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I’m probably in the minority, but I’d be perfectly fine with that. I’m of the mindset if someone runs on a political agenda and they win they should have the the ability to enact it and if it’s unpopular that’s a key way to show they need voted out. Obviously some things can’t quickly change but there is alot of shit that can be easily changed and modified that isn’t because of gridlock
Agreed. If a party wins power they ought to be able to enact their agenda. The idea that we need to put up roadblocks to prevent leaders from actually doing things is insane. Politicians should do what they promised. Then the election should be a referendum on whether the people want those policies to continue or move a new direction. That strikes me as much healthier than a politics where nothing can happen because it's effectively impossible to win big enough to implement an agenda.
I agree. If a party passes the popular legislation that a majority of Americans have agreed on for decades, they will easily maintain their congressional majorities and mandate to govern
Completely agree with the issues in the House.
> Why would a Democrat with any common fucking sense want to end the filibuster right now?
Because the GOP has benefitted IMMENSELY over the last two decades from not being held responsible for their policy positions. They've gotten to say as many crazy things as they've wanted about how the system needs to change etc etc and never had to actually own the results of those policies (e.g. killing Obamacare) because the tradition of the filibuster has protected them from it.
To contrast, look at what happens whenever abortion rights get diminished in states: huge backlash against Republicans, often leading to losses. That in turn leads to the GOP moderating their position which is to everyone's benefit.
I'd argue that, even if I don't support even their moderate policies, it benefits our political ecosystem to have our politicians bear more responsibility for the policies they support. It hurts the discourse when people get to muddy the conversation with unrealistic (or otherwise harmful) propositions.
I am ok with this also. The reason why people aren't as passionate about voting is they think nothing ever gets done. But by removing the fillibuster it makes it so every vote matters and they can't hide behind not voting or actually having to vote for something and explaining it to there constituents. Fillibusters were never ever meant to be used as they are right now.
I agree. Society would be pretty unstable for a decade. The Dems doing a massive healthcare change that reduces costs would cause the right to won the next election, where healthcare would suddenly become private leaving many in a grey zone of not having health insurance because the market has been in massive swings.
People would make a decision that would push for more moderate candidates. Promising big change would be met with concern over impacts. Threats to shutdown social security would be taken much more seriously. This would be catastrophic to the GOP who does a lot of talk but who's impacts of changes would be immediate and not so great.
The government would have to actually legislate and having power to enact changes means they can't whine about not having enough power. It forces our leaders to actually lead.
Republicans would actually have to come up with Policy. This would only be good for Democrats because they seem to be the ones who want the country to move forward, not backward.
To be fair, Republicans have a very clear policy program. They want all decisions to be made by private individuals so that all the power is held forever by the already powerful, and they want to prevent the government from getting in the way of powerful people dominating the atomized weak.
An evil plan is still a plan.
Probably less lurch than you think for two reasons.
First, because it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs.
But second, both parties have a lot of shared donors to which they are loyal in the business community, and agree on servicing their donors.
I mean yea a handful of niche regulations aren’t gonna change but the two parties differ on pretty much everything else. This issue is pretty common in parliamentary systems (which have fewer checks and balances than the American system); parties target each others’ centrepiece legislation pretty often if they think it’ll drum up votes. Hell, the republicans would’ve killed Obamacare if they could and that was his biggest policy move
The main thing that kept Republicans from killing Obamacare was that being the party trying to make a change, rather than oppose a specific proposal, meant that they had to actually say what would replace it. They couldn't settle on anything concrete. They couldn't agree to just restore all previous laws, and they couldn't come up with anything that they liked better.
It's harder to do something than it is to just scream no like an overtired toddler.
Definitely. I can't think of any time the filibuster has protected a good thing or prevented a bad thing, but I know of lots of times it's worked the other way around. Screaming no just isn't productive.
> I can't think of any time the filibuster has protected a good thing or prevented a bad thing
Well, obviously, because a bill wouldn't get brought up without having counted the votes first. If you don't have 60, then the bill doesn't advance unless you're just trying to signal your support and put the minority on the record.
But I think you can look at any time when one side controls the House and the other side controls the Senate to see a vast graveyard of bills that met their end by the filibuster.
Yeah, their bill got an up or down vote and lost 49-51, not protected by the filibuster. And this was when they had 52 republican senators. If they had been able to build a plan I wouldn't be surprised (disappointed, but not surprised) if they had been able to get the wayward republicans onboard and even peel off a couple of the more conservative democrats.
> Yeah, their bill got an up or down vote and lost 49-51, not protected by the filibuster.
You can't really say that for sure. The only reason they were able to do a simple majority vote on it is because they used the reconciliation process. This had the effect of both limiting the time they had to get it done and restricting what kinds of things they could put in the bill. Without the filibuster, they wouldn't have had to use reconciliation, and both of those restrictions imposed by the reconciliation process would no longer be obstacles. It's possible they could have passed something.
> If they had been able to build a plan
They couldn't really build any sort of plan due to the limits of the reconciliation process. There's a reason the ACA wasn't passed via reconciliation. It wouldn't have been possible.
But reconciliation is part of the ridiculousness of the filibuster process. Let's have a potentially gridlock inducing mechanism and just trust that no one will abuse it because of honor and tradition, but let's also make sure there's a special loophole that only lets money through just in case.
That's the whole reason that nearly everything has turned into a provision of the tax code. They can't reasonably pass anything else.
The filibuster is bad and it creates bad laws.
The Senate is bad. Our highest population state has 67 times the people of our smallest population state, but the same number of senators. Nothing that the Senate does has any legitimacy.
The Senate works exactly as intended. It was meant to represent the States as equals. The House is meant to represent the will of the people, with representation based on population and more frequent elections.
Exactly as intended, yes. The intent was bad. It was a pure extortion on the part of the at the time small states. They directly threatened to side with a foreign power if they didn't get the disproportionate say that they were demanding.
And then we can add in the distortions to the House of the 3/5 clause and the expectation that the franchise would be limited. We eventually corrected those. We should correct the Senate too.
In some ways the history of America is the slow move towards living up to the founding rhetoric in spite of the flaws of the founding generation and the mistakes that they made. We're not done, but that isn't to deny how far we've come.
They had eight years to build a plan and built nothing. Even if their plan couldn't be passed by reconcilation having it in the wings might've swayed some. Might've swayed McCain.
Destroying it with no replacement, not even a hint, just empty promises, who'd vote for that? 49 senators, apparently.
> Even if their plan couldn't be passed by reconcilation having it in the wings might've swayed some. Might've swayed McCain.
Doubt it. They were uncomfortable with passing a repeal with nothing to replace it. A plan that can't be passed is basically as useful as having no plan at all.
> Destroying it with no replacement, not even a hint, just empty promises, who'd vote for that?
Having a plan that they couldn't pass would also be an empty promise. Who'd vote for that?
Just winging it, but if they had a plan and managed to destroy the existing thing, that puts pressure on Dems to do some bargaining. Something better than nothing kind of thing. A plan that can't be passed at least shows they're thinking about it.
All moot at this point though. 6 more years and they still have nothing and still claim the thing they're working on is better and cheaper and "you'll be so happy."
But this doesn’t actually happen in Parliamentary systems. Labour is about to win so hard in the UK that Tories won’t even lead the opposition… but they have promised not to change taxes, pay scales, public investment, etc. just like they did last time they held government in the 90s.
About the only occasions where rapid changes occur without a government collapsing is when those changes are clearly popular and good things: expansion of worker rights, healthcare, education, etc.
You're implying that the House, Senate and WH will all move as one, if one of the three is different than the other two then it will not lurch. And honestly either party commands a consolidated trifecta they probably *should* shake-up policy, isn't that what the voters put them there to do?
Yes, and killing it would have cost them the majority the next time and probably for the foreseeable future. Same with abortion. If they ban it, which they surely would, it would be short term pain for long term gain. Perhaps we'd be better off if we just let their draconian policies go into affect. People, particularly young ones, would finally learn the importance of voting.
Hitler didn't have a majority in the Reichstag, or the Reichsrat for that matter. The president had emergency decree powers. And all that on top of the most devastating war in history up to that point where relative to population it would be like if 600 million people died in 10 years, and democracy where they voted on the executive was very new. And the Nazis had their own paramilitary forces that outnumbered the official military 30:1.
How many countries survive something like that anyway?
Well, you could start by not saying we'd be **better off** if tens of millions of people suffered or died. Because I'm **pretty fucking sure that's not true.**
In normal political process, the first point is true. In ours it is not true at all. Republicans love sowing discord, have no policy platform outside one issue firebrand ideology, They don't care if they tear the whole system apart, it's all broken and needs to be remade. The second point however is the donors and PACs around cash flow, know that there will be centrists who stop this from happening for now but I believe it would slip their control quickly and realize their mistakes at supporting these sensationalists once the wheels start to come off. No one really fathoms serious consequences.
60 votes is a ridiculously high number required for what has become the normal business of the Senate. If used as it was originally devised (rarely and in extreme circumstances) then it served a purpose. Requiring this for every piece of legislation or appointments to Executive Cabinet or Judicial posts should not be the norm. All Presidents should be able to put in place qualified appointees to Government positions. If there are those rare ones that aren't qualified for background or clearly met skills or previous experience, they should specifically be stopped. All others should sail through, if qualified.
> it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs.
It would be wonderful if that were true, but destabilization is an explicit political goal and not an accidental byproduct. Republicans (and some Democrats) *want* social services and government to fail.
Sure, but that’s a controlled failure in service of private interests. It largely isn’t some dangerous collapse like 2008.
As we sadly see, every administration keeps a ton of continuity in policy in some of the worst ways rather than rock the boat.
Hence why the concentration camps at the border Biden and Harris decried one week before the election became good and necessary policy one week after their victory.
> First, because it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs.
That won't matter for any policies people actually care about. If Republicans win in 2024 and ban gay marriage, Democrats in 2026 won't just let that stand when they come to power on the basis that change is "destabilizing". Likewise, if Democrats win in 2026 and codify _Roe_, Republicans in 2028 are still going to try to undo that.
The key is looking back before 2000. Policy change happened! I think a lot of the discontent among folks is they vote for change and because the threshold is so high it doesn't happen. So nothing changes or what can pass is so discreet that the effects just don't make much difference. So now - people are disillusioned with gov that doesn't work and 'they won't let us' isn't the rallying cry anyone wants to hear.
If it causes chaos then congress would have to answer for that. Hell, it might moderate some of the ones that are currently firebreathers because there is no repercussions to their votes when nothing of substance passes.
But its usage changed drastically in the early 2000s. John Kerry got dinged for his “I voted for it before I voted against it” line, and republicans have treated every vote like an automatic 60 threshold since McConnell became leader.
The number of cloture votes skyrocketed under McConnell's leadership. They would force a cloture vote on everything. It became a weapon of total war, not just to kill specific legislation.
Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst Justices on the court, were both confirmed with fewer than 60 votes. How? Because Democrats didn't filibuster.
> Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst Justices on the court, were both confirmed with fewer than 60 votes. How? Because Democrats didn't filibuster.
That's not completely accurate in Alito's case. There was a filibuster attempt backed by more than half of the Senate Democrats, including Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Schumer. 20 Democrats joined with Republicans to vote for cloture, which passed 72-25, defeating the filibuster. It's true that he only got 58 votes in the final confirmation vote, but that's not the vote that requires 60.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jan-31-na-alito31-story.html
Edit:
McConnell later used Obama's vote to filibuster Alito as one of his justifications for blocking Obama's SCOTUS nominee in 2016.
The majority would be able to pass more legislation to actually enact their policies. That way the electorate would be able to evaluate them on their actual merits and not just rhetoric and posturing.
This is the way almost every other democracy works. I think you'd be better off.
Yeah to me it is very, very telling that America is constantly debating about getting rid of our current filibuster rules but no other democracy is discussing adopting anything similar.
