Filibustered and abandoned

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To judge by conventional Beltway political coverage, the scrum for power in Congress is merely another site for offstage bargaining, favor-trading, and assorted other institutional intrigues, in line with all the other day-to-day negotiation that’s supposed to make up America’s two-party political system. But that image has never been true to the underlying degradation of our democracy, even when the parties could sustain at least a ritualized impression of comity. The quest for legislative compromise and bipartisan consent on Capitol Hill has yielded some of the worst federal lawmaking in recent memory, from the resolution to invade Iraq to the USA Patriot Act to the TARP bailouts of 2009.

And something far greater is at stake in the looming congressional stalemate of 2021, as TNR staff writer Osita Nwanevu notes. By any measure, the 117th Congress will go down as one of the most consequential Congresses in American history, he writes—in no small part because it will help determine whether the Constitution’s basic protections of the right to vote will be anything more than a dead letter:

A stack of bills that must be passed as regular legislation have been passed by the House and now sit, piled up for the Senate’s consideration. One of them is the For the People Act, or H.R. 1⁠—a long-discussed package of democratic reforms like automatic voter registration and a work-around for restrictive voter ID laws. Its passage into law would be the most significant expansion of political and civil rights in many decades. “There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights,” House Majority Whip James Clyburn said recently. “That just ain’t gonna happen.”

It might, actually. Absent additional changes or its full elimination, the return to the talking filibuster floated in recent days would do little more than place a bow on all the comparisons commentators have spent the last decade making between the contemporary Republican Party and the segregationist right during the civil rights era. Lindsey Graham has already invited us to imagine him taking a Thurmond-esque stand against H.R. 1. Others would champ at the bit to join him.

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Indeed, the Senate’s adherence to the anti-democratic obstruction of the filibuster is poised now—as it has been throughout the chamber’s history—to decisively smite down the advancement of civil rights and the ever-imperiled conditions of political equality in our formal democracy. The GOP minority grasps these stakes all too plainly, since a truly equitable framework of representative government threatens a Republican political agenda that has consistently fallen short of sustained popular approval. To have a governing structure genuinely committed to the expansive right to vote and due process in the administration of our elections is to place the GOP’s leadership caste on the path to political obsolescence. Hence, as Nwanevu notes, Ted Cruz—always a reliable bellwether of power-minded opinion on the right—has already gone into full demagogue mode on the alleged menace of H.R. 1:

In a call last week with the American Legislative Exchange Council, … Cruz told activists that there would be no room for compromise on H.R. 1 and the democratic reform push. “H.R. 1’s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election,” he said. “That they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century.” In an appearance on Fox, he went on to dub it the Corrupt Politicians Act, calling it “the single most dangerous piece of legislation before Congress,” and insisted its passage “would result in millions of illegal immigrants, and criminals, and felons being able to vote.”

This is why the filibuster is simply a procedural luxury our democracy no longer can afford. If H.R. 1 is strangled by it and joins nearly every other bill passed under the last House’s Democratic majority in the legislative graveyard of the Senate, Nwanevu writes, “the right will push forward a redoubled, all-hands-on-deck effort to curb voting rights for minorities wherever Republicans control government.” Already some 253 voter suppression initiatives are in play in GOP-controlled state legislatures; it is in no way hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party’s long-term power play here is to institute a system of permanent minority-party rule by ensuring that legislative bodies in America can never effectively reflect the will of the people.

Does the Democratic party leadership understand the existential stakes of the H.R. 1 battle? Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear. Right-leaning Democratic senators such as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin continue to pledge fealty to the myth of the filibuster as an agent of sage consensus-building in a divided Congress (even though they’ve also lately entertained the notion of modifying the maneuver to enhance the difficulty of its use, as has President Joe Biden). Unless and until Democrats mount a disciplined fight on behalf of the free and fair exercise of the franchise and resist the hoary insider vision of legislation as a glorified procedural game, the brutal verdict on both the party’s prospects and the reconstruction of America’s small-d democracy will simply be “Game over.”

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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