Tom Geoghegan sets out the case for ending the filibuster and describes the admittedly difficult path to doing it:
This past spring, Senator Claire McCaskill wrote to me asking for $50 to help elect more Democrats, so we could have a filibuster-proof Senate... But even with Franken in office, we don't have a filibuster-proof Senate. To get to sixty on the Democratic side, we'll still have to cut deals with Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and others who cat around as Blue Dogs from vote to vote...
Maybe we loyal Dems should start sending postcards like the following: "Dear Senator: Why do you keep asking for my money? You've already got the fifty-one votes you need to get rid of the filibuster rule."
That, he points out, is the only way we're ever going to have a Democratic Senate that acts like it's Democratic. Of course they have no interest in getting rid of the filibuster and simply following majority rules. It gives individual senators tremendous power to cut behind-the-scenes deals and the DSCC one more reason to hit up the faithful for more money and more support, trying to get to a "filibuster-proof" Senate.
But there will never be such a thing.
"But just wait till 2010, when we get sixty-two or sixty-three Democrats." I'm sure that's what Senator McCaskill would tell me. "So come on, kick in." But Senator, where will they come from?
They could come from bloody border states like yours (Missouri), or from deep inside the South. The problem with the filibuster is not so much that it puts Republicans in control but that it puts senators from conservative regions like the South, the border states and the Great Plains in control.
The only true filibuster-proof Senate would be a majority that would be proof against those regions. An astute book published in 2006, Thomas Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie, argued that to craft a presidential majority Democrats don't need the Southern vote. That may be true (although it turned out that Barack Obama made historic inroads in the South, winning three states there). But there is no way to whistle past Dixie when a non-Dixie presidential majority tries to get its program through the Senate. After 2010, we could have sixty-four Democrats in the Senate and still be in bad shape.
A filibuster-proof Senate, then, is a conceptual impossibility. Even with a hundred Democrats, a filibuster would still lock in a form of minority rule.
Those who think the filibuster should be retained say it kept an extremist administration like Bush's from enacting the worst of its agenda, and that future Bushes will come back into power one day.
Geoghegan says that the best way to keep extremist Republicans out of power is to enact a true liberal agenda that will benefit the vast majority of the population, and the filibuster is keeping Democrats from doing that, and in fact discrediting and corrupting the Democratic Party by forcing it to always weaken, compromise, and undercut its own agenda.
How to get rid of the filibuster? It wouldn't be easy, if it's anything like the battle JFK underwent to throw out a similar bar to majority rule in the House that allowed the Civil Rights Bill and Great Society legislation to be passed later.
We should adopt the strategy of the antislavery movement, which in the early stages had three approaches:
- The laying of petitions on the House. Forgive the archaic legal phrase: I mean petitions to Congress, both houses. In the era of John Quincy Adams...there would be mass petitions, with Adams and others reading them on the House floor to the howls of the Southerners. Every group busted by a filibuster should lay on a petition. And start with the House, which is the only place it has a chance of being read.
- Resolutions by the House, as a warm-up for the Senate. Such resolutions might read: "Resolved, that Congress has no authority to require supermajorities in any chamber except as authorized by the Constitution." Aren't House chairs tired of seeing their bills cast into black holes by senators whose names they never even know?
- Evangelizing. The most effective tactic in the fight against slavery was the preaching of New England clergy against it. We can start in our battle against the filibuster by enlisting faculty at New England colleges to hold teach-ins. Teach the kids why "Yes, we can" can't happen with the current Senate rules.