Whether he knows it or not, Sen. Steve Daines is feeling rather European. To give President Trump some steel slats, he proposes upending centuries of precedent by ending the legislative filibuster, and embracing parliamentary, majority-take-all government.
Conservatives would be wise to side with the Founders rather than the junior senator from Montana. The filibuster remains the best institutional defense of the original, bicameral design of the legislature.
The Senate was designed to protect rambunctious self-government from itself. During the Constitutional Convention, James Madison referred to the upper chamber as the “anchor” of our government arguing that it was necessary to check “the fickleness” of the House. And later it was George Washington who famously referred to the body as “a senatorial saucer to cool” populist passions.
The filibuster is the parliamentary tool developed to accomplish this constitutional end, and it has functioned decently well for the last two centuries. The House rams a bill through with a simple majority. But the filibuster forces the Senate to deliberate because just one member can use it to stop legislation.
And when Obama was president, Republicans loved the filibuster. It was their best defense against big government when they were in the minority. They ended the push for “cap and trade” with it in 2010, stopped a 30 percent tax hike cold in 2012, and killed Manchin-Toomey gun control in 2013.
Daines doesn’t have any patience with this particular check-and-balance now that Republicans are in power. He isn’t alone. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, doesn’t care for it either.
Cruz told the Washington Examiner in an hour long editorial board earlier in January that the 60-vote threshold for passing legislation needs to get nuked. His logic: Democrats will do it anyway so Republicans might as well:
I no longer believe it is a meaningful constraint on Democrats. I think if the Democrats ever regain the majority, they’ll end the legislative filibuster. That’s where their conference is. And it doesn’t make any sense for it to be a one-way ratchet – for us to have our hands tied, and for them to be able to pass with a simple majority.
Honestly, that isn’t a bad argument. It’s not a bad partisan argument for Republicans to make in January when they controlled the House and the Senate and the White House. But it is late December. An election happened.
For the sake of argument, give Daines what he wants. End the filibuster today and clear the pass for House Republicans to send whatever they want to the Senate for immediate approval. They only have two weeks until Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., becomes speaker of the House, so what will they pass first … wall funding?
They propose altering the structure of our entire government to plant some steel slats in the dust of the southern border? So Trump can placate Ann Coulter?
It wouldn’t be for a once in a lifetime chance to solve our entitlement crisis. It wouldn’t be for a moonshot opportunity to solve healthcare with an elimination of the employer-based insurance stranglehold. It wouldn’t be term limits. It wouldn’t be draining the swamp. Hell, it wouldn’t even be legalizing traditional incandescent light bulbs again. It would be for a partisan campaign promise.
If Republicans were ready to make good on their limited government talking points, this would be defensible. If they had listened to Cruz back in January, perhaps Daines wouldn’t sound so ridiculous today. This didn’t happen and Republicans are playing with European fire.
Our Senate is different than the British House of Lords, the French Senate, and the German Bundesrat for a reason. We divided our Congress, developing parliamentary measures to check the legislature against itself. The Founders did not want a winner-take-all system where the government careens wildly as the whims of the people shift after each election. They wanted ordered republican government. Not a reeling majoritarian democracy. These principles shouldn’t be thrown away in a partisan fever pitch.
