Bluster and the Filibuster
John Thune, the Republican Party’s soon to be new majority leader, speaking from the hallowed floor of that 165 year old chamber, recently said that he found it, “ironic that the party that has spent a fair amount of time this election cycle talking about the importance of preserving our democracy seems intent on embracing the thoroughly undemocratic notion that only one party should be making decisions in this country.” That is to say that he said, this time apparently without a sense of irony, that preserving the filibuster—an antidemocratic procedure deployed by an aristocratic body—is essential to the maintenance of our ongoing experiment in practicing democracy. Granted it is probably too much to ask of a career politician, even one who hails from the ironically named state of South Dakota—the fortieth state admitted to our union being named in honor of the Lakota and Dakota people whose sacred Black Hills were “unlawfully abrogated” (stolen) and who were massacred at Wounded Knee when they Ghost Danced in protest over this theft—to be as consistent in understanding of irony as he is skilled in his use of political bluster, but still one can always hope.
Senator Thune’s interest in preserving the filibuster has nothing to do with democratic governance or protecting the rights of the political minority. Legislative stasis, cultivating suspicion of any notion of the public good (eek, eek Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare will all lead to tyranny and socialism!), and eroding confidence in the efficacy of national governance being, after all, the evergreen goals of the once grand old party.
What Senator Thune is telling any American who has ears to hear is that he intends to do everything in his power to continue rendering the world’s greatest deliberative body dysfunctional, broken, and incapable of passing legislation that would improve the lives of everyday Americans at the expense of corporate profit margins. Newsflash: like his predecessor, Senator McConnell, Thune’s incoming majority has no intention of passing legislation that the majority of Americans favor.
Like, for example, S. 25 the Senate bill introduced in 2023, also known as the Assault Weapons Ban of 2023, and which, if passed, would save countless American lives (annually). Or H.R. 842, S.567—two different versions of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act introduced once in the House of Representatives and once in the Senate—and how it would have helped American workers to organize to more effectively bargain for better benefits and wages. Or S. 728, the Paycheck Fairness Act that would make it less onerous for women to pursue claims that they are suffering wage disparity on the basis of sex discrimination. Which is to say nothing of H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or H.R. 1280, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Each one of these bills, whether they originated in the House or the Senate, were doomed to be filibustered before the ink used to print them had dried. That the American people support the passage of these bills is of no moment to Republicans.
A government that cuts taxes for the rich, appoints conservative judges, and spends, profligately, on the military but is otherwise unresponsive to the needs of everyday Americans is what Republicans take good governance to be. Maybe if elected Democrats repeated the last sentence three times while clicking their heels (or is it donning Kente cloth and taking a knee) the message would finally sink in: dysfunctional, static governance is a feature, not a bug, of the post New Deal Republican Party when it comes to anything and everything public minded and broadly social that would improve the lives of the American people.
If the Democratic Party had any political backbone at all (or even just a faint, future desire to govern), not only would it reject Senator Thune’s mocking overture to protect their political rights, it would actively encourage the President-Elect into forcing the Republican led Senate to bend its knee to him, and discard the filibuster, so that he could pass whatever agenda he believes forty-nine percent of America has given him a mandate to pursue.
The best thing the Democratic Party can do for the country, and themselves, in the next two years is to allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to govern. Democrats should stop playing the role of an empty, toothless foil, when, for the next two years it has next to no power. And they ought to bet that a failed businessman who bankrupted a casino before becoming a politician teamed up with a political party that can’t stop prostrating itself before him, if both allowed to govern, are likely to create conditions that will lead to Democratic majorities in 2026, 2028, and beyond.
Of course, Democrats, in their finite political wisdom, will do no such thing. Because Democrats have no interest in governing in the future in a way that would improve the lives of everyday Americans, not if that means ridding themselves of corporate influence and admitting how kowtowing to the wealthy elite has caused them to stray from their core mission: fighting for working class Americans, which is to say sixty percent of the electorate, with nearly half of the sixty percent being comprised of racial minorities. Democrats don’t want to govern differently in the future because they, too, prefer the status quo. No one was happier than Democratic Party leadership when the second part of the infrastructure bill was sacrificed and then scuttled. Getting rid of the filibuster would mean no longer being able to hide behind Republicans while pursuing even more legislation that favors the big money interests who pay for them to be elected. And ending the ruse that there is a significant difference between their economic priorities and Republican economic priorities is not something Democratic Party leadership is even remotely prepared to do.
Instead, they’ll bluster on and on about needing the filibuster to protect Social Security and Medicare. They’ll assume that everyone has forgotten what happened when George W. Bush proposed privatizing social security after his resounding 2004 re-election: the negative reaction to his attempt to partially privatize Social Security was so vehement that Bush didn’t even allow the House to come forward with a bill. And this with a Senate advantage of 55 Republicans to 44 Democrats and a House advantage of 230 Republicans to 202 Democrats, numbers far exceeding Trump’s alleged mandate that our comically supine media keeps jibber-jabbering about. They’ll ignore recent polling that suggests Social Security and Medicare is right now more popular than ever: seventy-eight percent of all Americans actually support expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits. Or that the President-Elect has pledged to leave it untouched.
No, instead of encouraging Republicans to govern now–go on, knock yourselves out, get rid of the extraordinary social safety nets our party created and that the American people prefer–so that Democrats can govern later, Senator Schumer will soon be adding his bluster to Senator Thune’s bluster about the need to maintain the status quo, I mean the filibuster, so that the wealthy can keep getting wealthier and the rest of us can squabble over the scraps.
After all it was Democratic Senators Joe Manchin, John Tester, Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, Chris Coons, Tom Carper, and Kyrsten Sinema who filibustered S. 53, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021. Senator Sinema, you might recall—God bless and good riddance—entered her vote against as she curtsied.