One of the biggest developments in politics last week had nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic, or the collapse of the economy, or protests for racial justice, but it could have a profound impact on the resolution of all three—and on the larger question of whether America will be a democracy or autocracy in the long run. It was a response from Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who sits in Joe Biden’s old Senate seat, to a question about what Democrats will do if Republicans remain bent on scorched-earth opposition to Democratic governance.
“I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,”
Coons said. “I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.”
The blocking mechanism at issue is the Senate filibuster rule, which allows the minority to impose a three-fifths supermajority requirement on nearly all legislation. If, optimistically, Democrats enter the new year with control of the presidency, the House, and 53 Senate seats, after winning the election in a landslide, Republicans would still have easy veto power over basically every Biden initiative, whether to suppress epidemic disease, revive the economy, or reform policing. The catch is that Democrats could eliminate this antidemocratic rule, so that a simple majority of senators can pass legislation, with just 50 votes. On the first day of the new Congress, before Biden has even been sworn in, his Senate allies could dramatically expand the horizons of his presidency, giving him (and themselves) the power to govern around Republican obstruction, rather than be confined by it.
There should be no dilemma here, and many Democrats have advocated abolishing or reforming the legislative filibuster for a long time. Coons’s statement is meaningful because he’s a reluctant convert. Senate Democrats are divided over the filibuster question less along lines of political vulnerability (Coons won his last election
by over 13 points) than between those who see the world as it is and those who see it as they wish it was. His change of heart, and his explanation for softening, suggest the latter category of Democrats has begun to accept reality: Leaving the filibuster intact won’t generate bipartisan consensus where none exists, but it will make the difference between Biden’s presidency failing, with all the collateral damage that would create, and standing a real chance of success.
The challenge now is to convince these same Democrats that abolishing the filibuster is necessary, but insufficient—it’s a key that will unlock a world of new possibilities, but won’t on its own protect Biden from right-wing sabotage, or rescue America’s endangered democracy. Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos
wrote recently that, “When Trump loses in November, America needs to grapple with the fact that it was not our constitutional system, but Trump’s own incompetence that preserved our democracy. We might not be so lucky with the next would-be authoritarian.” This sentiment is widespread in liberal circles, mostly as a prompt for discussing civil service, ethics, campaign-finance, and other reforms that would better insulate the government from authoritarian corruption. These kinds of reforms are important, and may even receive bipartisan support in an environment where the president is a Democrat and Republicans are trying to cleanse the Trump taint from their party. But they are only second-layer protections, tools better suited to protecting the country should another authoritarian come to power than to closing avenues of power to authoritarians in the first place.
On display here folks we have an example of wilful ignorance.
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