Why the filibuster may survive after all and limit the damage congressional Republicans can do
By Paul Waldman November 17 at 1:07 PM
When the new Congress is sworn in and Donald Trump takes office in January, Republicans have a long list of legislative actions they want to take. Repeal the Affordable Care Act. Privatize (excuse me, “reform and strengthen”) Medicare. Slash Medicaid. Cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. Undo environmental protections. Make it harder for unions to organize. Repeal the Dodd-Frank law to unburden Wall Street from meddlesome oversight. Defund Planned Parenthood. Build a border wall.
It’s a veritable smorgasbord, and after eight years of a Democratic presidency, they are positively famished. But there’s one thing standing in their way: the filibuster. With only a 51-seat majority in the Senate (52 seats if, as expected, the Republican candidate wins a runoff election in Louisiana), they’re nowhere near the 60-vote supermajority they’d need to overcome Democratic filibusters. So now they have to answer a question: Will they kill the filibuster once and for all?
For some time now — starting many months ago when contemplating the possibility of full Republican control of government — I’ve been arguing that they will. With all those tantalizing laws just waiting to be passed, and with an angry base ready to revolt if they don’t do what they promised, it will be just too tempting. Yes, they might come to regret it the next time there’s a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, which could happen four years from now. But the first time Democrats filibuster an important GOP priority — especially ACA repeal, which Republicans turned into a symbolic vessel for all their hatred of President Obama and all their supposed ideological commitments — talk radio and Fox News will explode with rage and a demand to nuke the filibuster once and for all. The pressure will simply be too hard to resist.
But I may have been wrong. The narrowness of the Republican majority means that Democrats would need only a couple of Republicans to vote with them to deny the GOP the 51 votes it needs to institute a change in Senate rules. And now at least four Republican senators have gone on record saying that the filibuster should stay. Lindsey Graham said emphatically that ending the filibuster would be “a horrible, terrible idea.” Orrin Hatch was even more categorical. “Are you kidding?” he responded when asked by the Huffington Post’s Michael McAuliff whether it should be eliminated. “I’m one of the biggest advocates for the filibuster. It’s the only way to protect the minority, and we’ve been in the minority a lot more than we’ve been in the majority.” And NBC’s Benjy Sarlin reports that Jeff Flake and Jim Inhofe both told him the filibuster should stay.
There are a few reasons Senate Republicans might want to keep it. First, senators are very, very protective of their privileges, the many ways the institution gives each member extraordinary powers to slow things down and even grind them to a halt. A Senate that runs on simple majority rule would be almost like the House, a prospect senators of both parties find utterly horrifying.
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