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RSN | Hidden in Plain Sight: The "Unimpeachable" Offenses |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 February 2021 13:04 |
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Solomon writes: "Impeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won't: 'What about a president's unimpeachable offenses?'"
Donald Trump speaks at a rally on Nov. 2, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Hidden in Plain Sight: The "Unimpeachable" Offenses
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
08 February 21
 mpeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offenses?”
The question is the flip side of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.
So, when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article last month, the actions were much too late and much too little.
On Feb. 6, 2017, less than three weeks into Trump’s term, I wrote in The Hill newspaper: “From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.” I pointed out that “the president continues to violate two ‘emoluments’ clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.”
But, at the outset, treating President Trump as unimpeachable – despite those flagrant violations of the Constitution – greased the wheels for the runaway madness of his presidency in the years that followed. As Trump’s destructive joyride went on, reasons to impeach him proliferated. Researchers easily drew up dozens of articles of impeachment. But in the eyes of political elites, as with previous presidents, Trump’s offenses were seen as unimpeachable.
Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton became the second impeached president in U.S. history. The frenzy was akin to vilifying Al Capone for tax evasion. “We all seem to have lost our sense of proportion,” historian Howard Zinn wrote five weeks before Clinton’s impeachment. “Why are the political leaders of the United States and the major media talking of impeaching Bill Clinton for lies about sex, surely not the most important sins of his administration?”
Writing in November 1998, Zinn added: “If Clinton is to be impeached, why do it for frivolous reasons? I can think of at least 10 reasons to impeach him, for acts far more serious than his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky or his lies to Kenneth Starr. I am speaking of matters of life and death for large numbers of people.”
Zinn cited such matters as missile attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan; Clinton’s refusal to accept a Canadian proposal to ban land mines; continuation of “embargoes on Cuba and Iraq, causing widespread misery in Cuba for lack of food and medicine, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq according to U.N. statistics”; and squandering vast funds on the U.S. military while people were suffering and dying at home and abroad due to lack of health care, nutrition and housing.
There was no second impeachment of Clinton after he used a “diplomatic” scam called the Rambouillet accords to justify launching intensive U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, without Congressional authorization. Clinton persisted with a continuous air war for more than two months – making history by blatantly violating the War Powers Resolution.
Trump – like Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him – was able to order missile strikes and deploy troops in numerous war-torn countries without Congressional constraints. And there was no reason to be concerned that Congress might impeach him for war crimes. The reasons for such impunity are rooted in the history of “unimpeachable” offenses.
Consider the proceedings in Congress that forced President Richard Nixon to resign when impeachment was imminent in mid-1974. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment – focusing on Nixon’s obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in by operatives for his re-election campaign, misuse of federal agencies to violate citizens’ constitutional rights, and noncompliance with Congressional subpoenas.
Unmentioned in the Nixon impeachment articles: the Vietnam War that he had prolonged with a vengeance while claiming to seek peace. With methodical deception, Nixon inflicted a massive horrendous war – but his crimes against humanity were judged to be completely unimpeachable.
Also entirely excluded from the Nixon impeachment articles was the merciless U.S. bombardment of northern Laos that slaughtered people who lived on the Plain of Jars, making Laos “the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.” The impeachment articles likewise made no mention of Nixon’s ordering of the secret and illegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia, which began two months into his presidency and persisted year after year.
On July 31, 1973 – nearly a full year before Nixon’s resignation – Democratic Rep. Robert Drinan introduced an impeachment resolution. He said it was triggered by the “recent revelation that President Nixon conducted a totally secret air war in Cambodia.”
As journalist Judith Coburn noted, “The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan’s Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.”
Gerald Ford’s “only honest answer” – acknowledging that an impeachable offense is only “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history” – foreshadowed the impeachment proceedings against Nixon, Clinton and Trump.
If what’s impeachable is only what members of Congress say it is, constituents should insist that egregiously narrow definitions must no longer prevail. Otherwise, the operative standard for presidents will continue to be what they can get away with – in tandem with a collectively feckless Congress.
For now, the presidential offenses that are routinely considered unimpeachable – and therefore ultimately acceptable – tell us a lot about Congress. And about U.S. mass media. And maybe about ourselves.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Our Democracy Faced a Near-Death Experience. Here's How to Revive It. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58254"><span class="small">Stacey Abrams, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 08 February 2021 11:29 |
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Abrams writes: "The violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, coupled with ongoing threats to election officials, election workers and lawmakers at all levels, represent unprecedented attacks on the foundations of our democracy."