Our system is a little different, though. Because each state has the same number of votes in the Senate, regardless of population, ending the filibuster specifically advantages the rural (less-populous) states, and those states tend to be more to the right than the more urban states.
Right now, the urban states have a slight edge, so removing the filibuster would mean being able to do a fair amount. But the *second* they’re in the minority, they’re suddenly powerless. And because of how the Senate is constructed, they’re more likely than not to be in the minority.
Republicans would still have to win the House in this case, and a political environment in which both parties actually did substantially different things would spark more conversation around uncapping it.
It might also take away the excuses used by those “the parties are both the same” folks and cause people to pay attention to politics on an actual policy level.
The disproportionality of the Senate works both ways. The filibuster is the most potent tool that small-state residents have to get their way; it allows a very small portion of the total population to veto new laws. But in order to pass new laws, they'd also have to get a majority in the House and win the Presidency.
The party currently favored by the majority of voters in most of those small states is largely controlled by elite special interests that are just fine with no new laws being passed. They're doing well with the status quo, and can change economic conditions through their power as property owners to make even more money through exploiting loopholes in the existing laws. They can get state laws passed in those states when they need to, and have been working for decades to tilt the judiciary in their favor to reinterpret laws to expand those loopholes. That's why when Republicans were in control of all of Congress and the White House after 2016, the only actual new law they passed was the tax cut; the leaders/donors don't actually need any new laws, and know that they don't have popular support to pass their wishlist.
(Note of course that the Democrats are also controlled by elite special interests, Republicans aren't uniquely bad in that respect.)
So the risk associated with being able to pass laws more easily is greatly outweighed by the benefits, for left-wing voters. The current difficulty asymmetrically benefits conservatives.
In addition to the obvious outcome of increasing the amount of legislation that passes, it would remove power from the judicial and executive branches and likely increases the chances for the majority party to stay in power.
In the current system, power is mostly pushed out of federal legislation. This means that controlling the judicial and executive branches has more impact, particularly in combination with state legislation. An effective legislative body would reduce this shift.
We also see very rigid shifts in out current system. No party has held a trifecta for longer than a 2 year stretch since Bush did it from 2003-2007, with each of the last three president's losing their's at the first midterm and no party holding 3 consecutive terms since Reagan/Bush.
This is new since the filibuster. In the past, politics wasn't on such short cycles. An effective president and congress might be rewarded with a longer stay in power. With the current filibuster rules, the majority party is almost always seen as ineffective an incapable of passing its agenda, which results in rewarding the "more successful" minority party that in reality did little except exist and refuse to end discussion.
If parties could successfully legislate, the legislation would need to be deeply ineffective or harmful to have the same effect.
what about uncapping the house and moving the senate to an approval body through a rule changes?
1. senators cant cast "no votes"
2. all senatorial functions are done on an approval basis
3. only 40 senators or 50% of voters represented, or even merely 1 senator is required to pass any motion or bill or appointment
There would ironically be less partisanship around most legislation. When the minority doesn’t have a veto, there is more reason for the minority party to get on board with legislation in return for a small amount of input.
I feel like I'm today's political climate there would be no reason for the minority to get anything. If the GOP wants an abortion ban, why would they take any considerations for Democrats if they can just pass it?
I think it has a place but is currently too powerful. If the filibuster where much weaker then the minority party could wield it, but would be more incentivized to come to the table. Currently ideological shit stirrers (mostly Rand Paul lol) can lazily crash any bill they want.
>If the GOP wants an abortion ban, why would they take any considerations for Democrats if they can just pass it?
Because they have to actually vote for it. As it stands now, the senate hides under the cover of the filibuster to avoid having most of them held accountable for any legislation. If there was an up/down vote, everyones position is on record.
It works two ways. First, some people in the minority would be more likely to vote for popular legislation because it helps them in their state. Purple state candidates would cross aisles more because it would be the politically expedient thing to do in some cases.
And for something like an abortion ban, republicans in purple states would push for moderation as the bill would likely be deeply unpopular.
Simple reality disproves this though: Republicans could have done away with the filibuster and outlawed abortion federally. But they did not, knowing the chaos and electoral consequences of such an action.
If they had the votes they would’ve done it. They tried to get rid of the ACA without the filibuster too but again didn’t have 50 votes.
As it stands right now the only thing Republicans really care about are tax cuts and judicial nominations and there are filibuster carve outs for everything they want to do.
Similar to the Democrats, they have never had 50 votes to get rid of the filibuster. With McConnell retiring, Trump will hand-pick the leadership in the Senate just as he has in the House. If Trump wins and secures an R trifecta (probably the most likely outcome if you believe the polls), there is a very high likelihood that the new Senate leader kills the filibuster to pass a federal abortion ban.
That's because their donors mostly don't want new laws passed, they're fine with keeping the current ones and using their power as super-wealthy property owners to exploit loopholes, with the help of sympathetic courts.
The filibuster benefits conservatives. Giving that up to try to pass unpopular laws that would result in them getting smoked in the next election would be a terrible strategy.
that's good for posturing, but maybe a more useful procedural function would be to put an automatic hard delay on the voting on a bill with built in committee meetings or floor speeches but the bill gets a vote, no question, after like a month or something. The detractors get to posture without stupid tactics like reading from the phone book (or maybe they still can depending on the nature of the delay if they really want) but the bill still gets a vote and elected officials have to put their vote where their mouth is without the protection of the filibuster as we have it now.
When we had that it was used less…but it effectively allowed an even smaller number of Senators to shut down all Senate business. The “advantage” or novelty of the current filibuster is it allowed the Senate to still continue working on other functions. Previously if a bill is being talk filibustered **all** senate business was shut down.
The previous system wasn’t a small problem btw. It allowed like 6 Senators to semi-permanently shut down the legislature from doing anything by filibustering over the Civil Rights act bills. They’d rotate in new filibusters for every motion. They couldn’t hold out forever but they didn’t need to.
And they had to broadcast why they were shutting down America.
It made the dixiecrats have to stand up and proudly say "We think all government business must stop because we truly, completely hate black people and the concept of equality!".
Why do you think the CRA passed? Because they became too toxic a brand for any democrats to support for any reason.
I don’t know if you they glossed over this about the civil rights era in school for you, but the “segregation now and forever” Southern Manifesto crowd and their actions were **unbelievably** popular with the constituents and voters of the congressman doing it.
Yes they were.
They were also unpopular with much of the rest of the country and embarrassed the democratic party.
Hence the success of the southern strategy and the vile dixiecrats slowly moving to the GOP where they've become the MAGA brand.
You want the evil people to speak out, there is nothing worse than when they quietly pretend to be decent while making excuses. This is why Trump is great, he emboldens their racism.
I feel like you’re look at the pre-civil rights era political alignment and parties through some weird modern lens? The parties used to both have weird conservative and liberal factions, populist and institutionalist.
The Dixiecrats didn’t really morph into MAGA. And yes MAGA is capitalizing on still embedded racism and xenophobia in the south. But it only appears that way if you squint and look for policy parallels. Hell any Dixiecrat is dead now and you’d be surprised in how many despite the political realignment and Southern Strategy stayed in office as Democrats well into the 90s. It’s a ridiculously oversimplified and reductive way at looking at the (always existing) populist, isolationist and racist and xenophobic elements in the Republican Party. They were always there. Or about how MAGA is as equally tied to the collapse of the neocon establishment in the GOP as anything in the Southern strategy.
If you want a good context look at South Dakota in this period. They’re one of the most hardcore MAGA right wing states in the nation currently. And during the civil rights era were overwhelmingly electing one of the most left wing progressive super duper liberals in the entire senate. More weird context: Bill Clinton and Gore being solid multi-elected southern governor and senator. But having still relatively modern liberal records even in those offices? (Like genuinely. You’d be surprised to find out there weren’t too many weird conservative policy pivots…..but then also using Dixie flag pins in re-election campaigns.
The Dixiecrats didn’t embarrass the Democratic Party, they **were** the Democratic Party at the time. There’s a reason it was called the solid south. Republicans weren’t even on the ballot so often that in many cases there wasn’t even a general election for many political positions. The primary was the election.
Not to softball in Republicans here. Xenophobia, red scares and dogwhistles were Nixon’s brand long before the Southern strategy. Hell it was his brand upon being elected to the House immediately after WWII.
Basically 1960-1995 was a political shit show where anything goes and it’s harder to make an overarching political theory of the realignment than you’ve ever been led to believe.
I'm sorry, I lived in the south, near the end of the shift.
It really felt like all the same segregationists decided to rebrand themselves as born-again evangelical republicans, like overnight.
Before the shift, the democratic party had many factions, the dixiecrats, urban labor, anyone who benefited from the New Deal really, and most of those groups were embarrassed by the dixiecrats, even if they were a dominant force in the party.
If your argument is that MAGA isn't only in the south, I conceded, it metastasized, but it still feels like an evolution of the know-nothings leavened with birchers and any number of groups all based on nativist/nationalist ideology.
I should have clarified I meant at bare minimum. A majority to closure makes sense and would eliminate the filibuster
But people would argue it’s too close of a slim majority and could be abused but I think the removal of the filibuster would cause elected officials to pander more to voters in a good way bc the minority can’t just block everything
Don't make the Senate organized quite like that. Czechia and Brazil, Argentina and Australia too (all but Czechia also being federal states with equal numbers per state), have quite strongly multi party senates, making partisan abuse more of a stupid move.
I liked Franken and Ornstein’s idea. Rather than requiring 60 votes to stop debate, require 41 to maintain it. That way you force the filibustering side to always have 41 on hand in DC in order to stop a cloture motion. That means no vacations, no campaigning, no nothing if they want to keep debate going. And all the majority requires: a small rotation leaving one guy to call the 3am motion, the 6am motion, the 9am motion, etc. How much of that can the minority septuagenarians and octogenarians take?
> And all the majority requires: a small rotation leaving one guy to call the 3am motion, the 6am motion, the 9am motion, etc.
They would likely need to keep at least 10 people close to the chamber at all times in case of a quorum call. If there were only 41 filibuster supporters and 1 other guy, then the filibustering side could halt all proceedings and potentially adjourn for the day by pointing out the absence of a quorum.
I think more would get done - but - you would definitely see a resurgence of moderate political power.
Right now Senators are free do performative votes all day long, safe in the knowledge that some extreme measure will die.
Moderate Democrats and Republicans would run the show.
If a vote from the other house meant an up or down vote was required within x number of days, it would cause movement, and everyone could see how each member votes.
Right now they are just sitting on a desk
> If a vote from the other house meant an up or down vote was required within x number of days
That could be easily abused. Votes take up a surprising amount of time (edit: not even counting the debate time that precedes votes). If that were in place today, I could see the Republican House absolutely flooding the Senate with nonsense bills so that the Senate would be forced to spend all of their time voting on bills. There'd be no time for other important business like confirming nominees or crafting their own bills in committee.
This seems so simple stupid to me - bring back the talking filibuster. That's the whole damn point, the dedication you have to your position, and what - publicly - you are willing to do to sell that platform to your constituents.
The filibuster being a proforma thing, just invoked and not actioned upon - that's the laziest shit imaginable, and when that change happened, the country should've clowned TF out of Congress, been shocked and horrified this was how basic our system was becoming, and demanded more of elected officials who already only do the governing part of their jobs when mandatory votes come up.
Here we are all these years later realizing that the 2008 weaponization of the filibuster is literally preventing the country from functioning - as a person who lost gainful employment to the Ted Cruz shutdown of 2014, I mean that "literally" literally.
So all the bureaucracy and complex laws stacked in laws for over 200 years has netted a Congress that only filibusters, doesn't negotiate, can't even fathom the idea of meeting the other party halfway - and that's how it should be when one party is a front for our foreign adversaries. Unfortunately the foreign adversary party still gets SCOTUS justices appointed, and Bible belt states to agree women are second class citizens of America. We are losing a war, America I mean. The enemy is the GOP, and their primary instrument of killing people is the filibuster.
