Filibuster Robustly Busted

Ezra Klein has a typically cogent post about how the filibuster screws everything up, based on his remarks at an American Political Science Association panel last week. Among other things, he explains why it’s a fantasy to think that the passage of some important bills since Obama took office means that Senate obstructionism isn’t really a problem. A taste:

Take the marquee pieces of legislation: Health-care reform, the stimulus and financial regulation. In a world without a filibuster, instead of signing every single Democrat to those initiatives, which means every single Democrat had veto power over anything they didn’t like in those initiatives, you would have needed 51 of the 59 or 60 Democrats serving in the Senate. So rather than placating Max Baucus, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Jim Webb, Bill Nelson, Evan Bayh, Claire McCaskill, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Carper, and Ben Nelson, you would’ve only have needed to placate one of them, and then you could’ve negotiated with the others from a position of strength in which passage was assured and their vote would’ve simply been preferable.

Absent the filibuster, Ezra points out, the stimulus would have been way larger and the health care bill would have had the fabled public option. One might add that we’d probably have had a climate and energy bill, too.

Having to get sixty votes for important legislation is just the beginning. Ezra points to numerous others in a post that amounts to a clear, concise primer on the filibuster’s mischief. One of its nastiest, broadest effects, which even many well-informed liberals only dimly understand, is the way it subverts democratic accountability and democracy itself. Ezra:

A recent Pew poll found that only 26 percent of Americans knew that you needed 60 votes to break a filibuster. Another 25 percent though you only needed 51. So in a world where people don’t pay much attention to Congress and don’t understand it very well and mainly vote based on a rough approximation of how well policies seem to be working in their own lives, how’re they supposed to judge the majority’s program when the majority isn’t able to implement it? What’re the chances that people are judging the majority based on outcomes driven by the minority? I’d say pretty high, and that’s something that should worry us.

And of course the filibuster, in turn, is just one of the factors that has made the Senate the dysfunctional, joyless nuisance George Packer autopsies.

The whole post is here. There’s also a C-Span video of the whole panel. It’s worth watching for a few minutes, if only to observe the pathetic lameness of the pro-obstructionism musings offered by a guy from the Heritage Foundation and the courteous forbearance with which Ezra dispatches the less ridiculous of them. (He sensibly ignores the self-refuting ones, such as the Heritage guy’s proposals for scrapping popular election of senators, going back to the sixty-seven-vote cloture requirement, and mandating an entire day of debate for each million dollars Congress spends.)