If you need a supermajority...
I mean, what even is that?
Hi, friends! Happy Friday!
Have I mentioned that I started my time as a professional writer focusing on federal politics? It’s true. Way back in 2017, in the earliest days of the Trump administration, I got hired to write about federal politics with the express goal of increasing civic engagement across party lines.
It’s only a “participatory democracy” if we actually participate, right?
The trouble with political participation, however, is that it’s hard when you don’t understand how things work. And, by and large, our civic education efforts in the United States are nearly as poor as our efforts at sex education (but that’s another post). My kid went on a field trip for their Government class this week and, honestly, I’m not sure they learned a single, useful bit of information that pertains to their life.
Instead, they trooped down to City Hall to meet the Mayor and the City Planner. The Mayor mostly told jokes. And the City Planner? I mean, what high schooler is gonna pay attention to the guy who runs sidewalk improvement?
As an adult, I’m all about sidewalk improvement and any number of mundanities of running a small city. I think employees and elected officials of city and town governments are absolute heroes, as can be witnessed right now in the clean-up efforts in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. But teaching people about how government works, as the great educator Paolo Friere argued, requires allowing citizens to see themselves in the material they are learning so they become political subjects and not just pawns.
If the great popular masses are without a more critical understanding of how society functions, it is not because they are naturally incapable of it—to my view—but on account of the precarious conditions in which they live and survive, where they are “forbidden to know.” Thus, the way out is not ideological propaganda and political “sloganizing,” as the mechanists say it is, but the critical effort through which men and women take themselves in hand and become agents of curiosity, become investigators, become subjects in an ongoing process of quest for the revelation of the “why” of things and facts.— Paolo Friere, The Pedagogy of Hope
In other words, to effectively teach people about government you have to show them how the wonky mechanics of government matter to their lives. What matters to the high schoolers I care about? Abortion rights. Climate Change. Police brutality. Mass shootings.
Speaking of, three years ago this very week I took a break from the usual sorts of things we do here at the newsletter to return to my beginnings, writing about federal politics to encourage civic engagement. My subject was the filibuster, a rule that prevents any legislation without a supermajority of support from advancing through the U.S. Senate. Why focus on the filibuster?
The filibuster is in the news again now because Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has called for declaring an exception to the filibuster rule for abortion rights legislation. So, it seems timely to bring this essay back around.
Headlines have misrepresented Harris’s stance either explicitly or implicitly— “Kamala Harris says she supports ending the filibuster to bring back Roe v. Wade”, “Harris backs ending filibuster for abortion rights legislation”— which is easy to do when most folks don’t actually understand what you’re talking about. Folks read “end the filibuster” and get easily drawn into alarmist arguments about what might happen if minority views are ignored in the workings of our government, missing entirely the fact that the structure of the Senate already privileges minority views.
The representation for each state, regardless of population, is set at two senators. This means that as the U.S. population has increasingly moved to urban areas (a worldwide trend), the minority rural, primarily White, largely Republican populations of the country have an increasing degree of influence over policy. As of this year, for instance, California has a population of 39 million. How many senators represent them? Two! Wyoming has a population of 579,000. How many senators represent them? Two!
According to the Brennan Center, “by 2040, given projected population growth, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by just 30 percent of the Senate.” And there are serious racial implications to Senate representation skewing to primarily rural states as well. In the New York Times, author David Leonhardt argued that the Senate is essentially “affirmative action for white people.” He calculated that White Americans get 0.35 senators per million people; Black Americans get 0.26; Asian Americans are right behind them, with 0.25; and Hispanics are last in the race to the bottom, with 0.19. We, White folks, are the current racial majority, but according to the Census Bureau’s projections, we will be in the minority by 2045.
Also, again, Harris isn’t calling for an entire end to the filibuster. She’s talking about a carve-out to the existing rule for abortion rights legislation, which isn’t unprecedented. Currently, there are 161 exceptions to the filibuster rule. In 2021, 80% of Senate roll-call votes involved one or more filibuster exceptions.
This begs the question, If you need that many exceptions to a rule to get the majority of your business done, maybe the rule stinks?
It’s true that various political leaders of both parties, from Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, strongly oppose the complete elimination of the filibuster. Bernie famously has relied on the “talking filibuster” to hold up Senate business, but since the institution of the two-track rule (in 1972) Bernie’s occasional epic speeches are simply political theater.
McConnell swore when he was the Majority Leader in the Senate to pursue what he called a “scorched Earth policy” if the filibuster was eliminated, totally stopping any legislation from proceeding through the chamber unless every member of the body was physically present. To which I would argue:
They’re barely advancing 5% of the bills proposed in the Senate annually now, in large part because of the filibuster, so how big of a threat is that, really? Bringing Congress to a complete standstill will piss the American people off, just like the GOP’s increasing brinksmanship around government shut-downs. Pissed off people vote, Mitch.
Mitch was threatening to use parliamentary procedure to require all Senators to be physically present in the place we elect and pay them to work. Oh, no! The horror! Maybe if they all got off the endless campaign trail treadmill and stayed in Washington to get some legislation passed, we’d all be better off. Harris’s abbreviated campaign is proving we don’t need the treadmill. But we do need them to get work done.
Clearly, unlike Harris, I’m advocating for ending the filibuster entirely. But I’m also advocating for civic education, so don’t just take my word here for it. In the newsletter linked above I provide an exhaustive (but entertaining, I promise!) history of the rule, data on its modern impacts on Senate effectiveness, and the primary arguments for and against. There are dozens of links included as well as information about how to weigh in with your Senators.
It’s only a “participatory democracy” if we actually participate, right? So, allow me to help you participate. Please and thank you.
XO,
Asha
Asha Sanaker: END the filibuster.
My goodness, Mitch McConnell used to revel in being the "Grim Reaper" of progressive legislation.
I believe we would have updated civil rights legislation in the absence of that outmoded artifact of Dixiecrat politics.