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So what happens with the filibuster now? Just as the Republicans appear to have not learned what cost Harris the election, it seems likely the Dems will make similar mistakes this time.
Is killing the filibuster one of them? Is it a mistake?
Personally I feel like it would hasten the end of the union, but plenty of people will argue it will improve deadlock and they may even be right.
I hope Democrats get rid of it. It's simply good policy. A majority should govern and it is bad for democracy to invent excuses and traditions of impotence.
Sounds like we should just get rid of congress and make everything a national referendum. Any system that uses 'representatives' is by definition allowing a 'minority' to 'govern.' The President can just be the guy who is in charge of running the elections counting the votes, and he can be swapped out at any time.
In other words, bite the bullet on your logic or accept that the system is designed with a different objective in mind.
I'm not sold on getting rid of it either but a Senate majority doesn't have to be a popular majority, so nothing about this critique follows from the original point. A Senate majority preserves the rights of minor states too, just somewhat less so than an addition 60 vote threshold.
They can argue they need the additional threshold, that it's not enough that Maine neutralizes California, but not really because the US is a republic, not a democracy.
And that's what I'm implying. Once we've accepted that part of the system's purpose is to protect the minority's influence, then an additional safeguard is in keeping with that!
It’s a question of how many safeguards are enough NOT a question in my view that everything in a Democracy should be 50.01% opinion. Too many safeguards and you simply can’t govern or do anything. To little safeguards and the 49.99% can dominated.
My current opinion is we have too many safeguards on passing legislation which has ended up making the Presidency and SC stronger than they should be.
I don't think the safeguards are the real reason legislation isn't getting passed.
I think that's the hyperpolarization, and the incentives of the sitting politicians to try to hold office indefinitely.
Ultimately this THEN sounds like we should be devolving many of the current powers held by FedGov to the states, where there's usually less gridlock and the governing bodies are more representative of their populations.
MY current opinion is that we should lean harder into the Federalist system which means giving states more leeway within their bounds and letting the Federal Government control the relatively few issues of actual national importance.
There are a lot of things that need to be done at the federal level today.
Here’s one example. Let’s call it California. At the state level they experiment with ways to highly encourage technology start-ups. To pay for it they have very high capital gains taxes. So a bunch of people build great tech start ups in California. Two years before they IPO all the big founders move to Florida with 0% capital gains tax.
Do you see the issue? A lot of modern governance issues have similar things that they need to be at national versus local level.
To Clarify: I don’t think Cali has special infrastructure that helps tech start-ups as a policy choice. It was more like a gold mine in California. Agglomeration effects etc happened to start there and are strong. But for the hypothetical I needed to design it like Cali does something special policy wise .
Sounds like a job for a sovereign wealth fund to me. Loan to pay off the deferred taxes and set a time of jubilee commensurate with when IPOs need to occur (such that, if sufficiently late, there's a reasonable chance of them being outcompeted).
It does occur to me that most of the states that have these kinds of funds are states where resource development physically takes place; the same is technically true of California provided it remains capable of attracting tech startups. (Arguably, it's so incapable of this that the "inability to attract new talent" capital of the world has followed the talent after it all moved to Texas.)
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In keeping but not required by adherence to that purpose. The dose makes the poison. It may just be too much.
It's hard to argue that the American system wouldn't have minority protections even with the loss of the filibuster, the question is really about balance. Your argument is really for people who want to abolish the Senate altogether.
Which, of course, some people do want!
I think there's a lot of safeguards built in, and the biggest, most underappreciated one is simply the separation of Federal Authority and State Authority. And I'm also of the opinion that this safeguard got removed without good reason. The 10th amendment is actually fairly clear that the 'powers' of Government are reserved for the States unless specifically granted in the Constitution. But somehow that Amendment passes unremarked upon since many other powers have been read into the existing language, even though 10a arguably imposes the opposite requirement.
Under this system, if Congress 'can't do enough' because they're too stymied, people have the option to go ask their state government to do the thing instead! Its not like we INHERENTLY need to make everything a national congressional debate!
I just like to err way further in favor of safeguards, since I prefer consensus, cooperation, and compromise (and the right to walk away!) over handing power to any particular subgroup to dictate terms for the whole.
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That the majority should govern in a representative, constitutional democracy does not equate at all to rule of the mob.
have you seen these representatives in the last couple decades
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Sounds like a specific definition of "the majority" that is based on something other than the actual ideological makeup of the voting public, yes?
Surely in a constitutional Democracy the rules in said constitution would define who is governing and how they do so.
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? I didn't realize we were debating the question of representative democracy as such. I'm not sure supporting the end of the filibuster logically entails supporting direct democracy. Sounds like a disaster.
As for how "the system is designed" -- the filibuster was never "designed". The Founding Fathers did not intend that the Senate require a supermajority to pass business. (Not that I would agree if they had.) The Filibuster as it currently exists emerged out of speech and debate norms which no longer apply. It was never intended as a constraint on actually governing. That the filibuster has stuck around using the vaneer of tradition is because it's a perfect excuse for never doing anything.
If "the majority should govern" is some kind of high priority, and the minority should have no tools to interfere with that governance, I don't see why you'd support representative democracy at all. I'm missing something in your chain of logic.
My chain of logic doesn't even include 'majority should govern' as a factor, other than to acknowledge that letting the minority have dictatorial power over the majority is not good.