'I have the right to do the things I think I should do,' Abrams said. 'My gender and my race should not be limitations.' (photo: LaToya Ruby Frazier/The New Yorker)
Our Democracy Faced a Near-Death Experience. Here's How to Revive It.
By Stacey Abrams, The Washington Post
08 February 21
 he violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, coupled with ongoing threats to election officials, election workers and lawmakers at all levels, represent unprecedented attacks on the foundations of our democracy. Certainly, President Donald Trump and others in his party who inspired the attacks must be held accountable through all available means. But accountability alone will not be nearly enough.
Only meaningful reforms can undo the damage done — and establish a government that is truly representative of the people. The next real test of our democracy comes now.
Make no mistake: Democracy may have survived this year, but President Biden and Vice President Harris were elected despite, not thanks to, weakened electoral systems. Together with the Democratic Congress, they now have the opportunity to implement reforms that reaffirm our nation’s promises that our country represents and works for everyone. We as Democrats must act before it is too late.
Our democratic system faces extraordinary threats today because of sustained attacks from Republican leaders who throw up roadblocks to voting and, among the worst actors, stoke the flames of white supremacy and hyper-nationalism to cling to power. There can be no clearer example than the covid-19 pandemic. The deaths of more than 450,000 people in the richest country in the world are symptomatic of a democracy in crisis and a political system that rewards cronyism over competence. Despite strong public support for the Centers for Disease Control’s work, the Affordable Care Act, and other economic justice and safety-net policies that could save lives, millions nevertheless continue to contract the disease without adequate access to health care.
No thinking person can deny that the communities of color disproportionately suffering and dying from this pandemic are also the people whose votes — and ability to hold failed leaders accountable — have been continuously suppressed.
The pandemic has been a collision of tragedy and corroded institutions, and the challenge is in how we respond. We can either engage in collective amnesia about what we have just lived through, and leave an unaccountable government in place, or we can rise to meet this moment by fixing the broken social compact. Defeating Trump was not enough. Meaningful progress on health care, racial justice and the economy requires aggressive action on voting rights, partisan gerrymandering and campaign finance.
One of the first steps must be an overhaul of the Senate filibuster, which has long been wielded as a cudgel against the needs of millions who struggle. Today, the parliamentary trick creates a more sinister threat to our nation: the ability of a minority of senators, who represent 41.5 million fewer people than the Senate majority, to block progress favored by most Americans.
Democrats in Congress must fully embrace their mandate to fast-track democracy reforms that give voters a fair fight, rather than allowing undemocratic systems to be used as tools and excuses to perpetuate that same system. This is a moment of both historic imperative and, with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress, historic opportunity.
The agenda to restore democracy also includes passing the For the People Act to protect and expand voting rights, fight gerrymandering and reduce the influence of money in politics; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the Protecting Our Democracy Act to constrain the corruption of future presidents who deem themselves above the law. These landmark bills have broad-based support, and would have passed long ago were it not for obstructionist leaders who fear losing their own influence if the American people have more power of their own.
Further, fixing our democracy requires we finally allow our fellow Americans in D.C. and Puerto Rico, the vast majority of whom are people of color, to have full access to our democracy. That means D.C. statehood and binding self-determination for Puerto Rico. In the District, as white extremist mobs destroyed the Capitol, murdered a police officer, and threatened the lives of elected officials and residents, Washingtonians were left defenseless because D.C. is not a state and its chief executive had no authority to deploy the National Guard.
Time is short. The forces standing against a democracy agenda seek to preserve and expand paths to power by shrinking the voting pool rather than winning voters over. In reaction to the historic turnout of 2020 and Democratic victories in places such as Georgia, already this year more than 100 bills have been put forward in state legislatures seeking to restrict voting access. Those efforts will not end without a fight.
We don’t know how many chances we will get to reverse our democracy’s near-death experience. We must not waste this one. We must go big — the future of democracy demands it.
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RSN | The Empire Strikes Back (Part One): The Largest Voter Suppression Campaign in US History Is Underway |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 February 2021 09:20 |
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Wasserman writes: "The Republican Party's post 2020 state-by-state assault on voting rights has begun with the demand that all mailed-in paper ballots include photo ID. The Jim Crow racism is beyond obvious."
Voting in Ohio. (photo: David Goldman/AP)
ALSO SEE: After Record 2020 Turnout, State Republicans
Weigh Making It Harder to Vote
The Empire Strikes Back (Part One): The Largest Voter Suppression Campaign in US History Is Underway
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
08 February 21
he Republican Party’s post 2020 state-by-state assault on voting rights has begun with the demand that all mailed-in paper ballots include photo ID.
