Two years later, the so-called Republican Revolution swept into Washington, D. Soon, Boxer and her fellow Senate Democrats found themselves beating back one retrograde bill after another, sent their way from the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and its new speaker, Newt Gingrich.
Boxer remembers one deregulatory bill that would have undermined standards for mammograms. But when I spoke with Boxer earlier this year, she told me her views had changed. Now, she wants the filibuster gone, tossed into the dustbin of history. For her, the scales had tipped toward ending the filibuster. For a variety of reasons, more and more Democrats are reaching the same conclusion Boxer has: that the need to preserve the filibuster as a check on future Republican majorities is outweighed by the danger of leaving it in place and failing to act on urgent crises like climate change, gun violence, and democratic reform.
This change of heart happened fast. Four years ago, 29 Democrats signed a letter along with dozens of their Republican colleagues that urged the Senate leadership to preserve the vote requirement on most types of legislation. Not only did red-state Democrats sign that letter but progressives did too, including senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Bernie Sanders I-Vt. But by the start of this year, Harris, Booker, Sanders, and Gillibrand had all changed their tune and come out in support of reforming or ending the filibuster. Of the 50 Senate Democrats, 45 of them are on the record either supporting reform or abolition or expressing openness to the idea. What changed?
Why have so many Democrats endorsed filibuster reform? And, most importantly, what will it take to get the rest of them onboard with actual changes? Jeff Merkley remembers what the Senate used to be like. It was , and Merkley was interning for then-Sen. Mark Hatfield, a moderate Republican from Oregon. There were no cell phones and no email in those days, and the action moved fast on the Senate floor from amendment to amendment, bill to bill.
Instead, he watched as senators competed with one another to introduce their amendments, stump for their bills, and lobby their colleagues on how to vote. In , Merkley got elected to the Senate himself after a decade in the Oregon legislature. Within a few years, he no longer recognized the chamber that was once sacred to him, and the filibuster played a big part in that. Lyndon Johnson faced two cloture votes in his six years as majority leader; Harry Reid, the Democratic leader from to , had more than He called for reviving the so-called talking filibuster, requiring that any senator stand on the floor and speak for the entirety of their filibuster.
As the rules stand, senators can obstruct a bill by merely notifying their colleagues of their intention to do so.
In , Senate Democrats took a small step in the direction of filibuster reform. But Democrats made full use of the filibuster after Republicans won back the Senate in and Donald Trump won the presidential race. And Democrats used the filibuster under Trump to block Republican legislation on policing reform , abortion funding , and sanctuary cities. They are pursuing big policy changes on slender legislative majorities. And raising enough tax revenue to create or expand as many government programs as Democrats are seeking to would be tough under any circumstances.
But the Senate filibuster looms as the biggest obstacle to the broadest range of Democratic priorities. Even if the party ultimately coalesces behind a robust reconciliation bill, failing to confront the filibuster guarantees that it will head into the midterm elections without the legislative progress Biden promised on issues as central to core Democratic constituencies as immigration, police reform, voting rights, gun control, raising the minimum wage, and safeguarding abortion and LGBTQ rights.
That prospect is drawing stark warnings from groups that helped mobilize the massive turnout in that gave Democrats unified control of Washington in the first place.
Filibuster critics have made some progress this year. Adam Green believes that all other Democratic senators beyond Manchin and Sinema would now accept at least some changes to the rule. Read: Manchin and Sinema face the weight of history.
Democrats now have unified control of government but remain stymied on many issues by their refusal to confront the disaster of the filibuster. By the time a new generation of Democrats summons the will and consensus to reconsider the rule, the party could lose its control of government. Either scenario leaves them unable to pass the party priorities. Once that window shuts, it might not reopen for some time.
If Democrats lose either the House or the Senate in , it could take many years before they again control both chambers and the White House—especially if they fail to pass voting-rights legislation counteracting the laws and congressional gerrymanders that red states are passing to tilt the electoral playing field toward the GOP. The real question may be whether Democrats dismantle it themselves now, or watch as Republicans do it the next time they hold unified control of Congress and the White House.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. So maybe Democrats would not be able abolish the filibuster even if they tried. For now. But that could change. On the contrary.
The filibuster has a generally ignominious history, with some moments of glory. Since then, the filibuster has prominently been used to prop up racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws. Two of the most famous uses of the movie-version filibuster mentioned above were by the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, who in held the Senate floor for more than 24 hours in an attempt to block civil rights legislation — and who mounted a sequel filibuster to sequel legislation in In a separate address at the funeral of the civil rights leader representative John Lewis in , Barack Obama laid the filibuster on the chopping block.
The who-started-it argument about killing the filibuster revolves around federal judicial nominees and whether they could be filibustered. In brief, the Democrats were first to filibuster a federal judge nominee, in response to a loathed George W Bush pick who at the time was taken to be so uniquely unacceptable as to warrant unusual measures.
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