The Post-Filibuster Age

It’s coming—but maybe not as soon as we expect.

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Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stand and clap during President Joe Biden's State of the Union on February 7, 2023. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Super Tuesday was a bad day for political norms, and not just because two men who have no business being president again locked up their parties’ respective nominations. For the third cycle in a row, a prominent candidate ended up whining that an election they lost had been “rigged.”

And this time it wasn’t one of the usual suspects, or even a Republican.

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  1. Pishposh

    I have no problem with ditching the filibuster. Per no less a person than James Madison, the designer of our system, the mechanism for making the Senate the "cooling saucer” of reasoned deliberation is supposed to be the six year term of Senators. Madison was adamant that within the chamber itself the majority should rule. The filibuster is an anomaly that was never part of the original design and never should have happened in the first place. It mostly functions as an excuse allowing rabid partisans to avoid even negotiating.

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    Ben Connelly

    I’d be fine if they made it a talking filibuster again.

    Yes, it would be more democratic to get rid of the filibuster. That’s a bad thing. You’d think the Democrats would have learned this one by now. That’s how we got Trump! Every attempt to make our politics more democratic has made it worse, including getting rid of the smoke filled rooms and running primaries. Democracy means a demagogue like Trump. That’s why the Founders viewed democracy as a necessary evil, and it’s why classical philosophy often held democracy as the worst form of government. But by all means, get rid of the filibuster, and then get rid of literally every other barrier standing in the way of a future Trump admin actually becoming a dictatorship. That’s smart.

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  3. FreddySez

    I do think the danger of Senate "ping-pong" is real, and I think the greatest harm that can come from it will be to foreign policy.

    The "ping-pong" we already have has unmoored American foreign policy from the old "stops at the water's edge" stability. Now, the world holds its breath to see which America will show up: Is it Bush? Or Obama. Or Trump? Or Biden.

    Compare that to a half-century during which the most pressing long-term overseas issue, containing communism, remained steady and consistent across Truman-Ike-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-GHW Bush.

    (With some wrinkles, of course -- looking at you, detente -- but stand back and look at that big picture. A progressive like Carter pulled out of the Olympics over Afghanistan. A Cold Warrior like Reagan inked the INF treaty. And so on.)

    If our domestic politics remains partisan and ping-pongy, there will be costs and lost opportunities for sure. But it's much more vital in the long run for us to return to some kind of broad consensus on foreign affairs. Because whether or not our politics stops at the water's edge, the threats and impacts that head our way from the rest of the world do not.

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      Ben Connelly

      I do think there’s more variability in that list of Cold War presidents than you think. Especially between Nixon and Carter and Carter and Reagan. Nixon and Reagan were notably different. Johnson was different from all of them.

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      1. FreddySez

        True, but nothing like the whipsaw back-and-forth we see now.

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  4. Trichwages

    “The 60-vote threshold for cloture in that chamber is a brake on rash legislative action, preventing major changes to national policy without firm bipartisan support.”

    C’mon, Nick. Even the Senate disagrees with you on that. It’s to prevent talking a bill to death (filibuster) as the Senate allows for unlimited debate.

    https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/overview.htm

    Senators actually used to have to talk a bill to death so as not to end debate but that proved too onerous fairly recently so even the requirement to debate until there was cloture was removed once the filibuster started being used as a frequent weapon of nullification rather than an infrequently used tool of principled opposition.

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  5. Jack H Wolf

    My suggestion on the filibuster would be to make it 55. In these times it is hard to get to 55 in the Senate without the type of strong mandate that should be needed for a transformative program, but 60 is almost impossible. This should only be passed before an election and enacted after so it wouldn't advantage one side.
    Those that here are claiming it will result in a bunch of debt, forget that spending can be passed in a reconciliation bill that only requires a majority as can tax cuts.

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    1. Trichwages

      Just bring back the requirement to actually have to continue debate on the floor until cloture is reached. If some want to used the tool as a weapon of majority nullification rather than principled opposition, make them stay on the floor and talk. This idea that nothing gets to the floor until it has 60 votes is not traditional and it’s a higher threshold than is necessary to pass many of the Bills being debated.

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  6. Jack H Wolf

    The CA primary certainly wasn't "rigged" but it did suffer from imo the unethical cynical practice of people spending money on a spoiler candidate they dont like to hurt the other contender. Steve Garvey's campaign was largely funded by the Schiff supporters who wanted him to outpoll Porter thinking he was the easier candidate to beat in November.
    I have always considered this practice, applied a lot in 2022 by Dems to support the crazier GOPs in the 2022 primaries as unfair if not effective. For example,, the Dems spent a lot of money to defeat the Never Trumper ethical Peter Meijer in the primaries so they could run against the MAGA candidate. I am generally a Dem, but donated to Meijer only to see my party funding the Trump candidate. Maybe it works, but it is not ethical and since then I swore off ever contributing to the national fundraising groups like the DSCC.

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  7. Steve Flaig

    If they do away with the filibuster what need is there for the Senate? We'll just all have to enjoy the "lip stick on a pig" portrayal of mob rule

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    1. Trichwages

      You do realize that the Senate is not mob rule in that each state has two senators regardless of population size?

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  8. BPhillips

    Good article, except near the end - "Democrats... extend legal abortion to the moment of crowning."

    That isn't a Democrat position.

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      Kmregan7

      The argument goes something like this: democrats (knowing that pregnancy can be very complicated, very quickly, regardless of where you are in that pregnancy) prefer to leave it up to doctors and women to make that decisions, without having to worry about getting prosecuted. Because of that, they don’t want to agree to hard limits, and therefore it’s “abortion on demand.”
      It’s not correct and it induces an eye roll every time I read it because the facts don’t support it (no woman is going to pant “give me an abortion now!” The minute a head is crowning and no doctor would do that. But it keeps the conversation off of women almost dying, and ten year olds having to go out of state to get an abortion, and IVF coming into play.

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      1. BPhillips

        That's it exactly - it's impossible to write a law with every possible scenario - so don't try. I think the vast majority of Democrats are fine with a pre-viability cut off for abortion on demand, with carve outs for health of the mother. Referring to Democrats as promoting abortion "until the moment of crowning" is disingenuous at best.

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  9. Token Liberal

    I think the demise of the filibuster was set in motion when they made it easy to do. Back in the day, you had to get into the well of the Senate and keep talking. This made it a rare event. Now that it's easy to do, it effectively means that nothing can pass without 60 votes. So exceptions start appearing, and one day it may just go away.

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