The Jim Crow racism is beyond obvious. Instead of having to guess, mailed-in photo ID lets election officials quickly identify which ballots came from citizens of color … and then pitch them on the spot. By banning student IDs, they can also eliminate ballots coming from college campuses.
Thus the Nixon-Trump/Atwater-Rove-Bannon Republicans have picked up the KKK burning cross straight from hands of the Jim Crow Democrats.
They’re flooding at least 28 state legislatures with more than a hundred laws meant to undermine American democracy. 2020 taught them that, in Trump’s own words, if people of youth and color could cast ballots and have them reliably counted, “you’d never have another Republican elected again.”
The 2020 election was “stolen” in Trump’s eyes, not merely due to his false allegations about voting machines. What REALLY mattered was that voters of color — black, Hispanic, Asian-American, indigenous — were able to cast paper ballots and have them counted. They came in heavily against Trump, and are likely to escalate against his ilk for years to come.
Voters under 29 in 2020 voted at more than 60% to dump The Donald. Had the electorate been only Millennials and their younger Zoomer cohorts, Trump would have lost by more than 400 electoral votes, including in Texas, Florida, both Carolinas, Iowa and more.
So no Republican will ever consider an election with fair universal access to hand-marked, Vote by Mail, reliably scanned and counted paper ballots to be anything but “stolen.”
Indeed, the whole history of the modern Republican Party (like the race-based Democrats before) has been built on voter suppression. In Georgia and elsewhere, they are pushing bills to:
- massively strip and restrict the right to register to vote and have those registrations protected
- vastly expand the ability of states to purge voter rolls
- ban sending out paper ballots to all registered voters
- ban sending a paper ballot to any absentee voter who does not have a certified medical excuse
- demand photo ID from all voters who show up at the polls
- demand photo ID to be included in any mailed-in ballot application
- demand photo ID to be included in any mailed-in ballot
- demand ballots be witnessed and stamped by one or more notary public
- eliminate acceptance of student ID (as in Texas, gun licenses will still be accepted)
- ban drop boxes
- ban allowing any voter, including those with special needs, from designating anyone to carry their ballot into an election board or voting center
- ban election day registration
- ban prohibitions against caging, which allows party operatives to defraud voters of their ballot
- ban early voting
- tighten time tables for receiving mailed-in ballots
- make it easier for challengers to demand elimination of received ballots
- tighten signature verification, making it easier to arbitrarily pitch ballots
- eliminate precincts primarily in non-white, lower-income areas, and at college campuses
- impose electronic ballot marking devices at voting stations where they can break down, causing long lines
- impose electronic ballot marking devices producing paper ballots that hinge on bar codes illegible to any voter
- use ballot marking and scanning devices with proprietary source code that cannot be monitored by the public
- impose financial and other restrictions effectively banning any third party from gaining an access line on a ballot
- allow local election officials to eliminate saved digital ballot images even though saving them adds no cost to administering an election while vastly enhancing the ease and accuracy of doing recounts
- restrict public audits and recounts of contested elections
- enshrine gerrymandering to guarantee minority Republican rule in swing-state legislatures and the US House of Representatives.
This list goes on.
Many of these bills could be overruled if the massive, extremely complex HR-1 Bill (and its Senate counterpart) would pass the Congress. But with the filibuster still in tact, the odds are dicey.
HR-1 also has its imperfections, among them clauses that could doom nearly all third-parties.
Some 400 pro-democracy bills have also been proposed. But in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona and others, gerrymandered GOP legislatures are poised to beat them back.
The future of any remnant of US democracy might thus depend on the ability of grassroots activists in these key states to somehow override these corrupt legislatures.
It will also ride on grassroots uprisings for state constitutional amendments and other legal means to end gerrymandering altogether, and to establish fair election practices that can’t be trashed by Republicans who so deeply fear actual democracy. Such victories have been won in places like Michigan, Iowa, California and elsewhere.
Winning DC statehood, burying the Electoral College and banning money from electoral politics are also on the agenda.
But the fact remains that the “perfect storm” of decades of dedicated grassroots election-protection work combined with the COVID and other factors in 2020 (and the 2021 US Senate runoffs in Georgia) to produce the most fair, accurate, and truly democratic elections in all of US history.
The shock to the Republican Party has been primal. GOP operatives know that without massively restricting the vote and reversing the fair ballot counting that came with digital scanners and paper-based recounts, they are in terminal danger.
Thus their all-out campaign against all aspects of the democratic process.
