I’m pretty much in agreement with Eric Boehm’s take at Reason.com on the rush to abolish the filibuster:
The idea that the filibuster is a holdover from the Jim Crow era—an idea that is suddenly popping up all over left-wing politics and media—stems from the fact that filibusters were relatively rare until the past few decades. “It was used rarely and almost always for the purpose of blocking civil-rights bills,” explains New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “The filibuster exception to the general practice of majority rule was a product of an implicit understanding that the white North would grant the white South a veto on matters of white supremacy.”
There is no question that the filibuster has been wielded for racist purposes. Sen. Strom Thurmond (D–S.C.) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 24 hours—still the longest filibuster on record—in a failed attempt to block a final vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for example. The bill passed anyway.
But the filibuster is better understood as the product of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules. As such, it is not inherently racist (and, by extension, abolishing it won’t make the Senate as an institution anti-racist). If it was used by racists to advance racist goals, the racists are to blame. Presidents have used the annual State of the Union address to advance all manner of terrible policy, but we rightfully blame them (and the Congress that eventually votes to enact such policies) and not the speech itself.
The debate over the filibuster, like all of the tedious debates over procedural mechanisms in legislative chambers, is really about power. That power can manifest itself in the perpetuation of racist and discriminatory systems, of course, but not exclusively.
“Short-term, pragmatic considerations almost always shape contests over reform of Senate rules,” Sarah Binder, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration last year. She was referring to the history of the filibuster and its evolution over the decades, but the same lesson applies to what’s happening right now.
If the Democratic leadership were really impelled to “anti-racism”, there would be a lot more black representatives and senators in their caucus than there are now. Their present approach to redistricting has multiple objectives: creating “safe” Democratic districts, producing representatives who are more progressive than Democrats are in general but, most of all, protecting incumbents which necessarily means a lot of old, white senators and representatives. FDR’s coalition is no more, black voters are practically its last vestige, and they’re getting short shrift as usual.
All I can say about eliminating cloture rules is be careful of what you wish for. In the near term you may pass a lot of laws. If any of them produce unfortunate unforeseen consequences, Democrats will own them. Their complaints about those evil racist Republicans blocking the things that Americans need won’t have quite the resonance they used to.
