Democrats Should Do What Americans Want And Kill The Filibuster
Knowing Democrats are married to decorum and tradition above all else, Supreme Court conservatives have snickered in their direction and said in one voice: You won't end the filibuster.
The Supreme Court's far-right justices have all but dared congressional Democrats to blow up the Senate filibuster and enact an agenda that could, just maybe, stem the fascist tide.
In making downright radical rulings since congressional Republican stole the Court's majority and Donald Trump created a conservative supermajority, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and John Roberts – who is far more redpilled than previously thought – have said matters of extraordinary national importance needed to be decided by the legislative branch.
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The Supreme Court's right wingers have made this grand pronouncement in bad faith, naturally, because that is their default setting. Thomas and Alito and the rest know full well that America's legislative branch has been brought to a halt by arcane rules meant to make progressive change a slog, close to impossible. They know the Senate's filibuster rule is an impenetrable wall through which real progress can never pass. This is quite convenient for the American right, which now makes policies via radicalized federal judges and SCOTUS justices. They understand that if Democrats can't enact their agenda in Congress, and can't use the courts, they have no path to making policy.
Denny Carter
Democrats can hold the White House and slim Senate majorities for the twenty or thirty years and Clarence Thomas can rest easy with the knowledge that any and all efforts to address the collapsing climate or abortion rights or voting rights or healthcare is but a dream that exists in the lefty mind, and nowhere else. Knowing Democrats are married to decorum and tradition and a fair game above all else, Supreme Court conservatives have snickered in their direction over the past couple years and said in one voice: You won't do it. You won't kill the filibuster. You're too weak, too chickenshit, too feckless and meek in the face of strident opposition.
All of which makes Kamala Harris' recent pledge to end the filibuster to restore abortion rights quite the development.
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said in an Tuesday interview with WPR's Wisconsin Today, part of her local media tour that has infuriated national media outlets as they do their best to pretend this is a close presidential contest. “And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
Perhaps it shouldn't come as some great shock considering Harris as far back as 2019 said she would support codifying Roe – which, if we're being honest with each other, is insufficient – along with the Green New Deal.
Joe Manchin shat his pants within minutes of Harris' anti-filibuster comments, stomping his feet and saying he had no choice but to not vote for Harris in November. As a longtime recipient of truckloads of cash in exchange for his cooperation in gumming up the Senate's gears, Manchin – now with shit leaking from the bottom of his trousers – sees Harris' comments as a threat to undo his life's work: Ensuring life in the United States will not and cannot get better. Manchin went so far as to say the filibuster – the legislative maneuver that is inherently anti-majoritarian – is "the Holy Grail of democracy." It's a statement that might leave James Madison no choice but to haunt Manchin for the rest of his days.
The tough part for Manchin and other enemies of societal progress is that a solid majority of American voters support the end of the filibuster. Maybe they want to do that weird thing where you elect people to address major problems making life less free and fair. I'm only spitballing here.
This Should Have Happened A Long Time Ago
It is the ultimate and collective regret of every politically-engaged millennial that the filibuster wasn't nuked in 2009. Barack Obama had swept into office in a crushing defeat of a bruised and battered GOP, Democrats had seized a big House majority, and hark! They had a filibuster-proof 60-40 majority.
That left no avenue for Republicans to fuck things up. They were voiceless in the Obama-era Congress. If only Democrats had treated them that way (thankfully, Democratic governors like Tim Walz have since learned to completely shut out Republican voices even when Dems have a narrow majority).
That a handful (or more) of the Senate Democrats were really just Republicans from the 80s and 90s who had no home in the quickly-radicalizing Republican Party meant that the Democratic trifecta could not do what it needed to do: Give statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. and lock in a long-term Senate majority. They would have needed all 60 Dems to vote in favor of statehood. Everyone knew they did not have those numbers, but they certainly had 51 votes to create two new states and four new Democratic Senate seats and a few more electoral votes that would go to Democratic presidential candidates in perpetuity. All they had to do was end the filibuster and break the everlasting gridlock that has made it impossible for the United States to address a range of vexing and eminently solvable problems. These include our children being regularly murdered in schools so the profit line on gun manufacturers' spreadsheets can keep going up.
Obama-era Democrats lacked the courage to do what needs to be done. Today's Democrats, many of whom are way to the left of early-2000s Democrats who operated with the bloodless triangulation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, have learned the lessons of the Trump era. The past decade has seen congressional Republican leaders eviscerate all Senate norms. And it has worked beautifully. The right wing has captured the circuit courts and the Supreme Court, which now serve as backstops to end all liberal policies as soon as they're born.
If nuking the filibuster and establishing dominance over Republicans was critical back in 2009, it is utterly necessary today. It's heartening to hear Harris lean into the anti-filibuster discourse and tell folks that we do not have to be chained to the corpses of our forefathers if we don't want to be. We can, as Harris likes to say, be "unburdened by what has been." Imagine that.
If the 2024 election breaks right and Democrats have a 52-48 majority or something close to it, they have no choice but to solve the country's problems one party-line vote at a time. If they choose to let the filibuster live on, and for Republicans to continue calling the shots from the chamber's minority, we will have some judge in north Texas who watches Newsmax nine hours a day making federal policy from the bench until our dying day. I'd rather not.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.
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