Political Strategy Several Steps from Policy

The Senate failed to fix the filibuster problem this week.  Slate argues that the filibuster is ‘inherently reactionary.’  EzraKlein argues in the Washington Post that most Senate Democrats do not want to fix the rule, fearing powerlessness when they again become a minority party.  Klein adds that most media coverage of this debate gets the logic of one aspect backwards.

“The reform idea that got the most press was the “talking filibuster.” I’m a skeptic. The Senate can do quite a bit more to force filibustering senators to talk right now. The reason it doesn’t is that time is precious. The talking filibuster had many virtues, but at its core, it got the causality of the problem backwards. The reason the minority doesn’t burn time on the Senate floor talking isn’t because they don’t want to. It’s because the majority doesn’t want them to.”

The best idea I have heard has been proposed by the younger generation of Senators and is called the 41 vote rule.  Rather than the current rule, which requires the majority to deliver 60 votes in the chamber to defeat a filibuster, this would shift the burden of proof to the minority seeking to block legislation with the filibuster by requiring them to deliver 41 Senators in the chamber.  This will both reduce the use of the filibuster to block legislation and do it by appropriately shifting the burden of proof to the Senators seeking to block any particular piece of legislation.  As Klein put it “filibustering should be inconvenient.” 

There appears to be widespread Democratic party support for the 41 vote rule, among younger Senators and leadership, but their fear of becoming a minority party again may have overrode other considerations.  It is also unclear to me how much support there was for this idea among Republican Senators, and if even this rule would have required expending large amounts of political capital right now, it is possible that Senators were weighing party interest, individual interest (the current rule provides lots of power to individual Senators), and the interests of those who want to pass immigration, tax code, and gun regulation reform this term.