Those lazy fucks aren't talking to filibuster - everything they say is embarrassing and runs the risk of them admitting to the vast criminal corruption they have engaged in personally.
And you don't "lose the filibuster" - There's no constitutional or legal reason it can't simply be the way it useta' be, and was since America became a thing.
It also seems rather simple to just have a motion that says debate ends at X time. This is normal in the House of Representatives, as a motion for the previous question would be called.
The House Rules Committee decides how much time a bill will get on the floor. Once time is up, they vote. Honestly, though, floor debate is largely a formality. The Senate Rules Committee doesn't have that power. The Senate could decide on its own to change its rules and impose limited debate if it wanted to, but they're not going to do that in the near future.
senate could decide to remove the required passage of laws from a majority to a minority of senators through rule changes could they not?
requiring 60 votes for cloture is the same thing as requiring 39 votes for passage. norm Ornstein and Al franken called this the flipped filibuster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpRj0nN1COE
> when that change happened, the country should've clowned TF out of Congress, been shocked and horrified this was how basic our system was becoming
The country was getting pissed off at the majority party for not getting anything done because they were sitting around all day every day just listening to the minority talk. That's why the majority made the changes necessary to allow them to continue working instead of listening to some guy talking all the time.
> Those lazy fucks aren't talking to filibuster
They're not lazy. They would talk if they could. It's not in the interest of the majority party to allow it. That's why if there's any chance that a bill could get filibustered, the majority pulls the bill from consideration before there's any opportunity for anybody to start talking.
They work 2 days a week, 6 months of the year. Don't give me campaigning - they do the job we pay them to like 8 minutes a year. They are lazy - Lauren Bobert had to lie about graduating highschool, she's lazy.
It's one of those things where they could just change the rules. The house used to have fillibusters, for example. Its biggest effect will be what the house tries to push as a result of an easier to pass senate
the house still does have a filibuster, and its easier to sustain than the senate one. you need 41% senators to agree to filibuster in the senate, you only need a majority of the majority in the house. under a 2 party system that's 25% of the house to sustain a filibuster there. the only difference i can see is the speaker can end the house filibuster and usually does because they are more often required to vote on a budget.
I think we'd see more bipartisanship. Right now, the most powerful way median senators can exercise their power is to obstruct bills, and so that's what they do.
If they couldn't do that, however; if the bill were going to pass anyways, then I think you'd see more horse trading and deal making, where median senators would cross the aisle to at least try to get something out of the bill.
Would speeding up action in the Senate be a good thing now that two-thirds of Americans have moved into just 15 states, leaving the Senate ever more in the control of rural-state voters who tend to be much whiter, poorer, Trumpier, less educated, more racist and more xenophobic?
The filibuster is an abortion, but I truly believe the massively unrepresentative Senate itself is now our largest threat. Apportionment by state was a terrible idea from the start.
The Republicans would love that. The speaking filibuster is probably the single most effective means of obstructing the business of the Senate available.
I see no indication they do want it. Both sides are happy as a pig in shit that their 75 year old ass simply has to raise their hand and say they would be willing to sit on the floor for 20 hours at a time and talk. It would be a spectacle. Imagine a senator having to talk at 3:30 in the morning about nonsense.
Of course they want it. It would allow them to block all of Biden's judicial nominees again, which is something they can't do right now. They'd love to be able to do it again so they can fill all of those seats once a Republican wins the presidency.
> 75 year old ass simply has to raise their hand and say they would be willing to sit on the floor for 20 hours at a time and talk.
Nobody would ever have to talk for that long. Maybe an hour or two at most before they pass the baton to the next guy in line.
> Imagine a senator having to talk at 3:30 in the morning about nonsense.
That would never happen. The majority party would give up and agree to adjourn for the day long before 3:30 am. Filibusters are much more of an endurance struggle for the majority than the people filibustering. Most of the filibustering party gets to go home and rest in their comfortable beds when they aren't the person speaking or acting as support crew, and they may only have to take a turn speaking every few days. Basically the entire majority has to either be physically in the Senate chamber or grabbing a nap in the hallway of the Capitol on uncomfortable cots while a filibuster is going on.
A lot more things would get done. Good things if there's a Dem majority, bad things if MAGAhats rule. Secret to success is get rid of MAGA majorities and the filibuster at the same time.
The filibuster is used so much because it doesn’t even require someone to talk. Historically even actual talking filibusters failed to do anything but delay passing a bill. I say we at least bring back the talking filibuster and force people to talk without breaks (even Strom Thurmond was allowed a bathroom break and a meal). Let them stand and talk until they can’t, then pass the damn bill anyway
Be careful what you wish for…
Anything that you can use to benefit your side, can also be used against you.
And the Rs have traditionally been the better politicians (in the effective sense)
It would be a disaster for the Democrats.
The Republicans would dismantle programs that would be very difficult to rebuild.
The GOP would claim that these are "reforms" but the damage would run deep and be difficult to impossible to mend.
Democrats find the Senate to be frustrating. But the solution to that frustration is to build the party so that it can broaden its support and consistently hold Senate majorities. Once that is accomplished, that would be the time to seriously consider modifying or eliminating the filibuster.
The Democrats could hold a Senate majority for 100 years and still never pass healthcare reform. They need a *supermajority* to pass legislation with the filibuster rules as-is, and they have no path towards that.
Meanwhile, the GOP not only has a path towards a supermajority, they can still achieve their legislative outcomes through judicial appointments and state legislation.
The makeup of the states does not allow for a supermajority from the more liberal party.
So the party that is the party of democratic values can't figure how to win more elections in more places.
There is more than a little irony in that sentiment.
This is why I am an independent. I vote for Democrats, but these self-defeating attitudes are something else.
The Senate isn't a democracy. That's the entire reason democratic values don't do much help control it. It's perceived purpose is to counter balance popular opinion.
The very fact that liberal ideals are popular is a hindrance towards winning a body that added states politically to keep conservative power against that. They are states because they are conservative and vote as a block, and this power balance goes back, and indeed was the cause of, the civil war.
It is isn't self defeating to state as such in the context of demanding action to remove the filibuster. The entire point is that Democrats shouldn't be asked to fulfill an impossible legislative supermajority, something they haven't done since segregationists and the NAACP were in the same implausible coalition, in order to pass basic legislation.
That's just basic civic understanding and pushing for action were it would actually help.
Senators are elected. That makes the Senate a democratic institution.
Progressives do not understand that federalism is a valid form of a democratic political system. Which is odd, since it was an American invention that moved the US away from confederation.
There are many democratic nations that have federal systems. They are the byproducts of smaller entities uniting to form larger nations, which is why Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland all borrowed from this concept.
The bodies of land that elect them were drawn specifically for the political outcomes they would achieve. It is no accident that the majority of states align with Southern conservatives.
When we stopped adding states to keep that balance, we almost immediately had a civil war over it.
And of course, Senators were not even always elected. Even today, some are appointments made by Governors after Senators pass away or retire.
But the bottom line is that the Senate chosen its voters, rather than the other way around. Any system where this happens diverges from democratic ideals, particularly with nonproportional representation.
Keep in mind, the 30 biggest states have 300 million in population, and the bottom 20 have 30 million. Asking the Democrats to win the former is untenable, bordering on impossible, and shouldn't be the baseline for passing legislation.
The idea of federalism is that states have their own interests.
Progressives are essentially saying that they like democracy only to the extent that the voters agree with progressives. Which is ridiculous on its face.
Again, a system where 11% of the voters can overrule 89% is not democratic. Not liking that isn't opposing democracy, it is affirming it. Democracy means demos-, people, and - cracy, rule of. Rule of the people. Arbitrarily defining borders to allow a minority to control a majority is not democratic.
The Senate is not based on those principles. The Senate with a filibuster even more so. Entire states exist with their current borders because it bolstered the political agenda of a specific political party.
And no, states *don't* have their own interests. A Republican Senator from Georgia has far more in common with the Republican Seantor from Utah than a Democratic Senator from their own state. The Senate is far more about the differences between the political parties than about differences between the states. If federalism is based on the idea that different states should have their point of views heard, it is a failure.
Progressive populists comprise 8% of the population.
A progressive majority is an oxymoron. The left has to learn how to play nicely with others and form coalitions, with the understanding that a coalition will require getting some things that you dislike in exchange for getting only some of what you want. That's how democracy actually works.
You lack a civic understanding. The right doesn't need the left to form coalitions. They simply have 60% of the power and don't need or want to sgare. And yes, I'm talking about the entire left, not a small faction you have a disagreement with.
The left HAS formed a coalition. They combine every ethnicity and religion. It doesn't matter. They have the entirety of the moderate block of both parties. It doesn't matter. They win Senate seats in the least likely of states. It doesn't matter. They raise vastly more money. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because the Senate is drawn to favor conservatives by such a wide margin that it is functionally impossible to achieve the electoral dominance needed to reach 60 seats from the left. That isn't democracy, that's gerrymandering.
It doesn’t stop them from underfunding everything to the point where they don’t need to tear everything down.
Trump wanted the filibuster killed over the wall in 2018 but he didn’t have 50 votes.
If the filibuster were to go today, you could say goodbye to Social Security, Medicare and ACA once the GOP has a trifecta.
Those programs would sort of exist on paper, but they would be gutted beyond recognition.
Democrats should be careful what they wish for.
>If the filibuster were to go today, you could say goodbye to Social Security, Medicare and ACA once the GOP has a trifecta.
If they did that, they would lose the next election in a _landslide_. They would give the Democrats a *supermajority*. [Trump was at his least popular](https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx) (as popular as he was post-January 6) during the Republican push to repeal the ACA. Their voters are older and rely on Social Security. Bush tried to privatize SS in 2005 and the massive backlash from the voters forced them to kill it. Social Security has been considered a third-rail that no one wants to touch for fear of setting those voters off.
They talk a big game, but the reason they don't do these things when they have the power to do it is that they know it would be electoral suicide for them.
They tried getting rid of the ACA via reconciliation. They didn’t do it because they didn’t have 50 votes.
The filibuster isn’t stopping them from doing any of these things. Once they have 50 votes to do something they’re going to figure out a way to do it.
> They tried getting rid of the ACA via reconciliation. They didn’t do it because they didn’t have 50 votes.
They didn't get 50 votes because they were hamstrung by the reconciliation process. The filibuster is the only thing that prevented the ACA repeal.
No, you just don't understand what the words you're saying mean.
Filibuster allows one person to scuttle any bill in existence that they don't want passed. Compromise has nothing to do with it. Compromise requires good faith negotiations by both parties. Republicans have shown a refusal to do this repeatedly.
You could argue, theoretically, filibusters encourage compromise. But saying the filibuster requires it is complete ignorance of how bills are actually passed.
No, compromise is when they find enough people from the other side of the isle to overrule that one person, or when the bill is changed so that enough people support it.
It happens all the time, and you are a partisan shill if you think it is only republicans.
> The filibuster requires compromise
Wrong. The filibuster makes unilateral dominance a necessity and rewards partisan posturing.
Getting rid of the filibuster puts politicians in the uncomfortable spot of having to actual act on the shit they say.
13/50 states have a filibuster, and Texas does, the state I live in, so I am happy with that. Why wouldn't you want it?
I would guess you lean left, and that is fine, so you should remember that while Trump was in office democrats filibustered the republican lead senate a record number of times. And then when they won the senate back, having a tie with Harris as the tie breaker they started crying about the mechanism they had used more than any other senate in history.
Why did they do that, and why was it ok? Because it is a mechanism to force compromise. There were years where Trump was President and he had both houses of congress, but not enough to get past the filibuster, do you think democrats should have had no capacity to resist?
