The Filibuster and the Tyranny of the Minority
The Senate is already un-democratic. The filibuster makes it more so.
In a different world, Congressional debate over the last month would have been focused on issues and on policymaking: arguments over things like whether Congress needs to pass new voting-rights legislation, and if so, whether it should look like HR1, the sweeping bill passed by the House, or like West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s voting-rights bill. Instead, the focus of attention has been not on policy, but on process, and in particular on one element of that process: the filibuster.
That simple fact expresses the fundamental irony of the filibuster as it functions today — its supporters, including most notably West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, argue that it encourages substantive compromise and bipartisan dialogue on policy. But in practice, because the filibuster allows a mere 41 senators to block most Senate bills from ever coming to a vote, it makes most dialogue on policy simply academic, and instead encourages an obsession with process. As it exists today, the filibuster mostly does is ensure that senators spend a lot of time arguing over the filibuster.
Manchin’s recent voting-rights proposal, for instance, was a substantive, and very interesting, alternative…
