21
votes
With Obama saying "the filibuster is a 'Jim Crow relic' ”, it’s looking more and more like Democrats will abolish the filibuster if they win back the Senate
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- Title
- Obama: The filibuster is a "Jim Crow relic"
- Authors
- Ian Millhiser
- Published
- Jul 30 2020
- Word count
- 1099 words
I've been saying for, literally, decades that the solution is to require actual filibustering.
Many people don't realize that, long ago, they adopted a rule that a Senator saying "hey, I'm gonna filibuster that" would receive a "Stipulated" free pass. No one actually has to get up and talk for 37 hours to show they're serious.
Yeah I wouldn’t mind somehow keeping the talking filibuster while eliminating the current system that just requires the threat of a filibuster to gum things up.
Eliminating the filibuster has been repeatedly referred to as "the nuclear option". However, the filibuster itself should be a kind of Senatorial nuclear option, only pulled out in rare circumstances to try to stop the Majority from committing some disastrous error.
Any adjustment that would lead to that kind of attitude would work. Other ideas include "each Senator gets one filibuster per six-year term" perhaps even "each Senator gets one filibuster, and is no longer eligible for re-election after using it". Stuff like that.
That's a pretty powerful idea, especially given that there currently aren't term limits. Someone employing it would get some very serious attention. So much so that there would probably have to be rules around senators threatening to use it but not actually using it, similar to how they can currently threaten to filibuster but nobody has to stand up for hours.
Inevitable "they should have done that when they had a majority in 2009" reply.
Hindsight is easy (which I read your point to be).
Not many could foresee how far this administration and Republican leadership actually would go to upend procedure and protocol.
That's why the gradual outrage over "but they certainly won't do that!" as things've incrementally gone further has been there for so many years.
And then the Republicans have been emboldened by so clearly demonstrating that so many of the checks and balances aren't actually any checks at all if you just ignore them.
I don't think the Republican leadership has envisioned what could happen if the Democrats somehow could get on the same page and play hardball pushing through reforms. I wonder how far they'll go if they win the election as thoroughly as the current polls suggest.
The issue is that it's very difficult to reinstate conventions like this because the political calculus changes as soon as it is removed. No majority would vote to handicap themselves by reinstating the filibuster, and a vote during a lame duck session would be seen as so blatantly political that the incoming majority would suffer no political consequences by removing it.
The only way it could get reinstated is if there was broad support among the voters in the majority's party , but again, no one wants to work to get their party elected only to handicap them once in power.
But as soon as the Dems take power, many such reforms would suddenly hurt the Dems. As much as an opposition always loves to discuss limiting the power of the government, I fear priorities might shift if they gain power.
most of the Dems' policies are this way. Even their proposed reforms don't go far enough usually, and once they're in power they water it down even further.
Which reforms? Stuff like reducing executive power over the federal bureaucracy definitely would hurt anyone in the executive D or R, but other things like easier voting and better welfare definitely don't hurt the Democrats.