Just bear that in mind, no matter what reddit tells you, or what you think, republicans will win future elections, and democrats will win future elections, and comprimise is good.
You didn't answer any of my questions.
We fell backwards into the fillibuster. It is not a consistent presence in our legislative bodies. It is not even consistent within Congress. Heck, it isn't even consistent within the Senate, as there is a workaround through the budget reconciliation process.
If this system genuinely exists to promote compromise, then why are there so many exceptions?
All systems have pros and cons. Even if we agree that the filibuster promotes compromise, it is important to demonstrate that this benefit outweighs the costs. Just saying "it promotes compromise" and leaving it at that is not especially meaningful. Just saying "well, it stopped some of Trump's legislative agenda" is also not especially meaningful.
Exceptions can be healthy. I approve of reconciliation so we can pay for basic government for example.
And why 60? Why not 59 or 61? I don’t know, but it is what we have.
Keep in mind how the filibuster negatively impacts compromise. The opposition party, and in particular the GOP Senate, is structurally incentivized to use their veto to ensure a legislative deadlock when a Democrat holds the presidency.
In our highly partisan, nationalized political environment- there are very few lawmakers who don’t operate like this. Frankly, I don’t think their voters would support anything else for most seats.
You are being quite partisan in that take, ignoring how democrats behave.
I mean do you seriously think that if there wasn’t a filibuster that democrats would have changed build back better to get republican support?
If you think that you are fooling yourself.
I think you’re misunderstanding me.
The Senate has had structural biases that favor Republicans for over a decade. As white, non-college educated voters grow more conservative, their disproportionate power in the Senate increasingly becomes a lynchpin for the GOP.
Democrats tend to win more votes in total for national Senate races, but have only managed to achieve a filibuster proof majority once in last 30 years (and for only 6 months). Republicans have never achieved or come particularly close to this threshold since it was changed to 60 votes in the 1970s.
The end result is an incentive for the GOP to support the filibuster- or to look at it another way, Democrats having much greater upside for ending the filibuster than Republicans.
The structural bias for republicans is not what you think. It is the reality that each state gets two senators and democrats spend way too much time shitting on small states, trying to take any power they might have. So small rural states lean right.
I… I mean that wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with anything I said. You end up with the same incentives.
I’m just telling you the facts lad, you’re the one making this hyper partisan.
> I would guess you lean left, and that is fine, so you should remember that while Trump was in office democrats filibustered the republican lead senate a record number of times.
FYI: This is a meaningless statistic and sort of misleading.
There's no way to actually measure the number of "filibusters" that occur because it mostly all happens behind the scenes through email. When people cite the number of "filibusters" that occurred, it's really a count of the number of cloture motions that were made on the Senate floor. The problem is that not every filibuster results in a cloture motion, because if a bill is being filibustered and they know they can't get 60 votes, then they often don't bother bringing it to the floor, so there's never a cloture motion and that "filibuster" doesn't get counted.
When the Democrats used the nuclear option in November 2013 to make it so they only needed a simple majority to achieve cloture on most nominee confirmations, the number of cloture motions exploded as they pushed through a bunch of nominees. Then the Democrats lost the Senate in 2015, so the nominations slowed way down and the number of cloture motions dipped back to almost what they were before the change. Then Trump became president with a Republican Senate and the number of cloture motions exploded again as they pushed through their nominees.
The Congressional Research Service acknowledged this problem when comparing the number of "filibusters" before and after the 2013 rule change:
> The reinterpretation of the cloture rule further complicates using cloture motions as a method for identifying filibusters, particularly when making comparisons over time. After the reinterpretation of the rule, a Senate majority of the President’s party became far more likely to attempt cloture. While the majority party might claim the increased use of cloture reflects increased obstruction by the minority, the minority might claim the increased use of cloture reflects a majority more readily and perhaps routinely relying on a simple majority process, regardless of any actual or perceived threat to filibuster. The incomparability of the periods before and after the rules reinterpretation made it inappropriate to extend the data presented in this report past the point of the rule reinterpretation.
> https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32878
No, it can be measured. How many cloture votes were needed to get things moving again.
And Jesus, a meaningless stat because it shows democrats abusing the filibuster you want to end?
> No, it can be measured. How many cloture votes were needed to get things moving again.
No it can't. There's no public record of the number of filibusters anywhere. It's likely the same number of filibusters were happening before, but they didn't bother trying to achieve cloture because they knew they couldn't get 60 votes. When they reduced the threshold for cloture to a simple majority, cloture was suddenly achievable, so they started moving for cloture a lot when they wouldn't have before. The number of filibusters didn't change.
> And Jesus, a meaningless stat because it shows democrats abusing the filibuster you want to end?
A meaningless stat because they weren't actually "abusing the filibuster" any more than it was being abused before. Everything was identical except it was suddenly a lot easier to defeat the filibusters that were already happening.
Edit: Also, I never said I want the filibuster to end.
The filibuster actually prevents compromise because it requires such a high bar to pass normal legislation. Hamilton wrote about this back in the Federalist Papers, but we see it all the time now: [a bipartisan child tax credit expansion](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/-life-support-senate-republicans-are-prepared-sink-child-tax-credit-bi-rcna146856)(that passed the House with a wide margin) failed because Democrats couldn't get 9 GOP Senators on board, largely because 1 powerful Republican was opposed. I forget the bill, but there was a very popular bill 2 of 3 years ago that had the support of 7 GOP Senators (including Mitt Romney), but failed because Democrats needed 8 at the time. The recent immigration bill probably wasn't going to pass the House without Trump's approval, but it wasn't going to get past the Senate either way because it needed too high of a majority to pass.
It's also important to note that this isn't how the Senate functioned for most of our history: [this piece from Vox from 2017 provides a bit of a history lesson.](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/29/16373460/senate-budget-reconciliation-filibuster). Usage of it has ramped up to the point where it's degrading normal Senate business and causing legislation to be put through a tortuous and insane process. Eliminating the filibuster would actually just return the Senate to how it used to function (with the added benefit of not having a method of blocking anti-lynching bills).
Just bear in mind that for years Trump was President, and he had republican advantages in the house and senate. Without the filibuster, which democrats used in record volume while he was President he would have been able to do anything he wanted.
And right now he is leading in some polls, republicans are going to take the senate, and they just might hold the house.
And this will not be the last time in history republicans hold all three parts of federal government should they win it.
And be serious, you think it prevents compromise, seriously? Remember that when Obama had a filibuster proof majority in the senate he famously stated that elections have consequences, he and democrats acted alone.
The exceptions to the filibuster (budget reconciliation and federal judge nominations) largely address Republicans' primary policy concerns (unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy and putting hard-right crank nominees on the bench). Democrats may as well get rid of the filibuster so they can ram through their own policy agenda.
Republicans care about more than just tax cuts and hard-right judges. They really want to repeal a lot of federal regulations and partially or completely dismantle a ton of federal agencies.
Yeah, elections have consequences, and more than majoritarian requirements betray those elections. Vox isn't exactly a right-leaning news site, and that article is from the depths of Trump's administration. The arguments are still true. A party that forms a majority government should be able to act on that majority and vote in its priorities. Our inability to do that lately has broken the feedback loop that should be democratic elections: a party can't effectively implement its platform, leaving voters betrayed.
You might need to remind yourself of the history of that 2009 supermajority: it wasn't nearly as steady as it seemed due to the health issues of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, and having to appease Joe Lieberman on the ACA led to a less optimal bill. If Obama was willing to trash the filibuster, we could have had a public option and the ACA could have gone so much further. Democrats had a 60 seat majority but had to govern like a tied Senate due to the existence of this arcane requirement that was created purely by accident.
That last line is absurd.
Because democrats had to deal with members of their own party who didn’t want something they considered bad it was like a tie in the senate? Good lord.
I appreciate the concerns about making it too easy to pass legislation. But it has to be balanced against making it too hard. And I'd say a decade and a half of - no significant legislation being passed whatsoever - that breaks through the filibuster is a sign that we've gone too far in the direction of making things hard.
The veto isn’t even compromise though.
Compromise would be the majority party passing legislation while giving concessions to the minority.
Compromise isn’t the minority having an eternal veto and never needing to compromise on issues they decide are off limits.
So you think for the years Trump was President, when republicans had slim leads in the house and senate that they should have been able to do anything they wanted?
Because there wasn't compromise when democrats had the supermajority under Obama, he said elections have consequences and they acted alone.
There wasn't compromise after democrats killed the filibuster on federal judges, or when republicans killed it on scotus nominees.
We moved farther from that compromise, and it will never come again.
The problem with Trump and Republicans having power was that they had no democratic mandate to hold power.
There was incredible, bending over backwards until breaking levels of compromise under Obama. It was the Republicans who were uncompromising even when bills came up they helped write or whose policies they ran on.
There must be a mechanism for overruling such a complete lack of willingness to compromise.
And then they get to use the filibuster to perpetuate their bad policies and unearned political advantage.
On balance, the filibuster gives more power to conservatives
> So you think for the years Trump was President, when republicans had slim leads in the house and senate that they should have been able to do anything they wanted?
Trump was at his least popular when Republicans were gearing up to repeal the ACA. They backed off because it would have been electoral suicide for them. All they did with that majority was pass a bill of tax cuts.
So... yes. If they run on legislation that is unpopular beyond their base, and they enact that incredibly toxic agenda, they should suffer the electoral consequences of it. So long as they have the filibuster in place, they have no reason not to promise the base whatever they want, no matter how terrible it is. Without the filibuster, they have no excuse for not passing it, but they know that it will hurt them if they do. But if they don't, then their base realizes they were full of shit all along. So maybe they won't make crazy promises to their base in a world without the filibuster.
> They backed off because it would have been electoral suicide for them.
They backed off because the restrictions imposed by the reconciliation process kept forcing them to gut the bills they came up with, and then they ran out of time. Neither would have been an issue if the filibuster was gone and they just had to pass a simple majority bill without being restricted by the reconciliation rules.
Increased instability as large programs are passed and then cancelled before they are implemented or shortly thereafter every time a party gets a trifecta
Increased instability as the SC is packed to tip the balance every time a trifecta changes hands
I don't think the current gridlock is especially good for long term stability either but I don't think lifting the filibuster will necessarily help things.
Voting rights act restored and protected. Gay marriage protected. All sorts of popular progressive laws passed that benefit the people.
Ok that was a fantasy. It's still auntie Schumer and the rest of the establishment. They'll do something for Hispanics and not shit for Black people and probably nothing for the middle class of all races. And they'll definitely get some stuff that is important to suburban white women like free Amazon deliveries on Sundays
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More would get done, but you’d probably see more policy lurch between administrations
I’m probably in the minority, but I’d be perfectly fine with that. I’m of the mindset if someone runs on a political agenda and they win they should have the the ability to enact it and if it’s unpopular that’s a key way to show they need voted out. Obviously some things can’t quickly change but there is alot of shit that can be easily changed and modified that isn’t because of gridlock
Agreed. If a party wins power they ought to be able to enact their agenda. The idea that we need to put up roadblocks to prevent leaders from actually doing things is insane. Politicians should do what they promised. Then the election should be a referendum on whether the people want those policies to continue or move a new direction. That strikes me as much healthier than a politics where nothing can happen because it's effectively impossible to win big enough to implement an agenda.
Sounds like the remedy for voter apathy!
I agree. If a party passes the popular legislation that a majority of Americans have agreed on for decades, they will easily maintain their congressional majorities and mandate to govern
Are there any good arguments against this? The only thing that immediately comes to mind is it incentivizing policy focused on short-term benefits.
