Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) says that while he used to support the filibuster, “at this point in time,” his party should heed President Donald Trump’s call to eliminate it. Sen. Darline Graham (R-South Carolina) has joined the chorus, breaking with her late brother’s commitment to the filibuster.
The conservative case against the filibuster, which requires most legislation to get 60 votes in the Senate, comes in two flavors. The low, political one urges Republicans to use this moment of power, when they hold both houses of Congress and the White House, to enact major legislation that moves the country in their direction for the long haul — and before Democrats have a chance to end the filibuster themselves. The high-minded, institutional case suggests that the filibuster ties the hands of Congress when it needs to fight to reclaim its power from the executive and judicial branches.
Neither set of arguments ought to prevail.
Start with the political one. It might have some force if Republicans were trying to enact a transformative legislative agenda but kept getting blocked by filibusters. They aren’t. Johnson brought up replacing Obamacare as a goal Republicans could achieve if not for the filibuster. But what’s stalling that legislation is not the Senate’s supermajority requirement. It’s that a bill does not exist.
What Trump wants is to kill filibusters and then pass mandatory voter ID and restrictions on mail-in balloting. It’s not clear that this package has majority support in either the House, which has passed only the voter ID component, or the Senate. Toss the filibuster, and voter ID could pass. But that would not be the election game changer some Republicans have convinced themselves it would be. Voter fraud and noncitizen voting just are not very large-scale.
And while Democrats may win in 2028 and then try to gut the filibuster, it’s not inevitable that they will succeed. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) has already said he will defend the filibuster from now on. If the party were to succeed, however, it would surely move quickly to repeal the voter ID law and thus render the Republicans’ first strike pointless.
It’s unlikely, too, that freedom from filibusters would revive congressional power. The notion that Congress always stalemates and so presidents have to act on their own is not really true. President Joe Biden didn’t even try to get Congress to pass his student loan forgiveness plan before moving to implement it unilaterally. Trump didn’t ask Congress for tariffs last year, either. Instead, he wanted to be able to set them at will. Note, also, that Congress has not tried to wrest back its power over loan forgiveness or tariffs and then failed because of the filibuster.
To focus solely on the legislation that the filibuster blocks is, however, to miss part of its function, which is not only to stop rash action by bare majorities but to push lawmakers to broker deals that most people in a diverse American society can live with. Such bipartisan deals have become much rarer in our day, but they still happen — as on criminal justice reform in Trump’s first term or semiconductor subsidies under Biden. The need for bipartisan support for appropriations bills has also led to their frequently including limits on how the executive branch can use funding.
Yet Johnson’s comment that the filibuster does not suit these times was right, in a way. For decades, the United States has been moving away from the version of Congress in which the filibuster makes sense. National politics have become more and more a contest to build partisan majorities that can force through policy changes — such as Trump’s tax cuts or Biden’s stimulus package — on their own. The leaders of each party in Congress have centralized power to make the institution better at this task.
That centralization and heightened partisanship have come at the cost of the ability of Congress to make cross-factional bargains and to defend itself in interbranch struggles for power. The attempt to strengthen Congress has thus made it weaker.
Is this approach to national politics, along with the results it is getting, making the public happier about the state of the country, its politics or its government? Are the partisan majorities working, even for the base of each party? In a June column, I cast doubt on the durability of many of Trump’s apparent accomplishments in the last two years. But one might equally wonder how much of what Biden achieved via partisan majorities and executive orders is going to survive.
Ending the filibuster is a beguiling idea because it is the next logical step in the partisan escalation of recent decades. The filibuster is an artifact of an earlier era. That is what makes it valuable.
The post Killing the filibuster won’t fix a broken Congress appeared first on Washington Post.
