So much for bipartisanship.
As of this writing, the Senate can’t even agree on how to disagree. They’re stuck on an organizing resolution that will set the structure of Senate committees given the 50/50 split in the chamber. The obvious quick-route was to simply adopt the rules hammered out by Tom Daschle (D) and Trent Lott (R) the last time we had such a split two decades ago. But no. Of course not.
The complex specifics of the prior deal aren’t of great importance here. In brief, it recognized that one party was “in charge” due to the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote while still acknowledging that both parties had equal numbers of elected Senators in the chamber. The deal was fair.
This time around, Mitch McConnell (R) demanded that the legislative filibuster be formally enshrined within a modified version of the agreement to protect the 60-vote threshold for most legislation. Chuck Schumer (D), in turn, told him to take a hike around NeverLand. Both are wrong.
On one side, it is unreasonable for McConnell to expect Schumer to agree to something that McConnell didn’t agree to when he was the Majority Leader. Sure, McConnell didn’t try to ditch the legislative filibuster despite Trump’s pushing him to do so. Importantly, however, this wasn’t due to any perceived legal or ethical boundary. McConnell didn’t do it simply because he didn’t have the votes within his own caucus to pass the rules change. Period. If he could have passed it, he would have.
On the other side, there is little reason – other than spite – for Schumer to refuse to recognize reality. Schumer doesn’t have the votes in his own caucus to pass the rules change, either.
Both are missing the point.
Eliminating the filibuster is a bad idea. It is not simply some arcane rule. In fact, it provides an extremely important guardrail that must be preserved. Otherwise, the Senate becomes just a smaller version of the House where the majority has absolute control and the minority has no reason to even show up. The Senate is intended to be the more deliberative Congressional body with six-year terms for two Senators from each state and a 60-vote threshold to complete most of its work. Agreement in the Senate isn’t supposed to be easy and the minority isn’t supposed to be irrelevant. Democrats may be charge right now but that will change at some point.
Of course, in recent years, the filibuster has become the minority’s middle-finger to the majority and has been used – by both parties – to simply block all of the majority’s efforts purely for the sake of blocking them. This “tyranny of the minority” is also wrong but it is undoubtedly at the core of McConnell’s game plan.
A fix is complicated but likely includes re-introducing earmarks. The practice – which allowed discretionary funds to be directed to specific projects and entities bypassing normal bidding processes – was formally dropped about a decade ago. The “reform” had good intentions but didn’t really stop the practice. Lawmakers simply found other ways to specifically fund their pet projects and “pork” has never been more than 1% of the budget anyway. All that the earmarks ban really did was to prevent the horse-trading that Congress needed to gather the necessary individual votes to pass broader bills. Without earmarks, everything ended up being decided purely along party lines. And that’s not working for anyone.
In any case, to get out of our current stalemate, Schumer and McConnell need to simply have a “gentlemen’s agreement” that the elimination of the filibuster is off the table for now. That’s a simple recognition of fact and there’s no reason to make it more of the issue than it is. Unless Republicans retreat to filibustering everything from the lunch menu forward, there are way too many institutionalist Democrats to allow a rules change along party lines. However, the very distant threat of eliminating the filibuster might help the cause of compromise.
One can at least hope.