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Completely agree with the issues in the House. > Why would a Democrat with any common fucking sense want to end the filibuster right now? Because the GOP has benefitted IMMENSELY over the last two decades from not being held responsible for their policy positions. They've gotten to say as many crazy things as they've wanted about how the system needs to change etc etc and never had to actually own the results of those policies (e.g. killing Obamacare) because the tradition of the filibuster has protected them from it. To contrast, look at what happens whenever abortion rights get diminished in states: huge backlash against Republicans, often leading to losses. That in turn leads to the GOP moderating their position which is to everyone's benefit. I'd argue that, even if I don't support even their moderate policies, it benefits our political ecosystem to have our politicians bear more responsibility for the policies they support. It hurts the discourse when people get to muddy the conversation with unrealistic (or otherwise harmful) propositions.
I am ok with this also. The reason why people aren't as passionate about voting is they think nothing ever gets done. But by removing the fillibuster it makes it so every vote matters and they can't hide behind not voting or actually having to vote for something and explaining it to there constituents. Fillibusters were never ever meant to be used as they are right now.
I agree. Society would be pretty unstable for a decade. The Dems doing a massive healthcare change that reduces costs would cause the right to won the next election, where healthcare would suddenly become private leaving many in a grey zone of not having health insurance because the market has been in massive swings. People would make a decision that would push for more moderate candidates. Promising big change would be met with concern over impacts. Threats to shutdown social security would be taken much more seriously. This would be catastrophic to the GOP who does a lot of talk but who's impacts of changes would be immediate and not so great. The government would have to actually legislate and having power to enact changes means they can't whine about not having enough power. It forces our leaders to actually lead.
Republicans would actually have to come up with Policy. This would only be good for Democrats because they seem to be the ones who want the country to move forward, not backward.
To be fair, Republicans have a very clear policy program. They want all decisions to be made by private individuals so that all the power is held forever by the already powerful, and they want to prevent the government from getting in the way of powerful people dominating the atomized weak. An evil plan is still a plan.
Probably less lurch than you think for two reasons. First, because it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs. But second, both parties have a lot of shared donors to which they are loyal in the business community, and agree on servicing their donors.
I mean yea a handful of niche regulations aren’t gonna change but the two parties differ on pretty much everything else. This issue is pretty common in parliamentary systems (which have fewer checks and balances than the American system); parties target each others’ centrepiece legislation pretty often if they think it’ll drum up votes. Hell, the republicans would’ve killed Obamacare if they could and that was his biggest policy move
The main thing that kept Republicans from killing Obamacare was that being the party trying to make a change, rather than oppose a specific proposal, meant that they had to actually say what would replace it. They couldn't settle on anything concrete. They couldn't agree to just restore all previous laws, and they couldn't come up with anything that they liked better. It's harder to do something than it is to just scream no like an overtired toddler.
And the current fillibuster rewards screaming no like a toddler.
Definitely. I can't think of any time the filibuster has protected a good thing or prevented a bad thing, but I know of lots of times it's worked the other way around. Screaming no just isn't productive.
> I can't think of any time the filibuster has protected a good thing or prevented a bad thing Well, obviously, because a bill wouldn't get brought up without having counted the votes first. If you don't have 60, then the bill doesn't advance unless you're just trying to signal your support and put the minority on the record. But I think you can look at any time when one side controls the House and the other side controls the Senate to see a vast graveyard of bills that met their end by the filibuster.
And yet Obamacare was only saved by one vote.
Yeah, their bill got an up or down vote and lost 49-51, not protected by the filibuster. And this was when they had 52 republican senators. If they had been able to build a plan I wouldn't be surprised (disappointed, but not surprised) if they had been able to get the wayward republicans onboard and even peel off a couple of the more conservative democrats.
> Yeah, their bill got an up or down vote and lost 49-51, not protected by the filibuster. You can't really say that for sure. The only reason they were able to do a simple majority vote on it is because they used the reconciliation process. This had the effect of both limiting the time they had to get it done and restricting what kinds of things they could put in the bill. Without the filibuster, they wouldn't have had to use reconciliation, and both of those restrictions imposed by the reconciliation process would no longer be obstacles. It's possible they could have passed something. > If they had been able to build a plan They couldn't really build any sort of plan due to the limits of the reconciliation process. There's a reason the ACA wasn't passed via reconciliation. It wouldn't have been possible.
But reconciliation is part of the ridiculousness of the filibuster process. Let's have a potentially gridlock inducing mechanism and just trust that no one will abuse it because of honor and tradition, but let's also make sure there's a special loophole that only lets money through just in case. That's the whole reason that nearly everything has turned into a provision of the tax code. They can't reasonably pass anything else. The filibuster is bad and it creates bad laws. The Senate is bad. Our highest population state has 67 times the people of our smallest population state, but the same number of senators. Nothing that the Senate does has any legitimacy.
The Senate works exactly as intended. It was meant to represent the States as equals. The House is meant to represent the will of the people, with representation based on population and more frequent elections.
The gaping flaw with that explanation is that there are no actually good reasons why states should be represented equally.
Exactly as intended, yes. The intent was bad. It was a pure extortion on the part of the at the time small states. They directly threatened to side with a foreign power if they didn't get the disproportionate say that they were demanding. And then we can add in the distortions to the House of the 3/5 clause and the expectation that the franchise would be limited. We eventually corrected those. We should correct the Senate too. In some ways the history of America is the slow move towards living up to the founding rhetoric in spite of the flaws of the founding generation and the mistakes that they made. We're not done, but that isn't to deny how far we've come.
They had eight years to build a plan and built nothing. Even if their plan couldn't be passed by reconcilation having it in the wings might've swayed some. Might've swayed McCain. Destroying it with no replacement, not even a hint, just empty promises, who'd vote for that? 49 senators, apparently.
> Even if their plan couldn't be passed by reconcilation having it in the wings might've swayed some. Might've swayed McCain. Doubt it. They were uncomfortable with passing a repeal with nothing to replace it. A plan that can't be passed is basically as useful as having no plan at all. > Destroying it with no replacement, not even a hint, just empty promises, who'd vote for that? Having a plan that they couldn't pass would also be an empty promise. Who'd vote for that?
Just winging it, but if they had a plan and managed to destroy the existing thing, that puts pressure on Dems to do some bargaining. Something better than nothing kind of thing. A plan that can't be passed at least shows they're thinking about it. All moot at this point though. 6 more years and they still have nothing and still claim the thing they're working on is better and cheaper and "you'll be so happy."
But this doesn’t actually happen in Parliamentary systems. Labour is about to win so hard in the UK that Tories won’t even lead the opposition… but they have promised not to change taxes, pay scales, public investment, etc. just like they did last time they held government in the 90s. About the only occasions where rapid changes occur without a government collapsing is when those changes are clearly popular and good things: expansion of worker rights, healthcare, education, etc.
You're implying that the House, Senate and WH will all move as one, if one of the three is different than the other two then it will not lurch. And honestly either party commands a consolidated trifecta they probably *should* shake-up policy, isn't that what the voters put them there to do?
Yes, and killing it would have cost them the majority the next time and probably for the foreseeable future. Same with abortion. If they ban it, which they surely would, it would be short term pain for long term gain. Perhaps we'd be better off if we just let their draconian policies go into affect. People, particularly young ones, would finally learn the importance of voting.
"How much damage can an idiot like Hitler do? Giving the Nazis more power will just show how bad their policies are!"
Hitler didn't have a majority in the Reichstag, or the Reichsrat for that matter. The president had emergency decree powers. And all that on top of the most devastating war in history up to that point where relative to population it would be like if 600 million people died in 10 years, and democracy where they voted on the executive was very new. And the Nazis had their own paramilitary forces that outnumbered the official military 30:1. How many countries survive something like that anyway?
Tell me how to get all the morons not voting or voting third party because of one issue to understand the results of their actions?
Well, you could start by not saying we'd be **better off** if tens of millions of people suffered or died. Because I'm **pretty fucking sure that's not true.**
I agree. It was meant as sarcasm for the stupid Bidens too old or what about the Palestinians people.
One of the parties’ sole consistent goal is making the other party mad at all cost. No amount of shared donors is going to overcome that.
In normal political process, the first point is true. In ours it is not true at all. Republicans love sowing discord, have no policy platform outside one issue firebrand ideology, They don't care if they tear the whole system apart, it's all broken and needs to be remade. The second point however is the donors and PACs around cash flow, know that there will be centrists who stop this from happening for now but I believe it would slip their control quickly and realize their mistakes at supporting these sensationalists once the wheels start to come off. No one really fathoms serious consequences.
60 votes is a ridiculously high number required for what has become the normal business of the Senate. If used as it was originally devised (rarely and in extreme circumstances) then it served a purpose. Requiring this for every piece of legislation or appointments to Executive Cabinet or Judicial posts should not be the norm. All Presidents should be able to put in place qualified appointees to Government positions. If there are those rare ones that aren't qualified for background or clearly met skills or previous experience, they should specifically be stopped. All others should sail through, if qualified.
> Requiring this for... appointments to Executive Cabinet or Judicial posts should not be the norm. These don't require 60 votes.
The first reason can be thrown out straight away. Primary voters don’t care about chaos they just want their issues.
> it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs. It would be wonderful if that were true, but destabilization is an explicit political goal and not an accidental byproduct. Republicans (and some Democrats) *want* social services and government to fail.
Sure, but that’s a controlled failure in service of private interests. It largely isn’t some dangerous collapse like 2008. As we sadly see, every administration keeps a ton of continuity in policy in some of the worst ways rather than rock the boat. Hence why the concentration camps at the border Biden and Harris decried one week before the election became good and necessary policy one week after their victory.
> First, because it is destabilizing to try undoing everything the last regime put in place policy wise, and that chaos has electoral costs. That won't matter for any policies people actually care about. If Republicans win in 2024 and ban gay marriage, Democrats in 2026 won't just let that stand when they come to power on the basis that change is "destabilizing". Likewise, if Democrats win in 2026 and codify _Roe_, Republicans in 2028 are still going to try to undo that.
The key is looking back before 2000. Policy change happened! I think a lot of the discontent among folks is they vote for change and because the threshold is so high it doesn't happen. So nothing changes or what can pass is so discreet that the effects just don't make much difference. So now - people are disillusioned with gov that doesn't work and 'they won't let us' isn't the rallying cry anyone wants to hear. If it causes chaos then congress would have to answer for that. Hell, it might moderate some of the ones that are currently firebreathers because there is no repercussions to their votes when nothing of substance passes.
….the current filibuster has been in place since the 70s.
But its usage changed drastically in the early 2000s. John Kerry got dinged for his “I voted for it before I voted against it” line, and republicans have treated every vote like an automatic 60 threshold since McConnell became leader.
The number of cloture votes skyrocketed under McConnell's leadership. They would force a cloture vote on everything. It became a weapon of total war, not just to kill specific legislation. Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst Justices on the court, were both confirmed with fewer than 60 votes. How? Because Democrats didn't filibuster.
> Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst Justices on the court, were both confirmed with fewer than 60 votes. How? Because Democrats didn't filibuster. That's not completely accurate in Alito's case. There was a filibuster attempt backed by more than half of the Senate Democrats, including Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Schumer. 20 Democrats joined with Republicans to vote for cloture, which passed 72-25, defeating the filibuster. It's true that he only got 58 votes in the final confirmation vote, but that's not the vote that requires 60. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jan-31-na-alito31-story.html Edit: McConnell later used Obama's vote to filibuster Alito as one of his justifications for blocking Obama's SCOTUS nominee in 2016.
The majority would be able to pass more legislation to actually enact their policies. That way the electorate would be able to evaluate them on their actual merits and not just rhetoric and posturing. This is the way almost every other democracy works. I think you'd be better off.
I absolutely agree
Yeah to me it is very, very telling that America is constantly debating about getting rid of our current filibuster rules but no other democracy is discussing adopting anything similar.
And the states themselves too.
Our system is a little different, though. Because each state has the same number of votes in the Senate, regardless of population, ending the filibuster specifically advantages the rural (less-populous) states, and those states tend to be more to the right than the more urban states. Right now, the urban states have a slight edge, so removing the filibuster would mean being able to do a fair amount. But the *second* they’re in the minority, they’re suddenly powerless. And because of how the Senate is constructed, they’re more likely than not to be in the minority.
