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Democrats Need to Sh*tcan the Filibuster or We Are All Screwed

Photo credit: Al Drago - Getty Images
Photo credit: Al Drago - Getty Images

From Esquire

Once again we must ask if Democrats will allow huge swathes of their legislative agenda—the one voters handed them control of the federal government to enact—in order to maintain some arcane procedural mechanism that no normal person cares about. We are talking, of course, about the filibuster, which is not some ancient rite enshrined in the Constitution, does not reflect the Founders' vision for the upper chamber, and besides all that, completely sucks. It does not foster bipartisanship, it fosters gridlock. We had it all through the Obama and Trump eras. How much bipartisanship did you see? There are not 60 votes—10 Republican—for anything that would actually match the scale of the problems this country faces. There may not be 60 votes for anything at all if Mitch McConnell intends to run his 2009 playbook.

So now that the Senate parliamentarian (an unelected position created in 1935) has advised that the provision to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 cannot be included in the COVID relief bill, we're back here again. Because the Democrats are trying to pass the bill through a process called "budget reconciliation," which requires just 51 votes instead of 60, all the provisions therein have to be deemed to significantly impact the federal budget. This creates a labyrinthine process where chunks of the $1.9 trillion legislation could be yanked out of it via procedural rulings from the parliamentarian that exist on a sliding scale of arbitrary. The whole process is like squeezing your way through a tiny window when the door is right there. And the squeeze has caused Congress to recede as a branch of government, increasingly ceding power to the Executive and Judiciary. The Senate has basically banned itself from doing anything but allocating funds. The Presiding Officer of the Senate—Vice President Kamala Harris, should she choose to get involved—could overrule the parliamentarian, who has no actual authority here. But that already looks unlikely, and besides, the Democrats will at some point need to scrap the filibuster and this ridiculous dependence on budget reconciliation. Otherwise, we are all fucked.

That salty language and possibly saltier sentiment might seem uncalled for, but it's the truth. If Democrats—and it will really come down to the two most conservative among them, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—refuse to adjust the threshold to move legislation to a simple majority from the filibuster's 60-vote supermajority, there will be no new Voting Rights Act or H.R. 1, the For the People Act. There will be no reforms to the judiciary system. Republicans will be free to obstruct progress, then fall back on their structural advantages to squeeze out congressional majorities for themselves in the 2022 midterms, running on a platform of Democrats Didn't Do Shit. In a piece today for Five Thirty Eight, Perry Bacon, Jr. breaks down the current camps of Democrats, who are split among people who recognize the grave emergency facing American democracy and those who have deluded themselves into thinking there is going to be a brave new world of bipartisan cooperation with people who by and large are still saying the last election was stolen.

This is insanity. Democrats, even Manchin and Sinema, will need to come to grips with the fact that they are up against a political faction that does not believe in democracy when the process fails to end in their side's victory. Republican state legislatures have already embarked on a sweeping voter-suppression push in response to the high turnout of the last election, and they're set to gerrymander themselves into minority rule. Republican senators have not represented a majority of the American population since 1996, but they've controlled the Senate for much of the time since. The foundations are beginning to crack, and the democratic legitimacy of the institutions of the American republic is teetering. The surest evidence of that is that the minimum wage proposal—which enjoys strong support among the American republic—may now die in procedural hell within an institution badly in need of reform. The point of all this is to do the people's business, for their will to be reflected in governance and outcomes. It's not to cling to sacred cows. The cow is sitting on your neck.

Photo credit: Esquire
Photo credit: Esquire

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