In a recent blog called “Keep the Filibuster, Say Dem Senators,” Ryan Grim writes about the pushback from Democratic Senators against current calls from Progressives to get rid of the filibuster. Since this pushback was coming from four of my favorite Democratic Senators: Claire McCaskill, Amy Klobuchar, Barbara Boxer, and Patrick Leahy, I thought I ought to reply to the position taken in the article, a position that I think represents a loss of long-term perspective resulting from too close involvement with everyday experience.
Of course, it’s true that progressives may need the filibuster in the future, just as the conservatives need it now. And, of course, some centrist Democrats looking to maintain disproportionate influence having nothing to do with their ideas or capabilities want to maintain the filibuster. But none of this addresses the central point. That point is how much Democracy, in the sense of rule by majority, should we have in our Government?
Frankly, I think the United States has much too little Democracy in its Government right now. Majority Rule doesn’t apply in Presidential Elections. Monetary Policy is under control of the “independent” unelected Federal Reserve. The Senate needs 60 votes to pass anything important. The will of the Congress can be thwarted by Presidential veto. The popular will is subject to International Trade Agreements. The Supreme Court is unelected. The House is elected based on unfairly apportioned districts designed to maintain a system of “rotten boroughs.” Right now, there are all sorts of arrangements in place to thwart majority opinion; but there is very little in our Governance arrangements to facilitate it. I think the extent to which majority rule is frustrated in America is detrimental to societal adaptation. We can’t change fast to meet crises, because all sorts of arrangements are in place to allow those who are against change to frustrate us. If we’re not careful, this incapacity to adapt to a fast moving world will result in the decline of the United States. It may have already done so, during the past 40 years.
We can’t and shouldn’t forget, that elections are about the results of societal learning. They are our way of making operative lessons we have learned about the failures of our society and our way of getting new decision makers in power who embody our lessons learned. If these decision makers can’t apply those lessons because of barriers of process, we cannot learn whether those new lessons are right or wrong, the velocity of our adaptation suffers, and we are less adaptive than we should be.
It’s fine for Barbara Boxer (one of my favorite politicians, by the way), to point out that if the filibuster didn’t exist, during the 1990s, the crazy Republicans would have put through a whole mess of ridiculous and harmful legislation; but we have to recognize at least two things when evaluating her anecdote about this. First, Bill Clinton was President at the time, and the Republicans didn’t have enough votes to overturn a veto in most instances. And second, and more importantly, so what if the Republicans had been able to go crazy? Had that happened, the Congress would have been turned back to the Democrats that much sooner, and with no filibuster in place those same Democrats would have quickly been able to undo any Republican damage. The point is that there is a choice between preventing change with the filibuster procedure, or removing this barrier to change in order to allow people to learn from the consequences of bad legislation. A real Democracy has more faith in the latter method than in the former. Are we a real Democracy, or not?