I went back and forth with a number of people yesterday about the filibuster and the leadership contest in the Senate Democratic caucus yesterday. You want Van Hollen because among other reasons, some contended, he gets you closer to getting rid of the filibuster. Don’t be so sure of that. I want to show you something that popped up yesterday in my Twitter feed that is a good example of why. TPM alum Sahil Kapur posted this clip of Bernie Sanders getting asked about the filibuster. The answer isn’t great. I’m not picking on Sanders here. I’m flagging this precisely because Sanders is a key player making this leadership contest possible and people imagine, with some good reason, that Sanders is most willing to upend conventions, take on establishment thinking, etc. It’s an example of how deep filibuster thinking runs.
In case you don’t get a chance to watch, the gist of what he says is this: There are some good reasons for getting rid of the filibuster, majorities should govern, etc. But then he says that the filibuster is also key to protecting the rights of the minority. Having given a pretty equivocal response he then kind of dismisses the question by saying he’s confident the Democrats can pass a pretty good reconciliation bill. In other words, a big omnibus bill which has to survive the budgetary impact “Byrd” rules and ends up having a million different things in it and no one really knows what they are.
Again, this isn’t a criticism of or picking on Sanders. His reply is notable precisely because Sanders is presumably going to be among those most willing to upset the apple cart (though this can also be more generational than ideological). But even he’s pretty resistant.
One TPM reader just told me it’s crazy to get into a big fight about this now when President Trump’s veto makes this mostly moot. That is a credible argument; but I disagree. With the filibuster in place, you’re not going to be able to pass a bunch of popular bills that President Trump is forced to veto. And you’re not going to be able to put Senate Republicans on the spot and force them to vote against popular bills either. So a lot of what people want Democrats to do out of the gate next year isn’t actually going to happen. It’ll peter out in parliamentary minutiae.
The good news is we don’t really have to settle that argument because the argument in favor is the same either way. You’re not going to be able to hit the ground running in 2029 (if there’s a trifecta) if you haven’t laid the groundwork in 2027 and 2028 — precisely because support for this anti-majority relic runs a lot deeper than people like to think. Whether you think it’s critical in 2027 or 2029 you’ve got to start identifying who is on what side today.
What makes the filibuster so hard to ditch is that the conversation about it is murked up in these vague and equivocal answers — being kind of against it but never quite ready to get rid of it. This is how the Senate works — really, how both legislative bodies work: members always want to keep their positions vague because it preserves their freedom of action. If you take a moment to think about it, it’s remarkable that even for people who follow this closely, it’s extremely difficult to name any senators who are definitively and publicly in favor of killing the filibuster or keeping it.
That vagueness is by design. As long as the Democratic caucus is an amorphous blob when it comes to the filibuster, sort of against it but not in a specific or definitive way, it’s impossible to grab on to, impossible to start dividing the caucus into supporters and opponents and begin pressuring or convincing members to shift from one column to the other.
If you’re serious about ending the filibuster — and almost everything depends on it — you have to change that: you have to start identifying supporters and opponents, get them on the record. And you have to start doing it today because if you don’t you’ll roll into 2029 in the exact same situation, with this intractable barrier to progress which isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
