If the US wants sensible politics, the filibuster needs to go
Ten dead in a shopping mall in Colorado, just days after eight died in shootings in massage parlours near Atlanta, Georgia. America is rediscovering old ways of dying, as well as old rationalisations as to why the problem is a lack of guns, not an excess.
More guns might well be an answer but is unlikely to be the best answer. First, there’s a degree of fantasy about these awful scenarios, as though everybody is capable of engaging in John Wick levels of marksmanship at the crucial moment. Second, even if a good defence does amount to a good offence, further liberalisation of gun ownership would hardly be benign. For all the lives saved in individual sprees, normal life would change for the worse. Many more would die in firearm accidents, often – crazily, sickeningly – involving children. Yet more from suicide, driven by the convenience of having a gun close at hand at bad moments.
It is often said that Americans are in love with their guns, but America’s politicians could quickly implement changes to gun culture if it was simply a matter of giving people what they want. What stands in their way is a political process that had long been compromised by the money that the gun lobby injects into the system, as well as a fundamentally broken legislature.
Joe Biden certainly faces renewed calls to live up to the tough promises he made during his election campaign. Yet achieving any significant change will require Republican help and that is unlikely to happen in the numbers required. This inevitably leads to the problem of the filibuster which has slowly emerged to become one of the big talking points of this administration.
Mitch McConnell this week warned against any changes to the rules of the Senate. Democrats would “turn the Senate into a sort of nuclear winter,” he said. But then of course he would. The filibuster is often spoken about as though it is an instrument of the Constitution, but this strange instrument – requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to pass some areas of legislation in the Senate – was created in 1789 and only first used in 1837. It saw increased use throughout the 1970s but became the hot topic of partisan politics in the past decade when it was rolled back by successive administrations, most notably in 2013 when Democrat Harry Reid excluded it from votes on federal court nominees (excluding the Supreme Court). It was Mitch McConnell himself who got rid of that limitation in 2017, to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominations.
McConnell has good reason to oppose any such change in the present circumstances; the present circumstances being his position as minority leader. Getting rid of the filibuster effectively pushes Republicans further into the fringes and, in McConnell’s words, “would leave an angry 50 senators not interested in being cooperative on even the simplest things.”
Yet there are good reasons to abandon it completely. The filibuster is meant to nurture bipartisan cooperation and advance policies that exist in that middle ground between the ideological extremes. The reality is that the filibuster has neutered successive administrations to the extent that American politics has come to be defined by its negative space. Presidents leave office rueing their missed opportunities rather than their accomplishments. Trump never got infrastructure done. Obama famously regretted his ability to put forward gun reforms. With George W Bush it was the failure to deliver Social Security reform. As for Bill Clinton, there was much to regret but he has admitted: “I’m sorry on the home front that we didn’t get health care and that we didn’t reform Social Security”.
As a consequence, American voters don’t get a chance to judge the government they voted into power. They instead judge a government compromised by a system that rarely affords presidents the power to execute their agendas, whether for good or bad. What some describe as moderation is, in fact, a prolonged stalemate that ultimately condemns both parties to mediocrity, whilst undermining people’s faith in the democratic process.
A better class of politics might be achieved by getting rid of the filibuster. Given enough freedom to do wrong, both Republican and Democratic administrations would have more incentive to do right. Politicians on both sides would be more mindful of the ramifications of polices being driven by ideology. It would be akin to the now-famous moment when the late John McCain effectively protected Republicans from their own worst instincts, by voting to save the very Obamacare he hated.
As it stands, the current situation lends itself to perverse situations in the Senate where politicians on both sides of the chamber routinely engage in posturing – voting for policies they might privately oppose but find politically expedient to advocate so long as there is no chance they’ll pass. This only normalises the politics of extremes because politicians know they’ll never be held to account for the sometimes crazy policies they advance. By allowing parties the power to essentially be themselves, America will get to see what the two parties genuinely represent, and which visions of America they prefer. Republican governments would rule as Republicans; Democrats as Democrats. By wielding true power, politicians will be held to account for any excesses should they abuse that power. It might also make a few of them take the job a whole lot more seriously.