President Barack Obama met with Senate Democrats Wednesday to try to stiffen their spines and boost their morale two weeks after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts put an end to their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. Brown was sworn in Thursday and his presence in the Senate gives Republicans 41 seats. Under Senate rules, 41 is a magic number, since it takes 60 votes to end debate on any given issue and move a bill or a nomination forward.
Obama consoled his fellow Democrats by reminding them that they still hold a substantial majority if not a supermajority over their Republican counterparts. He asked them to consider the absurdity behind a Village Voice headline that said Brown’s win gives Senate Republicans a 41-59 “majority” and he urged Democrats to buck up and keep working on their agenda.
(The Voice headline, by the way, was clearly inspired by the brilliant and deservedly famous Harvard Crimson headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29,” that ran after Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds of its 1968 football game with Yale to tie a mighty Yale team that had won 16 in a row. The game is the subject of a prizewinning 2008 documentary that takes the Crimson headline as its title.)
I’ve written before on this blog about the filibuster, and any Google search will turn up several articles detailing its history and evolution. (Congressional Quarterly has a particularly good one here.) While the filibuster has been around for a long time — it popped up as a loophole possibility when the Senate changed its rules in 1806 to distinguish itself from the House, and was first used in 1841 — the filibuster as we know it today goes back only about 40 years to when Senate leaders, favoring sleep and a predictable schedule, decided to let virtual filibusters (simply signaling a refusal to end debate) take the place of real filibusters (talking for hours or days on end to delay, kill or force changes to legislation). No surprise then that the filibuster’s use has greatly increased over the past few decades now that filibustering no longer requires any work — no theatrical reading of the Constitution, the Bible or a grandmother’s recipes to the point of surrender, or compromise — and as partisan divides have deepened.
The filibuster can be a useful check on majority excess but today it’s more reflective of “the tyranny of the minority,” to quote Democratic consultant Peter Fenn, than it is a protection of the minority’s right to be heard. A check on power is a core American value, but what happens when that check no longer needs to be carefully considered or judiciously employed, when it has grown so great that it causes legislative paralysis on issues great and trivial and renders elections legislatively meaningless?
Each party is guilty, of course, of abusing the filibuster. Each condemns the filibuster when in control of the Senate and each uses it when in the minority. Each no longer sees the filibuster as a rarely taken path that sometimes leads to constructive delay and compromise. In our era of purity tests and partisan fits, when politicians fear that to compromise legislatively is to compromise themselves politically, the filibuster is primarily seen as a tool to indefinitely obstruct the other side’s agenda.
So, sorry, Mr. President. Nice pep talk you gave there, but that clever Village Voice headline writer is right. Senate Democrats may have the numbers, but unless something changes, Republicans hold the strings.