Why does the Senate exist in the first place, why was congress designed as a bicameral house?
In many cases doing nothing is the actual best response. That its now the excuse for inaction may be true, but I'd suggest that's a problem of incentives to do nothing, they can always find another excuse.
The filibuster is not an integral feature of democracy, republican norms, constitutional government, etc. It is an obstacle to enacting even extremely basic legislation without supermajority consent, which is extremely impractical. It actually encourages a dramatic blowup some day, because eventually the weight of our sins will pile up until a supermajority is given. What happens for example of Republicans don't turn it around, and Democrats win in 2028 with 2026 numbers? The rate of change will escape velocity and probably lead to a lot of really bad outcomes.
But I think I'm getting away from your point. I support getting rid of the filibuster and having a system similar to basically every other bicameral state. Almost none of the 50 states requires a supermajority to pass business in the Senate. I don't believe supporting a system like that, which works fine basically everywhere, requires me to logically continue to direct democracy.
I'm not sure how you're defining 'integral feature.' I think we might agree that "each legislative body gets to set their own internal rules on how they function" is an integral feature, and so if they choose to add or remove the filibuster, as long as they follow the rulemaking process, its just a formal agreement on how they will conduct the proceedings.
I just don't think "the majority should govern" is a required objective to design around.
If you can't get supermajority consent for 'extremely basic legislation' that seems like a problem caused by something OTHER than the filibuster itself. I would NOT claim that unanimous consent is possible or even preferable, but if there's enough controversy that 1/3 of the people involved reject the legislation, what's wrong with encouraging collaboration and compromise to get over that threshold?
To be explicit, I simply do not get why "50% + 1" is anything other than an arbitrary standard for passing rules that govern a whole. I mean, sure, its an intuitively pleasing one, but does it correlate with better outcomes than, say 53%? 55%?
To be even more explicit, I think the system as it exists was designed so that 'simple majority' rule would be relegated to the House of Reps, and that it was to be tempered by the Senate having an equal say in the process.
I've read the Federalist Papers, so I think the logic of "we need a legislative body that is less beholden to mob rule and is geared towards protecting 'underrepresented' interests when necessary" flows into "this body should have higher voting standards so they have to achieve more of a consensus" quite nicely.
Hence why Senators get 6 year terms, why they were originally appointed by their own state legislatures (should we go back to that?), and of course the "2 per state" limit.
Me, I personally would be fine with there being two separate voting standards: 2/3 majority to pass new legislation, and a simple majority to repeal anything that's been in place for, say 2 years or more. After all, if a 'simple majority' thinks a law is bad/should be removed after its been in effect for a while, surely that's all we should need?
Again this really seems like a problem that results from hyperpolarization rather than the filibuster itself.
As I understand it, the Civil War happened at a time when there was no Filibuster, or at least it wasn't used as such. I don't think it would have prevented the war, mind, but it might have given slaveholding states a little reassurance that they wouldn't get steamrolled if they stayed in the Union.
What is your specific objection to direct democracy, then? That it doesn't work?
It's arbitrary but it's a shortcut we take to avoid intractable political differences turning into what Clausewitz called "the continuation of politics by other means." All other things being unknowns or equal, if I had to bet on one side in a civil war and all I knew was their numbers, the correct answer would be to bet on the more numerous one. So to spare ourselves having to go through the bloodshed, we defer on intractable political differences to the side of the debate with the numerical advantage. Going with any other numbers but 50%+1 leaves more intractable issues without answer; some of these require an answer and not being able to resolve them causes potential for these issues to degenerate into violence.
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Ok, I think I understand your point better now in a way I didn't before. I misunderstood you.
I counter that democratic majorities are not stable. A 51% majority is constrained by the public. It can't act in inherently unpopular ways or it will lose its majority in the next election. It can't use its majority to rig the next election because of the other checks and balances inherent in the system.
An escalating see-saw between Democrat majorities and Republican majorities passing narrow majority laws is not the healthiest dynamic, but it's healthier than a system in which nobody can ever pass anything.
I wrote out a response to this and then I thought some more and I wondered if maybe you had a point, but came back to thinking that it would not have made much of a difference. Republicans in 1860 won a plurality in the House and tied the Democratic Party in the Senate. (The House was split between six parties, meaningfully three.) The Republicans didn't have a majority that could have steamrolled slavery. The South was incensed by the prospect of any national power used to restrict slavery at all.
Filibuster from the Constitution is an interesting thought experiment though. I wonder what parts of American history would have changed. A lot of the compromises before the Civil War itself would not have passed -- I think the Missouri Compromise is dead, for example. Maybe some of those votes against were "fake" and would have switched with a higher ceiling. A lot of the early tariffs would have been impossible. I think a lot of the Progressive Era reforms would be dead, but not the New Deal. You'd still have the Civil Rights Act, Hart-Celler, the ADA, Obamacare, the 19th Amendment, Sherman Antitrust, the Food and Drug Act, the entire New Deal, the charter of the Bank of the United States, the Fed.
The more I think about it maybe this is a compelling argument, and I can't find many examples off the top of my head of important legislation that would not have passed the Senate with a permanent filibuster.
A libertarian perspective is that a powerless government that does nothing is far more favorable than a whiplash government seesaw. In fact a powerless government is far more favorable than a stable government that keeps on piling more partisan laws in a consistent direction.
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