When the Democrats, at the start of the present session, organized the Senate without changing the procedural rule allowing for the filibuster, and requiring a cloture vote of 60 members to end one, they took on responsibility for giving Republicans and blue dogs inordinate influence over the legislative process. The filibuster is a long-standing tradition in the Senate, but the constitution doesn’t require it. It requires only majority rule in the Senate.
The effect of the filibuster in the current Senate has been to give Republicans and blue dogs influence they would not otherwise have had. This influence has had at least the following effects. First, it made it very difficult for the Senate to pass a Credit Card Reform bill that placed a ceiling on credit card interest rates, and, the Senate did not pass such a bill. As a result, credit card companies, which are paying close to zero annual interest on funds they borrow, are able to charge much higher interest rates to the public. Recently, they’ve been taking advantage of that ability to raise interest rates way beyond what consumers were paying prior to the recent banking bailout. For example, where some consumers with good credit were paying 10% annual interest on credit cards, now their rates may be 15% or higher. On $10,000 credit card debt, these consumers are now paying an additional $500 per year to their credit card company. If the consumers involved are less credit worthy than the first group, they might well have had their interest rates increased to 30%, meaning that they now have to pay an extra $2,000 per year to their credit card company, unless they can refinance their debt, which is very unlikely in the present credit market. Of course, all this means that a Democratic Congress decided to enable the credit card companies to strengthen their balance sheets by making excessive profits on the backs of consumers who were already in debt. The amount of additional money involved for many consumers was greater than the tax breaks they received as part of the stimulus package by the Obama Administration. No one knows for sure whether this result of credit card reform would have been averted if the filibuster had been repealed in the Senate. But we do know that Senators who may have favored limits on credit card interest rates would have had a much better chance to pass such constraints, and prevent the gross injustice of letting the companies make such excessive profits off consumers if passing them had required only 51 rather than 60 votes. The Democratic Party in the Senate which failed to remove the filibuster must bear the responsibility for the fact that interest rate limits were viewed as “off the table.”
Second, the stimulus package last Spring is now widely recognized as too small, and also as misdirected in its emphasis on tax cuts, rather than on saving more State and Local Government jobs and directly creating still other private sector jobs. While the stimulus is often credited with preventing further free fall into a depression, the situation we are now faced with is that unemployment is approaching and is expected soon to exceed 10 percent and to remain at high levels exceeding that number for some time. In short, it was very important that the stimulus package have a stronger job creation component. That it wasn’t larger, and didn’t have such a component, was in large part due to the context created by the presence of the filibuster. The Administration needed 60 votes for cloture to pass any stimulus. But a $1.5 Trillion stimulus that emphasized job creation faced opposition from the “moderate” Republicans and the blue dogs. So, the Administration ignored advice from the nation’s top economists citing the impossibility of passing more expansive legislation and proposed a bill that was small enough to create the possibility of compromise with Senators such as Snowe, Collins, Lieberman, Nelson, and other blue dogs. That compromise has cost many Americans, perhaps millions of them jobs they otherwise would have had. These Americans and many others who might have benefited from greater economic activity from the presently unemployed are other victims of the filibuster. A filibuster which the current Democratic majority bears primary responsibility for failing to end.
Third, of course, the present health care legislative process has been greatly influenced by the existence of the filibuster. There’s a good deal of support for enhanced Medicare for All, single-payer health insurance reform in the House, but that body hasn’t even really tried to pass single-payer, because its members believe that there’s not a chance in hell that such a bill would pass the Senate. The idea of a strong public option was originally conceived as a half-way house that would provide a pathway to single-payer, and it has considerable support from Democrats in both houses of Congress. But, at every stage of the process, Democrats in favor of a bill with a strong PO have had to take account of objections from Republicans and blue dogs in hopes that concessions would bring forth a bill that would pass both Houses and get 60 votes in the Senate. The result has been that health insurance reform keeps getting watered down until now there is good chance that there will be either a highly constrained PO in the final bill, or no PO at all, but that there also will be individual mandates to buy insurance along with subsidies to insure that the individuals forced to buy it will be able to pay the private insurance companies. This result, looks very much like an insurance company bailout. But we have been led inexorably to it, by the presence of the filibuster and the desire of Democrats to get 60 votes.
So, summarizing, legislation in this session in three critical areas: credit card reform, the economic stimulus, and health insurance reform have all had to cope with the threat of filibuster. The results in two of the three areas have been harmed greatly by its presence, as have the Americans who have felt the impact of that legislation. In a third area, health insurance reform, the expectation now is that a bill will be passed that benefits the insurance companies far more than the people who have been their victims for many years. Further, the same pattern can be expected in the areas of energy, educational reform, climate change, and job creation, if the Administration now moves forward with a new bill in this area. The filibuster is a devastating hurdle to overcome in any sort of reform. It empowers those both in and outside of the Congress who benefit from present problems, and it enfeebles those who want to solve those problems and serve the interests of the people.
So, why are we still saddled with the filibuster? The answer is that the Democrats didn’t want to get rid of it. They wanted to have the excuse available that they needed 60 votes to keep their promises, and the chance to blame their failure to keep them on Republicans. Blue dogs wanted to keep it because, it gives them inordinate power over the rest of a caucus in which they are a distinct minority. And some progressive Democrats wanted to retain it, because they’ve benefited from it in the past, when they were in the minority and wanted to block particularly obnoxious Republican legislation. So, since so many Democrats wanted to retain it, the possibility of getting rid of the filibuster was never seriously entertained at the beginning of the session. But since the Democrats didn’t rid the Congress of it, they now have to take responsibility for its presence and continuing crippling effects on creating change we can believe. It is, in the end, the Senate Democrats fault that we haven’t had better credit card reform, and a better stimulus with more jobs and fewer unemployed. And it is also their fault that the health insurance reform bill is likely to be an onerous change that does more harm than good. It is their fault, because it is they who prioritized the comfortable tradition of the filibuster, ahead of the promises they made to the American people. If they continue to do that, they will deserve all of the punishment they will surely get at the polls.
(Also posted at firedoglake.com where there may be more comments)