I've always said that the filibuster will end when one party has 50 or more but less than 60 votes to do something they really want to get passed. Is this that moment? I have no clue. Is it good for Democrats to force Republicans to end the filibuster at this moment? I also have no clue. But Matt is correct that all of this has always been dumb. And if Democrats do dare Republicans to either end the filibuster or shut down the government, they need to be able to fight any and all Murc's Law thinking: “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. As Matt says, the GOP has all the power, if they want to pass a bad bill, or shut down the government, that's entirely in their power to do so.
The main reason that Republicans are viable as a party is because their worst policies have either been blocked by Democrats or because the electorate doesn't realize that Republicans are responsible for them (or even wrongly assign the blame to Democrats). Filibuster plays an important role here. We need clean accountability. Make it as easy as possible for a deeply ignorant and irresponsible electorate to connect the threads.
I don't think so. Most of Trump's policies have little support, some of them extremely low. On the issues where he has better ratings most people thinks he goes too far, according to the polls. The problem is that the Dems refuse to moderate (for real, not just paying lip service) on issues such as immigration, crime, gun rights and trans issues. Dems need to capture the center, including the center-right.
Sans filibuster we'd actually find out the revealed preferences of the electorate. Plenty of policies sound good on paper, but is unpopular in practice (recent example, TikTok ban).
You could make the argument that the GOP exploits that gap because they have the messaging advantage: crime is bad, illegal immigration is bad, taxes are bad, etc. But the inflation, exploding debt, cuts to Medicaid and rapidly expanding police state created by enacting those policies is already broadly unpopular.
Even in 2010, most only objected to the style, not the substance. They pretty much all voted to repeal the ACA, after all. Voted for Gorsuch. Completely supported the agenda.
My comment was that Republican policies are unpopular in the general electorate and that the filibuster saves them from accountability and you answered my comment with a "Republican policies are popular among Republicans".
Republicans might be hiding behind the filibuster to paper over some of the nonsense from the House. The legislatures are probably going to be more risk adverse than the nihilists running the party.
It *has* always been dumb but to make this the centerpieces of Dem resistance at this point in time also seems *extremely* dumb and not a little tin eared to me.
The correct synthesis is that both the filibuster and the concept of the government shutdown are bad and dumb and entirely self-inflicted and we can just get rid of both of them.
Yea I kind of liked ending the debt ceiling as a thing Dems should set up a path for Rs/bipartisan support, but I think ending filibuster might be "easier"? Do think dems should take advantage of the weak trifecta and go for a longer term goal of how congress operates.
I think risk averse scenarios are based on if dems only had "been nicer" Rs would eventually have checked executive power...and well that seems slippery logic (but you can't completely discount it).
The simplest message is “We had an agreement, Trump then didn’t honor it. We had bipartisan funding for these programs and Trump decided not to honor it.”
Or simply “Trump’s a dealbreaker not a dealmaker.”
Congress is withering as an institution. For it to revivify, creaky old procedures have to go and legislating has to become possible. If you don’t like the imperial presidency, you should really hate the filibuster.
Senators can allow a bill to come to a vote and the vote no. that's a viable option too. The idea that one must filibuster everything they don't agree with needs to end too.
If you do that, you're not actually fighting the thing you disagree with to the best of your ability. If you know you have the ability to stop the bad thing from happening, and you choose to refuse to do it, you really don't disagree with it.
"On the other hand, I’m deeply sympathetic to any senator who looks me in the eye and says, “I don’t want to vote for a temporary budget that just keeps current spending levels in place that the president then violates at will.”
That should be the ballgame right there. Dems should be shouting from the rafters that a GOP budget, coupled with the OBBBA, will continue to kneecap our fiscal standing. Higher inflation, rising bond yields, faster compounding debt, putting the squeeze on millions of American via sunsetting of Medicaid subsidies. The list goes on. Trump was mainly elected on ending inflation and now we're headed back in the wrong direction on that front. I like the notion of negotiating in good faith to restore ACA subsidies but I also feel strongly that Dems should attack the GOP where they are vulnerable, and that is weakening our financial house through endless tax cuts.
"Shout from the rooftops" + "Packed to the rafters" = "Shout from the rafters"?
One difficulty is that a rafter is generally not visible on the outside, when you're on the roof. A second difficulty is that rafters are for sloping roofs so unless what needs to be shouted is very short one would have a hard time doing in on a pitched roof. Better to do it from flat rooftops.
This 'stack is dedicated to teaching the politics of responsibility instead of the politics of conviction: less expression for expression's sake, more message discipline; less performative stance-taking, more calculating the consequences.
But if you have given the consequences a thorough interrogation, and no clear answer emerges, then the politics of responsibility offers no guidance on this question.
If you have, in addition, considered the consequences of acting on pure convictions, and even after a proper Weber grilling there is still a tie, then it seems to me time to act on conviction.