The response from the election protection movement must be immediate and forceful. We have just survived a violent attempt to overthrow our democracy. The forces now trying to radically undermine our elections through the state legislatures are quieter, but far better organized and financed.
As a movement we have learned and accomplished great things in this new millennium.
With a coordinated national grassroots campaign, we can enter new realms of democratic fairness the US has never seen before.
Our very survival hangs in the balance.
So let’s do it!
Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition Monday zooms at 5 pm Eastern. His People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org, along with The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, written with Bob Fitrakis.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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What the Filibuster Has Cost America |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43327"><span class="small">Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 07 February 2021 13:59 |
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Kilgore writes: "But in weighing the value of zapping the filibuster in part or in whole the moment it becomes possible, it's important to take a longer look at what it has cost the country over the years."
Southern senators Tom Connally, Walter George, Richard Russell, and Claude Pepper during their successful filibuster of anti-lynching legislation in 1938. (Photo: Library of Congress)
What the Filibuster Has Cost America
By Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
07 February 21
 s Democrats mull a reform or even an abolition of the hoary and disreputable institution of the Senate filibuster, it’s easy to confine the stakes of the debate to desirable legislative items that are currently front-and-center: reforming democracy, fighting climate change, and reforming health care, and other progressive goals that simply cannot get through Congress to Joe Biden’s desk because 41 senators can and will veto every one of them.
Fundamentally, the filibuster (which really didn’t exist in a meaningful sense until the late 19th century) allows any determined Senate minority to resist and in many cases kill legislation it dislikes. Until 1917, with the invention of “cloture,” there was no way to force the end to a filibuster. Still, the filibuster didn’t achieve its full evil flowering as the favored tool for preservation of Jim Crow until between the world wars, and then the late stages of segregation. And it didn’t become a de facto supermajority requirement until a 1970s “reform,” designed to let the Senate function during a filibuster, relieved those using it of the exhausting chore of actually holding down the floor and gabbing incessantly.
But in weighing the value of zapping the filibuster in part or in whole the moment it becomes possible, it’s important to take a longer look at what it has cost the country over the years. While it has been fully available to progressive as well as conservative senators, it has most often been used to defend reactionary institutions and practices, especially those aimed at preserving white supremacy.
Reconstruction
The Houthis are also the victims of US Iranophobia, the paranoid policy framing that sees Iranian devils behind every difficulty in the Middle East, regardless of any lack of evidence. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is an Iranophobe, as well as a Christo-fascist. In a midnight news dump on January 10, Pompeo announced the terrorist designation to go into effect on January 19. The announcement provided little basis in policy or fact and received bipartisan criticism because its most likely impact would have been to exacerbate human suffering in Yemen.
[D]uring the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, senators launched filibusters against civil rights bills, deployment of federal troops in southern states, and repayment of income taxes from the Civil War, Koger said.
“The last gasp of Republican efforts to ensure the political rights of southern blacks was the 1890-91 elections bill, which died in a Senate filibuster,” Koger said. “The Republicans were chastened after this last effort. They were surprised by the vehemence of Southern opposition to the bill, and found that northern interest in civil rights was low.”
It wasn’t until 1957 — when southern senators abandoned a filibuster to help their friend Lyndon Johnson take credit for a toothless bill — that the Senate addressed voting rights. They wouldn’t be actually guaranteed until 1965.
Anti-Lynching Legislation
White Southern determination to use the filibuster to kill anything remotely like civil-rights legislation became manifest in the interwar period, when on two occasions federal legislation to outlaw lynching, for many decades a prevalent form of racist terrorism, succumbed to the filibuster. The first time was in 1922, when the Dyer anti-lynching bill passed the House and was reported to the floor by the relevant Senate committee before southern Democrats talked it to death. And again in 1938, the Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching legislation was filibustered for 30 days before a cloture vote (then requiring two-thirds of senators) failed. Cynically enough, many Republican senators who allegedly favored the legislation opposed cloture.
The End of Jim Crow
By the 1950s, southern Democratic senators (with some support from conservative Republicans) had created a well-oiled filibuster machine against civil-rights legislation under the leadership of Georgia’s racist Richard Russell — for whom one of the Senate’s office buildings is still named. In 1957, they succeeded in stripping the first civil-rights bill they allowed to pass of most of its most significant features (though creation of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department remained). This bill was the object of the longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour marathon undertaken by former Dixiecrat presidential candidate (and future Republican) Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Russell and his men waged the longest filibuster war ever against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin. The filibuster lasted 60 working days and was broken through the determined leadership of Russell’s former protégé LBJ, now president, who swore to dedicate the legislation to John F. Kennedy’s memory, with future vice-president Hubert Humphrey leading the fight on the Senate floor and Republican leader Everett Dirksen supplying crucial late support.
