END THE FILIBUSTER

 So Joe Biden enters the White House with the wind at his back; oh sure, he's got a lot of work to do, like dealing with the effects of the coronavirus on both human lives and the economy, but still,  his approval rating is over fifty percent and his party now controls the House and the Senate as well as the White House.  And Biden hit the ground running, using the power of Presidential order to make big changes on things like immigration and climate change right away.  So far so good.  Perhaps undoing the horrid years of the Trump administration won't be so hard.

And then, reality struck.  Right now the Senate is basically in a state of limbo, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanding that Democrats promise not to get rid of the filibuster before the session begins.  The filibuster is, of course, the rule that allows any member of the Senate to change the number needed for a bill or nomination to pass the Senate from a simple majority to  sixty.  And there is a big difference in that chamber between fifty one votes and sixty.  There's a reason why McConnell is fighting so hard for to keep it; he remembers how effectively he and other Republicans in the Senate used it to slow down the changes that the Obama administration was trying to make back in two thousand and eight (and in a burst of successful cynicism, used their use of gridlock to make Obama look ineffectual in the midterms!).  

But the Democrats remember two thousand and eight too, and they are not thrilled at the prospect of constant filibusters again.  While they are not necessarily saying that they will get rid of it, they want to at least retain the possibility of ending it as a bargaining chip.  Just how long this standoff will last is unknown, but McConnell is a man who clearly like getting his way.  Remember that he held up  Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland  for ten months before the twenty sixteen election, and then rammed through Amy Coney Barrett to that same court less than a month before the twenty twenty election.  Another problem is that not all the Democrats are united behind ending the filibuster, with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia coming out against ending it.

That's a pity.  I've already blogged about how insane I think the filibuster is, and it bears repeating: it's not in the constitution, it has a sorry history of holding up civil rights legislation, and it give far too much power to individual members of the Senate.  Really, it seems like common sense that a piece of legislation passed by majorities of the House and the Senate and supported by the President should be passed, but the filibuster can kill it anyway.

 I think the US Senate is already a chamber that gives far too much power to small states (California, with thirty five million people, has only as many Senators as Rhode Island, which has just over a million people living in it), eliminating the Filibuster is one way that it can become more reflective of the nation at large.  I also think that Puerto Rico and Washington DC should  become states.  But that's another argument.