Liberals on Twitter are acting like they’ve been hit hard by the Holy Ghost because David Brooks, the David Brooks, wrote in the New York Times this week that Democrats should “kill” the Senate filibuster rule for legislation if Republicans refuse to negotiate President Biden’s agenda items.
If David Brooks says it, the David Brooks, it means something!
Well, no, it doesn’t mean anything. Brooks’s personal affection for Biden isn’t a reason to eliminate the most important rule of the Senate. And Brooks’s personal affection for Biden runs uncomfortably deep.
“Every president sets the moral and cultural tone for the nation,” Brooks wrote. “We saw that in a terrible way over the past four years. Just by who he is, Biden sets the stage for a moral revival. His values cut across the left/right, urban/rural culture war we’ve been enduring for a generation. This will begin to heal a broken and ungovernable nation. Next, Biden will work to depoliticize American life.”
Under Biden’s presidency, Brooks said, “the emotional temperature will go down.”
The thing about journalists in Washington is that they believe their reverence for political traditions and government rituals is shared by everyone else. Their mood is controlled by who lives in the White House, so they assume that’s true for you, too.
Brooks is in a good mood because he has a personal love for the new president. The vast majority of the national media do, too. That doesn’t mean the nation’s “emotional temperatures will go down.” It means their own emotional temperatures will go down.
That Brooks likes the new president isn’t an argument for further empowering that president by killing the filibuster. Sorry.
