Minority Rules
Our lasting cultural impression of the filibuster is from the film “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” in which a weary and haggard-looking Jimmy Stewart stands in the well of the Senate speaking, until he can speak no more, against the unscrupulous business titans in his home state. He kept talking because he had to. Until very recently, the filibuster required one to talk to keep the filibuster alive. Rules changes a few years ago meant that all you had to do was send an email. No longer a tool to keep the oppressed minority from being overrun by a malicious majority, it’s now the everyday-mechanism to stop the “world’s greatest deliberative body” from deliberating.
I’m not a doomsayer, catastrophist, or alarmist, but the naked election-rules power-grab currently running through Republican-controlled statehouses is creating the most perilous moment for our democratic republic since 1860. Unless we address the filibuster now, it will be too late to save ourselves. But filibuster reform is not happening.
The Electoral College and the filibuster drive me crazy. Each allows a minority to rule over the stated intent of the majority. It drives me so crazy that with a couple of partners, I’ve started a nonprofit called LetMajorityRule.org. Our goal is to raise awareness of these two arcane institutional rules, the Electoral College, inscribed in the Constitution, and the filibuster, which is not.
The outcome of every election you’ve voted in since picking an elementary school student council, was determined by who got the most votes. Thanks to the outdated Electoral College, twice since 2000, the loser of the popular vote has become president.
We’ll save that for another day because the Electoral College won’t become relevant again until 2024. The filibuster is very much in the news today, because it is the current mechanism of gridlock in Washington. If you’re already doodling in the margins, here, I apologize and will try to breathe some life into a boring subject.
For a fleeting post-election moment, it appeared that the Democrats would kill or amend the filibuster. That moment has past. A few Democrats whose support is necessary, have closed the door on filibuster reform. Among other things, there will be no federal protection of voting rights. In addition to making it harder for minority populations to vote, partisan legislatures have given themselves the unprecedented ability to overturn election results. Democrats find themselves riven and subject, although they own the majority in the House and Senate, to the minority rule of the Republicans.
It’s hard to beat Mitch McConnell when it comes to putting party and political survival over country. Usually it is cloaked in rhetoric and plausible deniability. Sometimes it is shockingly naked, as when the grieving mother of a dead Capitol Hill Police officer went to the Hill to ask the senators—for whom her son gave his life, and for whom 140 other police officers suffered varying degrees of injury—to do one thing: empanel a bipartisan commission to study the Capitol assault.
Their response, out of a perverted mixture of fear, cynicism, political calculation, careerism, and just about everything except patriotism and devotion to the ideal of America as a shining city on a hill, was, alas, no.
This was not Sophie’s Choice. Not hard at all. You could vote to get to the bottom of it, expose co-conspirators, even those among your own ranks, and make plans to protect the peaceful transfer of power going forward, or, you could stonewall, obfuscate, and delay in order to change the subject in advance of next year’s mid-term elections. Knowing there was no price to pay, they chose the latter.
So, we are gridlocked.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers, warned us of the dangers of a filibuster.
If a “minority can control the opinion of a majority,” it can lead to “tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; (and) contemptible compromises of the public good…The fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.”
That’s the reason our Founding Fathers did not put the filibuster in our Constitution. But because they did not specifically prohibit it, self-interested senators betrayed the trust of our Founders by weaponizing the filibuster.
How should American government work? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson: “The voice of the majority decides,” he wrote in his Manual of Parliamentary Practice.
Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson. They were on to something.
But so are McConnell and Senate Republicans. They’re not even bothering to try to persuade us that they’re right. Ipsos research says the public wants reform, and since they can’t sway the public through speechifying or marketing, they’ll keep it—absent Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith— from ever coming to the floor.
© 2021 Jon Sinton for Progressive Agenda LLC