Sometimes, gaming it out only goes so far. When it yields no answer, do what expresses your own side's deepest convictions. You risk going down in flames, but the risk is inscrutable in this case. Better to go down saying what you believe, then to go down being too clever by half.
Ending the filibuster just reads as accelerationism to me. Expanding the scope of what small majorities can get away with is bad and dangerous. The wild swings in ever more expansive federal policy are already pushing us to the brink. This is where political violence comes from. We need more ways to put the government back in the box of pluralistic consensus, not give even wider latitude to the whims of the populists as some sort of hail mary play to dominate the politics.
Maybe, but if the Constitution is going down the people who don't let it go without a fight will have been in the right, because whatever comes next will be much worse.
Or in a country with 340 million diverse people spread across a huge landmass. I personally think this is the biggest reason we are essentially ungovernable right now.
The only policy that seems to be swinging wildly is immigration policy, and that's because we have a Rube Goldberg system that relies on laws not being enforced with de facto legalization rather than an orderly legal process. People don't seem to like either the quasi-open borders asylum or the masked raids at the Home Depot. But, the filibuster is a hindrance to any more moderating centrist compromise.
That by itself is a big deal and we also have trade policy and the attempts to use federal funding to force ideological conformity across a wide swath of the private sector.
Why not make the ostensible sticking point the deficit? A proposal to raise marginal income tax rates maybe "sweetened" by allowing higher deductions for saving? By Matt's logic even if Democrats lose the vote they make tax reform and deficit reduction their issue.
Cowen advertising a book on his blog on how italy dedcended into fascism and how it came out of it. I've only read the first part and it is quite good so far... ''don't count on venerable institutions to save you, they will act to preserve influence" seems like a recurring theme that checks out so far. Also, cowen sometimes seems to go to amusing lengths to keep his criticism circumspect, such as citing a Yglessias article more than a year old to make an argument against tariffs. "Here is a book you should read", and "the sound of music was so good, watch it again if you can" are part of the same theme.
The reason Hitler came to power is that most of the other parties including liberal and moderate ones ended up backing the Enabling Act. Hitler got a large majority to support them creating an air of legitimacy. If Weimar parties had maintained a firewall it never would’ve happened. Even something passed narrowly by the Nazi Party only would’ve never had the level of legitimacy that let Hitler become a dictator. The lesson is that there should never be collaboration with the far-right: even a paralyzed Weimar is far superior to what came after.
Ultimately the only check on Hitler was that Germany was not powerful enough to fight all the world’s other major countries at the same time. But there isn’t even that check on US fascism. The whole world is in for a dark future if Democrats act like the German Center Party.
There's a reason Zentrum had to change its name and re-form as the CDU under the only major Zentrum figure that opposed the 1929-30 rule by decree 'coup'. The SPD came out of the situation clean.
I think of this more as a client than as an armchair strategist. I don't know what Schumer can possibly get with the filibuster card. I doubt Yglesias or any of the activated partisans do, either. That's supposed to be Schumer's job: to get what he can with the cards he's dealt. I suspect it's more than nothing. As a Democratic voter, if he comes back with nothing like last time I'm going to continue writing $0 checks to the DNC, DSCC, etc., write that he should be replaced, etc.
The main problem with the filibuster is that it makes it unclear to the deeply ignorant electorate which party is actually in power and responsible for what. Which in turn makes it more difficult than it already is (considering how willfully ignorant and irresponsible they are) to evaluate and properly reward and punish the parties in the next election.
People are like toddlers when it comes to politics and need every help they can get to vote in a somewhat rational and coherent fashion.
I push elitism hard because it's one of the most ignored truths about the world currently (it's depressing and out of sync with egalitarian myths). Truth is important, both in its own right, and to form a strategy for winning elections.
Trump is the Borg Queen and all members of the Republican Party have been assimilated. Save, of course, Massie. We are still in the first act of this three act drama and our heroes’ peril (that is, *our* peril) is going to get worse before it gets better. Killing the filibuster would be a significant second act plot point.
I've been saying for a while that Ezra Klein really has disappointed me that he hasn't continued his anti-filibuster message. Around 2020-2021, that was a central message of his work, which focused on bolstering democratic processes. It would have been so much stronger of a message if he revisited this recently when Republicans are in power. If he had, he would have shown some ideological consistency. Instead, it comes across as just scheming for partisan advantage. EK's shift to focusing on abundance, AI, and Israel-Palestine is fine, but it's a real lost opportunity to abandon his focus on democratic process when its less politically convenient to do so.
So, I really appreciate MY coming out against the filibuster at a time when there's no partisan advantage for him to advocate for such a position. Highlighting that filibustering is distorting and that these shutdown fights are stupid and structurally set up for failure is the right call.
