Biden, Democrats, and the filibuster

Photo: Tom Williams

From Jonathan Chait:

...The prospective concern with Biden is not that he would somehow revive the old Dixiecrat coalition, but that he is nostalgically trapped in the bygone world of his youth, unable to grasp the tectonic changes that have reshaped American politics. ..

The Senate is undemocratic by design, giving disproportionate representation to residents of low-population states (which tilt rural and white.) It compounds this quality with a supermajority requirement, the filibuster, which senators often justify as permitting “unlimited debate,” but which does not require any speechifying and is typically used to prevent debates from taking place. 

For decades, the filibuster was primarily used to block even modest civil-rights measures, like anti-lynching measures. After decade upon decade of the Senate serving as a graveyard for civil-rights legislation, the movement finally broke through in the 1950s and 1960s...

But even senators who joined after the decline absorbed its institutional memory and sense of its better past self. “We should not be doing anything to mess with the strength of the filibuster,” New Jersey senator Cory Booker said earlier this year. “It’s one of the distinguishing factors of this body.” Even the famously irascible Bernie Sanders insisted that he was “not crazy about getting rid of the filibuster,” which he defends as a tool “to protect minority rights"...(emphasis added)

Yet none of the Democratic senators running for president can match Biden’s adoration. The Senate’s traditions form his model for how politics ought to be conducted. “The system’s worked pretty damn well,” Biden recently told a reporter. “It’s called the Constitution. It says you have to get a consensus to get anything done.” 

In his presidential announcement speech, Biden frontally challenged the notion that the system had changed and made large-scale bipartisanship obsolete...

Voters lap up this kind of happy talk, so Biden would have reason to say this kind of thing even if he knew better. But if he were saying this out of political calculation, it would be odd that he would express the idea in such an uncalculating way — Democrats running for president in the 21st century usually try not to go out of the way to associate themselves with segregationists.

In any case, Biden has been delivering his senatorial restoration riff for so long, and so insistently, that there’s little reason to doubt his sincerity. 

Biden’s 2007 memoir laments “our bitter and partisan party divisions,” but insists, “from inside the arena none of it feels irreversible or fatal.”

The dozen years since, under three presidents, ought to have confirmed that the partisan trend was indeed irreversible.

See also Harry Reid: The Filibuster Is Suffocating the Will of the American People.