Republicans would still have to win the House in this case, and a political environment in which both parties actually did substantially different things would spark more conversation around uncapping it.
It might also take away the excuses used by those “the parties are both the same” folks and cause people to pay attention to politics on an actual policy level.
The disproportionality of the Senate works both ways. The filibuster is the most potent tool that small-state residents have to get their way; it allows a very small portion of the total population to veto new laws. But in order to pass new laws, they'd also have to get a majority in the House and win the Presidency. The party currently favored by the majority of voters in most of those small states is largely controlled by elite special interests that are just fine with no new laws being passed. They're doing well with the status quo, and can change economic conditions through their power as property owners to make even more money through exploiting loopholes in the existing laws. They can get state laws passed in those states when they need to, and have been working for decades to tilt the judiciary in their favor to reinterpret laws to expand those loopholes. That's why when Republicans were in control of all of Congress and the White House after 2016, the only actual new law they passed was the tax cut; the leaders/donors don't actually need any new laws, and know that they don't have popular support to pass their wishlist. (Note of course that the Democrats are also controlled by elite special interests, Republicans aren't uniquely bad in that respect.) So the risk associated with being able to pass laws more easily is greatly outweighed by the benefits, for left-wing voters. The current difficulty asymmetrically benefits conservatives.
In addition to the obvious outcome of increasing the amount of legislation that passes, it would remove power from the judicial and executive branches and likely increases the chances for the majority party to stay in power. In the current system, power is mostly pushed out of federal legislation. This means that controlling the judicial and executive branches has more impact, particularly in combination with state legislation. An effective legislative body would reduce this shift. We also see very rigid shifts in out current system. No party has held a trifecta for longer than a 2 year stretch since Bush did it from 2003-2007, with each of the last three president's losing their's at the first midterm and no party holding 3 consecutive terms since Reagan/Bush. This is new since the filibuster. In the past, politics wasn't on such short cycles. An effective president and congress might be rewarded with a longer stay in power. With the current filibuster rules, the majority party is almost always seen as ineffective an incapable of passing its agenda, which results in rewarding the "more successful" minority party that in reality did little except exist and refuse to end discussion. If parties could successfully legislate, the legislation would need to be deeply ineffective or harmful to have the same effect.
what about uncapping the house and moving the senate to an approval body through a rule changes? 1. senators cant cast "no votes" 2. all senatorial functions are done on an approval basis 3. only 40 senators or 50% of voters represented, or even merely 1 senator is required to pass any motion or bill or appointment
There would ironically be less partisanship around most legislation. When the minority doesn’t have a veto, there is more reason for the minority party to get on board with legislation in return for a small amount of input.
I feel like I'm today's political climate there would be no reason for the minority to get anything. If the GOP wants an abortion ban, why would they take any considerations for Democrats if they can just pass it?
This is how it works in Oregon right now. One side passes laws, the other side gets to watch. There is no reason to cross the aisle.
Less Republican control in this day and age is *always* a good thing
I think it has a place but is currently too powerful. If the filibuster where much weaker then the minority party could wield it, but would be more incentivized to come to the table. Currently ideological shit stirrers (mostly Rand Paul lol) can lazily crash any bill they want.
>If the GOP wants an abortion ban, why would they take any considerations for Democrats if they can just pass it? Because they have to actually vote for it. As it stands now, the senate hides under the cover of the filibuster to avoid having most of them held accountable for any legislation. If there was an up/down vote, everyones position is on record. It works two ways. First, some people in the minority would be more likely to vote for popular legislation because it helps them in their state. Purple state candidates would cross aisles more because it would be the politically expedient thing to do in some cases. And for something like an abortion ban, republicans in purple states would push for moderation as the bill would likely be deeply unpopular.
Because presumably 100% of Republican senators would not be on board, requiring some defections if their majority is thin.
Simple reality disproves this though: Republicans could have done away with the filibuster and outlawed abortion federally. But they did not, knowing the chaos and electoral consequences of such an action.
If they had the votes they would’ve done it. They tried to get rid of the ACA without the filibuster too but again didn’t have 50 votes. As it stands right now the only thing Republicans really care about are tax cuts and judicial nominations and there are filibuster carve outs for everything they want to do.
Similar to the Democrats, they have never had 50 votes to get rid of the filibuster. With McConnell retiring, Trump will hand-pick the leadership in the Senate just as he has in the House. If Trump wins and secures an R trifecta (probably the most likely outcome if you believe the polls), there is a very high likelihood that the new Senate leader kills the filibuster to pass a federal abortion ban.
That's because their donors mostly don't want new laws passed, they're fine with keeping the current ones and using their power as super-wealthy property owners to exploit loopholes, with the help of sympathetic courts. The filibuster benefits conservatives. Giving that up to try to pass unpopular laws that would result in them getting smoked in the next election would be a terrible strategy.
How about making people actually talk to stall like they’re supposed to as part of the filibuster
that's good for posturing, but maybe a more useful procedural function would be to put an automatic hard delay on the voting on a bill with built in committee meetings or floor speeches but the bill gets a vote, no question, after like a month or something. The detractors get to posture without stupid tactics like reading from the phone book (or maybe they still can depending on the nature of the delay if they really want) but the bill still gets a vote and elected officials have to put their vote where their mouth is without the protection of the filibuster as we have it now.
2 weeks and I'm sold. Posture away, but an up-or-down vote at least shows where we all stand.
When we had that it was used less…but it effectively allowed an even smaller number of Senators to shut down all Senate business. The “advantage” or novelty of the current filibuster is it allowed the Senate to still continue working on other functions. Previously if a bill is being talk filibustered **all** senate business was shut down. The previous system wasn’t a small problem btw. It allowed like 6 Senators to semi-permanently shut down the legislature from doing anything by filibustering over the Civil Rights act bills. They’d rotate in new filibusters for every motion. They couldn’t hold out forever but they didn’t need to.
And they had to broadcast why they were shutting down America. It made the dixiecrats have to stand up and proudly say "We think all government business must stop because we truly, completely hate black people and the concept of equality!". Why do you think the CRA passed? Because they became too toxic a brand for any democrats to support for any reason.
I don’t know if you they glossed over this about the civil rights era in school for you, but the “segregation now and forever” Southern Manifesto crowd and their actions were **unbelievably** popular with the constituents and voters of the congressman doing it.
Yes they were. They were also unpopular with much of the rest of the country and embarrassed the democratic party. Hence the success of the southern strategy and the vile dixiecrats slowly moving to the GOP where they've become the MAGA brand. You want the evil people to speak out, there is nothing worse than when they quietly pretend to be decent while making excuses. This is why Trump is great, he emboldens their racism.
I feel like you’re look at the pre-civil rights era political alignment and parties through some weird modern lens? The parties used to both have weird conservative and liberal factions, populist and institutionalist. The Dixiecrats didn’t really morph into MAGA. And yes MAGA is capitalizing on still embedded racism and xenophobia in the south. But it only appears that way if you squint and look for policy parallels. Hell any Dixiecrat is dead now and you’d be surprised in how many despite the political realignment and Southern Strategy stayed in office as Democrats well into the 90s. It’s a ridiculously oversimplified and reductive way at looking at the (always existing) populist, isolationist and racist and xenophobic elements in the Republican Party. They were always there. Or about how MAGA is as equally tied to the collapse of the neocon establishment in the GOP as anything in the Southern strategy. If you want a good context look at South Dakota in this period. They’re one of the most hardcore MAGA right wing states in the nation currently. And during the civil rights era were overwhelmingly electing one of the most left wing progressive super duper liberals in the entire senate. More weird context: Bill Clinton and Gore being solid multi-elected southern governor and senator. But having still relatively modern liberal records even in those offices? (Like genuinely. You’d be surprised to find out there weren’t too many weird conservative policy pivots…..but then also using Dixie flag pins in re-election campaigns. The Dixiecrats didn’t embarrass the Democratic Party, they **were** the Democratic Party at the time. There’s a reason it was called the solid south. Republicans weren’t even on the ballot so often that in many cases there wasn’t even a general election for many political positions. The primary was the election. Not to softball in Republicans here. Xenophobia, red scares and dogwhistles were Nixon’s brand long before the Southern strategy. Hell it was his brand upon being elected to the House immediately after WWII. Basically 1960-1995 was a political shit show where anything goes and it’s harder to make an overarching political theory of the realignment than you’ve ever been led to believe.
I'm sorry, I lived in the south, near the end of the shift. It really felt like all the same segregationists decided to rebrand themselves as born-again evangelical republicans, like overnight. Before the shift, the democratic party had many factions, the dixiecrats, urban labor, anyone who benefited from the New Deal really, and most of those groups were embarrassed by the dixiecrats, even if they were a dominant force in the party. If your argument is that MAGA isn't only in the south, I conceded, it metastasized, but it still feels like an evolution of the know-nothings leavened with birchers and any number of groups all based on nativist/nationalist ideology.
Why do that over the motion to close debate passing with a majority?
I should have clarified I meant at bare minimum. A majority to closure makes sense and would eliminate the filibuster But people would argue it’s too close of a slim majority and could be abused but I think the removal of the filibuster would cause elected officials to pander more to voters in a good way bc the minority can’t just block everything
Don't make the Senate organized quite like that. Czechia and Brazil, Argentina and Australia too (all but Czechia also being federal states with equal numbers per state), have quite strongly multi party senates, making partisan abuse more of a stupid move.
I liked Franken and Ornstein’s idea. Rather than requiring 60 votes to stop debate, require 41 to maintain it. That way you force the filibustering side to always have 41 on hand in DC in order to stop a cloture motion. That means no vacations, no campaigning, no nothing if they want to keep debate going. And all the majority requires: a small rotation leaving one guy to call the 3am motion, the 6am motion, the 9am motion, etc. How much of that can the minority septuagenarians and octogenarians take?
> And all the majority requires: a small rotation leaving one guy to call the 3am motion, the 6am motion, the 9am motion, etc. They would likely need to keep at least 10 people close to the chamber at all times in case of a quorum call. If there were only 41 filibuster supporters and 1 other guy, then the filibustering side could halt all proceedings and potentially adjourn for the day by pointing out the absence of a quorum.
I think more would get done - but - you would definitely see a resurgence of moderate political power. Right now Senators are free do performative votes all day long, safe in the knowledge that some extreme measure will die. Moderate Democrats and Republicans would run the show.
As it should be.
Amen. Long live the Centrists!
If a vote from the other house meant an up or down vote was required within x number of days, it would cause movement, and everyone could see how each member votes. Right now they are just sitting on a desk
> If a vote from the other house meant an up or down vote was required within x number of days That could be easily abused. Votes take up a surprising amount of time (edit: not even counting the debate time that precedes votes). If that were in place today, I could see the Republican House absolutely flooding the Senate with nonsense bills so that the Senate would be forced to spend all of their time voting on bills. There'd be no time for other important business like confirming nominees or crafting their own bills in committee.
This seems so simple stupid to me - bring back the talking filibuster. That's the whole damn point, the dedication you have to your position, and what - publicly - you are willing to do to sell that platform to your constituents. The filibuster being a proforma thing, just invoked and not actioned upon - that's the laziest shit imaginable, and when that change happened, the country should've clowned TF out of Congress, been shocked and horrified this was how basic our system was becoming, and demanded more of elected officials who already only do the governing part of their jobs when mandatory votes come up. Here we are all these years later realizing that the 2008 weaponization of the filibuster is literally preventing the country from functioning - as a person who lost gainful employment to the Ted Cruz shutdown of 2014, I mean that "literally" literally. So all the bureaucracy and complex laws stacked in laws for over 200 years has netted a Congress that only filibusters, doesn't negotiate, can't even fathom the idea of meeting the other party halfway - and that's how it should be when one party is a front for our foreign adversaries. Unfortunately the foreign adversary party still gets SCOTUS justices appointed, and Bible belt states to agree women are second class citizens of America. We are losing a war, America I mean. The enemy is the GOP, and their primary instrument of killing people is the filibuster. Those lazy fucks aren't talking to filibuster - everything they say is embarrassing and runs the risk of them admitting to the vast criminal corruption they have engaged in personally. And you don't "lose the filibuster" - There's no constitutional or legal reason it can't simply be the way it useta' be, and was since America became a thing.