If they filibuster for a good reason then they should really do it, and do the nonstop talking thing (and preferably talk clearly about why they’re filibustering) instead of the voting no on the cloture resolution.
If we’re talking about rules to prevent the frivolous or insincere use of the filibuster--a problem we don’t seem to have--there are probably better available rules, such as limiting its use by party a certain number of times a session. From a party’s point of view, I don’t see why they should be concerned with unilaterally limiting the filibuster’s overuse than that it be used strategically, which normally doesn’t involve a marathon talking session.
If nothing else, having the fight is a higher variance play at a moment when Dems’ current strategies aren’t working.
I've always said that the filibuster will end when one party has 50 or more but less than 60 votes to do something they really want to get passed. Is this that moment? I have no clue. Is it good for Democrats to force Republicans to end the filibuster at this moment? I also have no clue. But Matt is correct that all of this has always been dumb. And if Democrats do dare Republicans to either end the filibuster or shut down the government, they need to be able to fight any and all Murc's Law thinking: “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. As Matt says, the GOP has all the power, if they want to pass a bad bill, or shut down the government, that's entirely in their power to do so.
The main reason that Republicans are viable as a party is because their worst policies have either been blocked by Democrats or because the electorate doesn't realize that Republicans are responsible for them (or even wrongly assign the blame to Democrats). Filibuster plays an important role here. We need clean accountability. Make it as easy as possible for a deeply ignorant and irresponsible electorate to connect the threads.
You underestimate how much of the country actually likes Republican policies.
I don't think so. Most of Trump's policies have little support, some of them extremely low. On the issues where he has better ratings most people thinks he goes too far, according to the polls. The problem is that the Dems refuse to moderate (for real, not just paying lip service) on issues such as immigration, crime, gun rights and trans issues. Dems need to capture the center, including the center-right.
Sans filibuster we'd actually find out the revealed preferences of the electorate. Plenty of policies sound good on paper, but is unpopular in practice (recent example, TikTok ban).
You could make the argument that the GOP exploits that gap because they have the messaging advantage: crime is bad, illegal immigration is bad, taxes are bad, etc. But the inflation, exploding debt, cuts to Medicaid and rapidly expanding police state created by enacting those policies is already broadly unpopular.
Most left leaning people do. It's why they continually ask why the GOP doesn't stand up to Trump. It's because *they like what he's doing*.
The ones that did stand up to Trump are mostly gone. This isn’t the GOP of 2010.
Even in 2010, most only objected to the style, not the substance. They pretty much all voted to repeal the ACA, after all. Voted for Gorsuch. Completely supported the agenda.
The GOP does not equal the entire country.
I am also not sure how this is relevant to my comment.
My comment was that Republican policies are unpopular in the general electorate and that the filibuster saves them from accountability and you answered my comment with a "Republican policies are popular among Republicans".
No, but it *does* equal the presidency, the Congress and the judiciary.
Why are we even talking about this, considering the premise is "if Trump is willing to negotiate in good faith"?
Republicans might be hiding behind the filibuster to paper over some of the nonsense from the House. The legislatures are probably going to be more risk adverse than the nihilists running the party.
It *has* always been dumb but to make this the centerpieces of Dem resistance at this point in time also seems *extremely* dumb and not a little tin eared to me.
Totally agree. And we should make it 100% a Republican initiative to be the party of borrowing and spending.
The correct synthesis is that both the filibuster and the concept of the government shutdown are bad and dumb and entirely self-inflicted and we can just get rid of both of them.
Yea I kind of liked ending the debt ceiling as a thing Dems should set up a path for Rs/bipartisan support, but I think ending filibuster might be "easier"? Do think dems should take advantage of the weak trifecta and go for a longer term goal of how congress operates.
I think risk averse scenarios are based on if dems only had "been nicer" Rs would eventually have checked executive power...and well that seems slippery logic (but you can't completely discount it).
When the bigger fight over an authoritarian takeover is finished, yeah.
The simplest message is “We had an agreement, Trump then didn’t honor it. We had bipartisan funding for these programs and Trump decided not to honor it.”
Or simply “Trump’s a dealbreaker not a dealmaker.”
Congress is withering as an institution. For it to revivify, creaky old procedures have to go and legislating has to become possible. If you don’t like the imperial presidency, you should really hate the filibuster.
Senators can allow a bill to come to a vote and the vote no. that's a viable option too. The idea that one must filibuster everything they don't agree with needs to end too.
If you do that, you're not actually fighting the thing you disagree with to the best of your ability. If you know you have the ability to stop the bad thing from happening, and you choose to refuse to do it, you really don't disagree with it.
"On the other hand, I’m deeply sympathetic to any senator who looks me in the eye and says, “I don’t want to vote for a temporary budget that just keeps current spending levels in place that the president then violates at will.”
