When the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed over his filibuster, he called the cloture vote stopping his filibuster a lynch mob. Yes, he was a lovely man.
For those of you that think that filibusters aren’t racist in nature, keep in mind that every single successful filibuster from 1877 to 1964 was to stop civil rights progress.
At the same time that filibustering became a sacrosanct Senate birthright, power was shifting in the Senate. For most of its history, the Senate was a group of individuals. There was no real central authority. It was during Lyndon Baines Johnson’s tenure in the 1950s that the position of Majority Leader became a center of power. This power became even more centralized during Harry Reid’s tenure.
Party discipline now trumps individual beliefs. If a senator desires a plumb committee assignment, the expectation is that they must toe the party position on all votes. The Senate is now a top down institution. Given how rare it is for one party to win 60 seats, this pretty much guarantees that any filibuster will be successful. All a senator has to do now is to signal that they will filibuster and that serves to kill the bill.
This brings us to Mitch McConnell. He has no interest in legislating. He is only interested in becoming and staying Majority Leader. With support of white conservatives and wealthy business interests, he understands that he doesn’t have to appeal to an American majority. In fact, he has no interest in doing so.
The remedy is simple. We should tell conservatives that they are right. We should follow the beliefs of our original founders. They all strongly believed in the principle of majority rule. They believed that the Senate was designed for debate. We should allow senators to debate on the merits of the bill. The minority should be given a voice in the debate. Once the salient points have been made, then the senators vote. The current state that allows the minority (even a minority of one!) to stifle the voice of the majority must end.
Stop the filibuster!
dorkenstein 