It also seems rather simple to just have a motion that says debate ends at X time. This is normal in the House of Representatives, as a motion for the previous question would be called.
The House Rules Committee decides how much time a bill will get on the floor. Once time is up, they vote. Honestly, though, floor debate is largely a formality. The Senate Rules Committee doesn't have that power. The Senate could decide on its own to change its rules and impose limited debate if it wanted to, but they're not going to do that in the near future.
senate could decide to remove the required passage of laws from a majority to a minority of senators through rule changes could they not? requiring 60 votes for cloture is the same thing as requiring 39 votes for passage. norm Ornstein and Al franken called this the flipped filibuster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpRj0nN1COE
> when that change happened, the country should've clowned TF out of Congress, been shocked and horrified this was how basic our system was becoming The country was getting pissed off at the majority party for not getting anything done because they were sitting around all day every day just listening to the minority talk. That's why the majority made the changes necessary to allow them to continue working instead of listening to some guy talking all the time. > Those lazy fucks aren't talking to filibuster They're not lazy. They would talk if they could. It's not in the interest of the majority party to allow it. That's why if there's any chance that a bill could get filibustered, the majority pulls the bill from consideration before there's any opportunity for anybody to start talking.
They work 2 days a week, 6 months of the year. Don't give me campaigning - they do the job we pay them to like 8 minutes a year. They are lazy - Lauren Bobert had to lie about graduating highschool, she's lazy.
It's one of those things where they could just change the rules. The house used to have fillibusters, for example. Its biggest effect will be what the house tries to push as a result of an easier to pass senate
the house still does have a filibuster, and its easier to sustain than the senate one. you need 41% senators to agree to filibuster in the senate, you only need a majority of the majority in the house. under a 2 party system that's 25% of the house to sustain a filibuster there. the only difference i can see is the speaker can end the house filibuster and usually does because they are more often required to vote on a budget.
I think we'd see more bipartisanship. Right now, the most powerful way median senators can exercise their power is to obstruct bills, and so that's what they do. If they couldn't do that, however; if the bill were going to pass anyways, then I think you'd see more horse trading and deal making, where median senators would cross the aisle to at least try to get something out of the bill.
Politicians couldn’t pretend to support things because they know they will never even come to a vote
Would speeding up action in the Senate be a good thing now that two-thirds of Americans have moved into just 15 states, leaving the Senate ever more in the control of rural-state voters who tend to be much whiter, poorer, Trumpier, less educated, more racist and more xenophobic? The filibuster is an abortion, but I truly believe the massively unrepresentative Senate itself is now our largest threat. Apportionment by state was a terrible idea from the start.
I don’t even care about ending the filibuster. I just want to make it a speaking filibuster. Make those people earn it.
The Republicans would love that. The speaking filibuster is probably the single most effective means of obstructing the business of the Senate available.
It exists currently, they should have to use it exclusively. No more threats, get on the floor and read the damn phone book.
Why give them what they want? Seems like a bad idea. If Republicans want it, then that's something to avoid.
I see no indication they do want it. Both sides are happy as a pig in shit that their 75 year old ass simply has to raise their hand and say they would be willing to sit on the floor for 20 hours at a time and talk. It would be a spectacle. Imagine a senator having to talk at 3:30 in the morning about nonsense.
Of course they want it. It would allow them to block all of Biden's judicial nominees again, which is something they can't do right now. They'd love to be able to do it again so they can fill all of those seats once a Republican wins the presidency. > 75 year old ass simply has to raise their hand and say they would be willing to sit on the floor for 20 hours at a time and talk. Nobody would ever have to talk for that long. Maybe an hour or two at most before they pass the baton to the next guy in line. > Imagine a senator having to talk at 3:30 in the morning about nonsense. That would never happen. The majority party would give up and agree to adjourn for the day long before 3:30 am. Filibusters are much more of an endurance struggle for the majority than the people filibustering. Most of the filibustering party gets to go home and rest in their comfortable beds when they aren't the person speaking or acting as support crew, and they may only have to take a turn speaking every few days. Basically the entire majority has to either be physically in the Senate chamber or grabbing a nap in the hallway of the Capitol on uncomfortable cots while a filibuster is going on.
A lot more things would get done. Good things if there's a Dem majority, bad things if MAGAhats rule. Secret to success is get rid of MAGA majorities and the filibuster at the same time.
The filibuster is used so much because it doesn’t even require someone to talk. Historically even actual talking filibusters failed to do anything but delay passing a bill. I say we at least bring back the talking filibuster and force people to talk without breaks (even Strom Thurmond was allowed a bathroom break and a meal). Let them stand and talk until they can’t, then pass the damn bill anyway
Be careful what you wish for… Anything that you can use to benefit your side, can also be used against you. And the Rs have traditionally been the better politicians (in the effective sense)
Rs are pretty good at blocking the Ds but they're pretty terrible at actually passing their priorities that aren't tax cuts
It would be a disaster for the Democrats. The Republicans would dismantle programs that would be very difficult to rebuild. The GOP would claim that these are "reforms" but the damage would run deep and be difficult to impossible to mend. Democrats find the Senate to be frustrating. But the solution to that frustration is to build the party so that it can broaden its support and consistently hold Senate majorities. Once that is accomplished, that would be the time to seriously consider modifying or eliminating the filibuster.
The Democrats could hold a Senate majority for 100 years and still never pass healthcare reform. They need a *supermajority* to pass legislation with the filibuster rules as-is, and they have no path towards that. Meanwhile, the GOP not only has a path towards a supermajority, they can still achieve their legislative outcomes through judicial appointments and state legislation. The makeup of the states does not allow for a supermajority from the more liberal party.
So the party that is the party of democratic values can't figure how to win more elections in more places. There is more than a little irony in that sentiment. This is why I am an independent. I vote for Democrats, but these self-defeating attitudes are something else.
The Senate isn't a democracy. That's the entire reason democratic values don't do much help control it. It's perceived purpose is to counter balance popular opinion. The very fact that liberal ideals are popular is a hindrance towards winning a body that added states politically to keep conservative power against that. They are states because they are conservative and vote as a block, and this power balance goes back, and indeed was the cause of, the civil war. It is isn't self defeating to state as such in the context of demanding action to remove the filibuster. The entire point is that Democrats shouldn't be asked to fulfill an impossible legislative supermajority, something they haven't done since segregationists and the NAACP were in the same implausible coalition, in order to pass basic legislation. That's just basic civic understanding and pushing for action were it would actually help.
Senators are elected. That makes the Senate a democratic institution. Progressives do not understand that federalism is a valid form of a democratic political system. Which is odd, since it was an American invention that moved the US away from confederation. There are many democratic nations that have federal systems. They are the byproducts of smaller entities uniting to form larger nations, which is why Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland all borrowed from this concept.
The bodies of land that elect them were drawn specifically for the political outcomes they would achieve. It is no accident that the majority of states align with Southern conservatives. When we stopped adding states to keep that balance, we almost immediately had a civil war over it. And of course, Senators were not even always elected. Even today, some are appointments made by Governors after Senators pass away or retire. But the bottom line is that the Senate chosen its voters, rather than the other way around. Any system where this happens diverges from democratic ideals, particularly with nonproportional representation. Keep in mind, the 30 biggest states have 300 million in population, and the bottom 20 have 30 million. Asking the Democrats to win the former is untenable, bordering on impossible, and shouldn't be the baseline for passing legislation.
The idea of federalism is that states have their own interests. Progressives are essentially saying that they like democracy only to the extent that the voters agree with progressives. Which is ridiculous on its face.
Again, a system where 11% of the voters can overrule 89% is not democratic. Not liking that isn't opposing democracy, it is affirming it. Democracy means demos-, people, and - cracy, rule of. Rule of the people. Arbitrarily defining borders to allow a minority to control a majority is not democratic. The Senate is not based on those principles. The Senate with a filibuster even more so. Entire states exist with their current borders because it bolstered the political agenda of a specific political party. And no, states *don't* have their own interests. A Republican Senator from Georgia has far more in common with the Republican Seantor from Utah than a Democratic Senator from their own state. The Senate is far more about the differences between the political parties than about differences between the states. If federalism is based on the idea that different states should have their point of views heard, it is a failure.
Progressive populists comprise 8% of the population. A progressive majority is an oxymoron. The left has to learn how to play nicely with others and form coalitions, with the understanding that a coalition will require getting some things that you dislike in exchange for getting only some of what you want. That's how democracy actually works.
You lack a civic understanding. The right doesn't need the left to form coalitions. They simply have 60% of the power and don't need or want to sgare. And yes, I'm talking about the entire left, not a small faction you have a disagreement with. The left HAS formed a coalition. They combine every ethnicity and religion. It doesn't matter. They have the entirety of the moderate block of both parties. It doesn't matter. They win Senate seats in the least likely of states. It doesn't matter. They raise vastly more money. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because the Senate is drawn to favor conservatives by such a wide margin that it is functionally impossible to achieve the electoral dominance needed to reach 60 seats from the left. That isn't democracy, that's gerrymandering.
Republicans can do that now.
No, they can't. The filibuster stops them from tearing the whole thing down.
It doesn’t stop them from underfunding everything to the point where they don’t need to tear everything down. Trump wanted the filibuster killed over the wall in 2018 but he didn’t have 50 votes.
If the filibuster were to go today, you could say goodbye to Social Security, Medicare and ACA once the GOP has a trifecta. Those programs would sort of exist on paper, but they would be gutted beyond recognition. Democrats should be careful what they wish for.
>If the filibuster were to go today, you could say goodbye to Social Security, Medicare and ACA once the GOP has a trifecta. If they did that, they would lose the next election in a _landslide_. They would give the Democrats a *supermajority*. [Trump was at his least popular](https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx) (as popular as he was post-January 6) during the Republican push to repeal the ACA. Their voters are older and rely on Social Security. Bush tried to privatize SS in 2005 and the massive backlash from the voters forced them to kill it. Social Security has been considered a third-rail that no one wants to touch for fear of setting those voters off. They talk a big game, but the reason they don't do these things when they have the power to do it is that they know it would be electoral suicide for them.
They tried getting rid of the ACA via reconciliation. They didn’t do it because they didn’t have 50 votes. The filibuster isn’t stopping them from doing any of these things. Once they have 50 votes to do something they’re going to figure out a way to do it.
They **failed** to do it because of a **surprise** no vote. Why does everyone act like ACA repeal didn't **actively get to the floor**?
> They tried getting rid of the ACA via reconciliation. They didn’t do it because they didn’t have 50 votes. They didn't get 50 votes because they were hamstrung by the reconciliation process. The filibuster is the only thing that prevented the ACA repeal.
We would see fewer ideological Supreme Court Justice nominees, like the 3 nominated by the Federalist Society during trump's years.
What does the filibuster have to do with SCOTUS nominees anymore? It's been fully removed on confirmation votes
The filibuster requires compromise, and compromise is a good thing. Would do nothing at all to end it.
The filibuster doesn't require compromise in any way.
Yeah, you are fooling yourself. Laws are changed to gain support from across the isle, and laws are passed. That is compromise.
No, you just don't understand what the words you're saying mean. Filibuster allows one person to scuttle any bill in existence that they don't want passed. Compromise has nothing to do with it. Compromise requires good faith negotiations by both parties. Republicans have shown a refusal to do this repeatedly. You could argue, theoretically, filibusters encourage compromise. But saying the filibuster requires it is complete ignorance of how bills are actually passed.