By the time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 came to the Senate floor, 70 votes were available for cloture and a filibuster never really materialized. As late as 1982, however, long after opposition to civil-rights legislation had moved decisively into the Republican Party, Jesse Helms of North Carolina briefly filibustered a Voting Rights Act extension that strengthened its provisions after a Supreme Court decision had required proof of discrimination by the jurisdictions the act covered.
It’s impossible to measure the damage the filibuster did over the years to the causes of equal rights and racial justice, and to innumerable Americans suffering from discrimination and outright oppression. Suffice it to say that the filibuster was the institutional handmaiden of Jim Crow from start to finish, and the old reliable friend of bigots past and present.
A Functioning Senate
A reform of the filibuster in 1974 reduced the the two-thirds vote needed for cloture to a smaller supermajority of 60 votes, but also provided that the Senate could continue to function when facing a filibuster threat (simply putting aside the legislation being filibustered). Since then filibuster has evolved from an occasionally utilized weapon aimed at select areas of progressive legislation to a virtual 60-vote supermajority requirement for major legislation. The number of cloture motions that have proved necessary to keep the Senate functioning has skyrocketed.
And now filibusters are being used to kill not only controversial but highly popular legislation, as Jonathan Chait noted recently: “After the horrifying Newtown massacre, pro-gun Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Pat Toomey negotiated a handful of concrete steps that had overwhelming public support (including among gun owners), such as background checks for purchasing firearms. The bill died of a Republican filibuster, the brief debate a mere afterthought.”
The surge in items subject to the filibuster has placed a huge premium on the limited avenues available for getting around filibusters. One stratagem has been to package enormous amounts of legislation into must-pass omnibus appropriations bills necessary to keep the federal government functioning. But as more and more controversial “riders” have been attached to such measures, the risk of actual government shutdowns has risen, with disruptions of services occurring in 2013 and 2018-19.
For truly controversial legislation, however, the go-to stratagem forced by the filibuster has been the use of budget reconciliation bills that require only a Senate majority, beginning back in 1981 when Ronald Reagan used the device to package and enact much of his legislative agenda. The process, which also has streamlined rules on debates, was subsequently used by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and Democrats are currently in the process of making it available to Joe Biden as well.
While reconciliation has proved to be an effective and indeed indispensable way to get around the filibuster in recent years, it severely limits legislative options, and has a distorting effect on the provisions that do make it into such bills. Under rules bearing the name of longtime senator Robert Byrd, reconciliation bills cannot include items that aren’t germane to the federal budget. This has excluded broad areas of legislation, including, during Barack Obama’s initial legislation blitz, a climate-change bill that passed in the House but never saw the light of day in the Senate. The “Byrd Rule” currently means that a vitally important package of election-reform legislation is likely a dead letter in the Senate. But even widely popular legislation like modest bipartisan gun-safety measures have succumbed to recent filibusters.
Reconciliation hasn’t just excluded types of legislation; it has had a bad effect on the legislation it includes, thanks to the Byrd Rule and the necessity of demonstrating fiscal impact at all costs.
The much-discussed complexity of many federal programs owes a lot to the process necessary to enact or adjust them. It’s not the only reason that Obamacare, for example, is so confusing, but it didn’t help that the final version of the Affordable Care Act was enacted via reconciliation when Democrats lost a Senate supermajority in 2010.
What price can you place on years of failure to address climate change? And given the perilous lack of confidence in our democracy, how much blame for a near-slide into authoritarianism in 2020 do we assign to the filibuster that has made national election reform impracticable?
A Huge and Avoidable Price to Pay
There’s no way to add up all the costs associated with the filibuster over the decades, and it’s obviously harder to assess the bad legislation the dilatory tactic and its theoretical availability has prevented from enactment. Had Republicans been able to repeal Obamacare in 2017 via a straightforward piece of legislation rather than jumping through the hoops required by reconciliation, they might have succeeded.
But all in all, the filibuster has been used to halt progress more often that it has been useful to facilitate it or defend it from attacks. And it remains incontestable that limited reforms — such as restrictions on the measures subject to the filibuster, or a return to the days when “talking filibusters” were required — are available short of its outright abolition which could preserve minority rights in the Senate without thwarting majority rule. Filibuster reform should remain at the top of every progressive legislative agenda. Those center-left or center-right politicians who always find excuses to oppose reform need to be regularly asked: How much damage to America and Americans are you willing to accept to maintain this terrible tradition?
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