For a man who spent most of his adult life as a senator, President Biden sure doesn’t understand the Senate’s rules or history.
And for a man who ran on restoring and preserving America’s norms, Biden sure seems hellbent on lighting the whole place on fire.
While Biden’s party launches a crusade against minority rights in the Senate, the president is trying to give the group what it wants while still sounding reasonable.
“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster,” Biden told ABC News. “You have to do what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days. You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”
This is, as Biden might put it, malarkey. The “talking” filibusters Biden is reminiscing about were generally conducted because those staging them lacked the 40 votes necessary to block a cloture vote. This was the case, for example, in Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond’s famous record-setting filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Because the bill enjoyed the support of 72 U.S. senators, including all 43 Republicans in the chamber, the numbers were there to force a vote. Thurmond’s filibuster could only delay the inevitable.
If Senate Democrats want to force a filibustering minority to “keep talking,” they have two choices. One is to craft a compromise that can get at least 10 Republicans on board. The other is to accept an uncontrolled, very lengthy debate with an uncertain end date.
There has been no rule change in this regard since Biden first entered the Senate two generations ago. And if Biden is instead lamenting the frequency of filibusters, he has no standing. Biden sided with Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Pat Leahy, and Tom Daschle when they turned the filibuster of judicial nominees (especially Hispanic, black, and female nominees) into standard procedure.
Democrats now want to “reform” the filibuster in order to abuse their power and gain a political advantage. They do not seek to do it out of some concern for democracy.
As a tactic, the filibuster has always been a frustrating tool for Senate majorities but a stabilizing one for the nation’s laws and long-term policies. The possibility of a filibuster forces the parties to work together more than they would have to otherwise and limits short-term variations in federal statutes.
It also requires a greater buy-in on new laws. It’s one thing for a political party to tweak the tax code with the barest of simple majorities. It’s quite another to have them upend the nation’s long-standing labor and employment laws, remove religious freedom protections from doctors or inmates, or consolidate party power by manipulating election law or even admitting new states into the union (the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, specifically) for the sole purpose of obtaining additional Senate seats and cementing power.
Democrats may think they are clever with their plans to abolish the filibuster. But as the party of government, they have a lot more to lose if the filibuster ever disappears. Imagine what would happen if the barest of congressional majorities could immediately scrap the government programs they cherish. What if 50 senators plus one could even require the destruction of records necessary to rebuild such programs quickly or easily?
Entitlement reform would suddenly become reality with the filibuster. In fact, it would already be here. Meanwhile, ossified laws that have long empowered and created funding streams for key Democratic interest groups could be repealed overnight. For example, the National Labor Relations Act, an obsolete Depression-era law that empowers labor unions, could be scrapped unceremoniously, effectively making every state a right-to-work state. Even if Democrats later got the chance to reverse such a dramatic change, unions would have a devil of a time forcing workers to rejoin or otherwise start paying dues again.
Without the filibuster, programs that create funding streams for left-wing political organizations such as Planned Parenthood would be at risk. Universities that persecute students for conservative opinions could find their federal funding constantly in doubt.
As for admitting new states as part of a congressional or electoral power grab, if either party ever starts to behave in such an abusive manner, things will get very silly very fast. North Idaho, East Tennessee, and West Texas should never become states, but under the Constitution, it can happen if the pertinent state legislature and Congress agree to it. How much Balkanization of the states would people be willing to tolerate?
This is a recipe for making the entire republic fall apart. It all begins with abuse of rules that have long been respected and provided a stability that happily frustrates both parties, all in the service of producing a short-term political advantage.
The United States has functioned as a nation for as long as it has because such abuses are not even countenanced, let alone acted upon. If Democrats try to do such a thing with their current, bare 50-seat Senate majority, they will be sealing the fate of government of, for, and by the people of the U.S.