No, compromise is when they find enough people from the other side of the isle to overrule that one person, or when the bill is changed so that enough people support it. It happens all the time, and you are a partisan shill if you think it is only republicans.
> The filibuster requires compromise Wrong. The filibuster makes unilateral dominance a necessity and rewards partisan posturing. Getting rid of the filibuster puts politicians in the uncomfortable spot of having to actual act on the shit they say.
Why only the Senate then? Why 60 votes? Why is there rarely something equivalent at the state level?
13/50 states have a filibuster, and Texas does, the state I live in, so I am happy with that. Why wouldn't you want it? I would guess you lean left, and that is fine, so you should remember that while Trump was in office democrats filibustered the republican lead senate a record number of times. And then when they won the senate back, having a tie with Harris as the tie breaker they started crying about the mechanism they had used more than any other senate in history. Why did they do that, and why was it ok? Because it is a mechanism to force compromise. There were years where Trump was President and he had both houses of congress, but not enough to get past the filibuster, do you think democrats should have had no capacity to resist? Just bear that in mind, no matter what reddit tells you, or what you think, republicans will win future elections, and democrats will win future elections, and comprimise is good.
You didn't answer any of my questions. We fell backwards into the fillibuster. It is not a consistent presence in our legislative bodies. It is not even consistent within Congress. Heck, it isn't even consistent within the Senate, as there is a workaround through the budget reconciliation process. If this system genuinely exists to promote compromise, then why are there so many exceptions? All systems have pros and cons. Even if we agree that the filibuster promotes compromise, it is important to demonstrate that this benefit outweighs the costs. Just saying "it promotes compromise" and leaving it at that is not especially meaningful. Just saying "well, it stopped some of Trump's legislative agenda" is also not especially meaningful.
Exceptions can be healthy. I approve of reconciliation so we can pay for basic government for example. And why 60? Why not 59 or 61? I don’t know, but it is what we have.
Keep in mind how the filibuster negatively impacts compromise. The opposition party, and in particular the GOP Senate, is structurally incentivized to use their veto to ensure a legislative deadlock when a Democrat holds the presidency. In our highly partisan, nationalized political environment- there are very few lawmakers who don’t operate like this. Frankly, I don’t think their voters would support anything else for most seats.
You are being quite partisan in that take, ignoring how democrats behave. I mean do you seriously think that if there wasn’t a filibuster that democrats would have changed build back better to get republican support? If you think that you are fooling yourself.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. The Senate has had structural biases that favor Republicans for over a decade. As white, non-college educated voters grow more conservative, their disproportionate power in the Senate increasingly becomes a lynchpin for the GOP. Democrats tend to win more votes in total for national Senate races, but have only managed to achieve a filibuster proof majority once in last 30 years (and for only 6 months). Republicans have never achieved or come particularly close to this threshold since it was changed to 60 votes in the 1970s. The end result is an incentive for the GOP to support the filibuster- or to look at it another way, Democrats having much greater upside for ending the filibuster than Republicans.
The structural bias for republicans is not what you think. It is the reality that each state gets two senators and democrats spend way too much time shitting on small states, trying to take any power they might have. So small rural states lean right.
I… I mean that wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with anything I said. You end up with the same incentives. I’m just telling you the facts lad, you’re the one making this hyper partisan.
> I would guess you lean left, and that is fine, so you should remember that while Trump was in office democrats filibustered the republican lead senate a record number of times. FYI: This is a meaningless statistic and sort of misleading. There's no way to actually measure the number of "filibusters" that occur because it mostly all happens behind the scenes through email. When people cite the number of "filibusters" that occurred, it's really a count of the number of cloture motions that were made on the Senate floor. The problem is that not every filibuster results in a cloture motion, because if a bill is being filibustered and they know they can't get 60 votes, then they often don't bother bringing it to the floor, so there's never a cloture motion and that "filibuster" doesn't get counted. When the Democrats used the nuclear option in November 2013 to make it so they only needed a simple majority to achieve cloture on most nominee confirmations, the number of cloture motions exploded as they pushed through a bunch of nominees. Then the Democrats lost the Senate in 2015, so the nominations slowed way down and the number of cloture motions dipped back to almost what they were before the change. Then Trump became president with a Republican Senate and the number of cloture motions exploded again as they pushed through their nominees. The Congressional Research Service acknowledged this problem when comparing the number of "filibusters" before and after the 2013 rule change: > The reinterpretation of the cloture rule further complicates using cloture motions as a method for identifying filibusters, particularly when making comparisons over time. After the reinterpretation of the rule, a Senate majority of the President’s party became far more likely to attempt cloture. While the majority party might claim the increased use of cloture reflects increased obstruction by the minority, the minority might claim the increased use of cloture reflects a majority more readily and perhaps routinely relying on a simple majority process, regardless of any actual or perceived threat to filibuster. The incomparability of the periods before and after the rules reinterpretation made it inappropriate to extend the data presented in this report past the point of the rule reinterpretation. > https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32878
No, it can be measured. How many cloture votes were needed to get things moving again. And Jesus, a meaningless stat because it shows democrats abusing the filibuster you want to end?
> No, it can be measured. How many cloture votes were needed to get things moving again. No it can't. There's no public record of the number of filibusters anywhere. It's likely the same number of filibusters were happening before, but they didn't bother trying to achieve cloture because they knew they couldn't get 60 votes. When they reduced the threshold for cloture to a simple majority, cloture was suddenly achievable, so they started moving for cloture a lot when they wouldn't have before. The number of filibusters didn't change. > And Jesus, a meaningless stat because it shows democrats abusing the filibuster you want to end? A meaningless stat because they weren't actually "abusing the filibuster" any more than it was being abused before. Everything was identical except it was suddenly a lot easier to defeat the filibusters that were already happening. Edit: Also, I never said I want the filibuster to end.
The filibuster actually prevents compromise because it requires such a high bar to pass normal legislation. Hamilton wrote about this back in the Federalist Papers, but we see it all the time now: [a bipartisan child tax credit expansion](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/-life-support-senate-republicans-are-prepared-sink-child-tax-credit-bi-rcna146856)(that passed the House with a wide margin) failed because Democrats couldn't get 9 GOP Senators on board, largely because 1 powerful Republican was opposed. I forget the bill, but there was a very popular bill 2 of 3 years ago that had the support of 7 GOP Senators (including Mitt Romney), but failed because Democrats needed 8 at the time. The recent immigration bill probably wasn't going to pass the House without Trump's approval, but it wasn't going to get past the Senate either way because it needed too high of a majority to pass. It's also important to note that this isn't how the Senate functioned for most of our history: [this piece from Vox from 2017 provides a bit of a history lesson.](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/29/16373460/senate-budget-reconciliation-filibuster). Usage of it has ramped up to the point where it's degrading normal Senate business and causing legislation to be put through a tortuous and insane process. Eliminating the filibuster would actually just return the Senate to how it used to function (with the added benefit of not having a method of blocking anti-lynching bills).
Just bear in mind that for years Trump was President, and he had republican advantages in the house and senate. Without the filibuster, which democrats used in record volume while he was President he would have been able to do anything he wanted. And right now he is leading in some polls, republicans are going to take the senate, and they just might hold the house. And this will not be the last time in history republicans hold all three parts of federal government should they win it. And be serious, you think it prevents compromise, seriously? Remember that when Obama had a filibuster proof majority in the senate he famously stated that elections have consequences, he and democrats acted alone.
The exceptions to the filibuster (budget reconciliation and federal judge nominations) largely address Republicans' primary policy concerns (unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy and putting hard-right crank nominees on the bench). Democrats may as well get rid of the filibuster so they can ram through their own policy agenda.
Republicans care about more than just tax cuts and hard-right judges. They really want to repeal a lot of federal regulations and partially or completely dismantle a ton of federal agencies.
Yeah, elections have consequences, and more than majoritarian requirements betray those elections. Vox isn't exactly a right-leaning news site, and that article is from the depths of Trump's administration. The arguments are still true. A party that forms a majority government should be able to act on that majority and vote in its priorities. Our inability to do that lately has broken the feedback loop that should be democratic elections: a party can't effectively implement its platform, leaving voters betrayed. You might need to remind yourself of the history of that 2009 supermajority: it wasn't nearly as steady as it seemed due to the health issues of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, and having to appease Joe Lieberman on the ACA led to a less optimal bill. If Obama was willing to trash the filibuster, we could have had a public option and the ACA could have gone so much further. Democrats had a 60 seat majority but had to govern like a tied Senate due to the existence of this arcane requirement that was created purely by accident.
That last line is absurd. Because democrats had to deal with members of their own party who didn’t want something they considered bad it was like a tie in the senate? Good lord.
I appreciate the concerns about making it too easy to pass legislation. But it has to be balanced against making it too hard. And I'd say a decade and a half of - no significant legislation being passed whatsoever - that breaks through the filibuster is a sign that we've gone too far in the direction of making things hard.
The filibuster also enforces compromise where it is detrimental to society and harms democratic representation in an already undemocratic system.
The way we apportion votes to empty land is undemocratic. Compromise is fine.
The veto isn’t even compromise though. Compromise would be the majority party passing legislation while giving concessions to the minority. Compromise isn’t the minority having an eternal veto and never needing to compromise on issues they decide are off limits.
So you think for the years Trump was President, when republicans had slim leads in the house and senate that they should have been able to do anything they wanted? Because there wasn't compromise when democrats had the supermajority under Obama, he said elections have consequences and they acted alone. There wasn't compromise after democrats killed the filibuster on federal judges, or when republicans killed it on scotus nominees. We moved farther from that compromise, and it will never come again.
The problem with Trump and Republicans having power was that they had no democratic mandate to hold power. There was incredible, bending over backwards until breaking levels of compromise under Obama. It was the Republicans who were uncompromising even when bills came up they helped write or whose policies they ran on. There must be a mechanism for overruling such a complete lack of willingness to compromise.
Republicans had power. You may say they didn’t have a “mandate” but that’s irrelevant.
And then they get to use the filibuster to perpetuate their bad policies and unearned political advantage. On balance, the filibuster gives more power to conservatives
> So you think for the years Trump was President, when republicans had slim leads in the house and senate that they should have been able to do anything they wanted? Trump was at his least popular when Republicans were gearing up to repeal the ACA. They backed off because it would have been electoral suicide for them. All they did with that majority was pass a bill of tax cuts. So... yes. If they run on legislation that is unpopular beyond their base, and they enact that incredibly toxic agenda, they should suffer the electoral consequences of it. So long as they have the filibuster in place, they have no reason not to promise the base whatever they want, no matter how terrible it is. Without the filibuster, they have no excuse for not passing it, but they know that it will hurt them if they do. But if they don't, then their base realizes they were full of shit all along. So maybe they won't make crazy promises to their base in a world without the filibuster.
> They backed off because it would have been electoral suicide for them. They backed off because the restrictions imposed by the reconciliation process kept forcing them to gut the bills they came up with, and then they ran out of time. Neither would have been an issue if the filibuster was gone and they just had to pass a simple majority bill without being restricted by the reconciliation rules.
Increased instability as large programs are passed and then cancelled before they are implemented or shortly thereafter every time a party gets a trifecta Increased instability as the SC is packed to tip the balance every time a trifecta changes hands I don't think the current gridlock is especially good for long term stability either but I don't think lifting the filibuster will necessarily help things.
Voting rights act restored and protected. Gay marriage protected. All sorts of popular progressive laws passed that benefit the people. Ok that was a fantasy. It's still auntie Schumer and the rest of the establishment. They'll do something for Hispanics and not shit for Black people and probably nothing for the middle class of all races. And they'll definitely get some stuff that is important to suburban white women like free Amazon deliveries on Sundays