That should be the ballgame right there. Dems should be shouting from the rafters that a GOP budget, coupled with the OBBBA, will continue to kneecap our fiscal standing. Higher inflation, rising bond yields, faster compounding debt, putting the squeeze on millions of American via sunsetting of Medicaid subsidies. The list goes on. Trump was mainly elected on ending inflation and now we're headed back in the wrong direction on that front. I like the notion of negotiating in good faith to restore ACA subsidies but I also feel strongly that Dems should attack the GOP where they are vulnerable, and that is weakening our financial house through endless tax cuts.
There is absolutely zero reason to negotiate in good faith right now IMO
"Shout from the rooftops" + "Packed to the rafters" = "Shout from the rafters"?
One difficulty is that a rafter is generally not visible on the outside, when you're on the roof. A second difficulty is that rafters are for sloping roofs so unless what needs to be shouted is very short one would have a hard time doing in on a pitched roof. Better to do it from flat rooftops.
This 'stack is dedicated to teaching the politics of responsibility instead of the politics of conviction: less expression for expression's sake, more message discipline; less performative stance-taking, more calculating the consequences.
But if you have given the consequences a thorough interrogation, and no clear answer emerges, then the politics of responsibility offers no guidance on this question.
If you have, in addition, considered the consequences of acting on pure convictions, and even after a proper Weber grilling there is still a tie, then it seems to me time to act on conviction.
Sometimes, gaming it out only goes so far. When it yields no answer, do what expresses your own side's deepest convictions. You risk going down in flames, but the risk is inscrutable in this case. Better to go down saying what you believe, then to go down being too clever by half.
Ending the filibuster just reads as accelerationism to me. Expanding the scope of what small majorities can get away with is bad and dangerous. The wild swings in ever more expansive federal policy are already pushing us to the brink. This is where political violence comes from. We need more ways to put the government back in the box of pluralistic consensus, not give even wider latitude to the whims of the populists as some sort of hail mary play to dominate the politics.
Keeping the filibuster also allows narrow majorities to do things, just with massive budget reconciliation bills. That’s a bad way to do policy.
Agreed. The reconciliation process is a mess that should be severely constrained or scrapped entirely.
No filibuster means no reconciliation nonsense.
Sure, but blowing up the dam doesn't actually plug the leak, it's just a different set of issues.
But then the salmon get to flop free. Think of the fish Dave. Think of the fish!
Yes, but it's just *not* an issue that rises to the occasion here.
"Pluralistic consensus" is basically impossible in a politics where so many people are more aware of politics.
Maybe, but if the Constitution is going down the people who don't let it go without a fight will have been in the right, because whatever comes next will be much worse.
Or in a country with 340 million diverse people spread across a huge landmass. I personally think this is the biggest reason we are essentially ungovernable right now.
The only policy that seems to be swinging wildly is immigration policy, and that's because we have a Rube Goldberg system that relies on laws not being enforced with de facto legalization rather than an orderly legal process. People don't seem to like either the quasi-open borders asylum or the masked raids at the Home Depot. But, the filibuster is a hindrance to any more moderating centrist compromise.
I mean... Trade. Anti-trust. Civil Rights Enforcement. Speech.
There's a lot of stuff that's swinging around dramatically that individuals perceive in very substantial and personal ways.
That by itself is a big deal and we also have trade policy and the attempts to use federal funding to force ideological conformity across a wide swath of the private sector.
Why not make the ostensible sticking point the deficit? A proposal to raise marginal income tax rates maybe "sweetened" by allowing higher deductions for saving? By Matt's logic even if Democrats lose the vote they make tax reform and deficit reduction their issue.
Because few voters have that as their priority
Because there are few weirdos who worry about interest on current public debts and that opportunity cost.
"Few" being the operative word here.
Cowen advertising a book on his blog on how italy dedcended into fascism and how it came out of it. I've only read the first part and it is quite good so far... ''don't count on venerable institutions to save you, they will act to preserve influence" seems like a recurring theme that checks out so far. Also, cowen sometimes seems to go to amusing lengths to keep his criticism circumspect, such as citing a Yglessias article more than a year old to make an argument against tariffs. "Here is a book you should read", and "the sound of music was so good, watch it again if you can" are part of the same theme.
The reason Hitler came to power is that most of the other parties including liberal and moderate ones ended up backing the Enabling Act. Hitler got a large majority to support them creating an air of legitimacy. If Weimar parties had maintained a firewall it never would’ve happened. Even something passed narrowly by the Nazi Party only would’ve never had the level of legitimacy that let Hitler become a dictator. The lesson is that there should never be collaboration with the far-right: even a paralyzed Weimar is far superior to what came after.
Ultimately the only check on Hitler was that Germany was not powerful enough to fight all the world’s other major countries at the same time. But there isn’t even that check on US fascism. The whole world is in for a dark future if Democrats act like the German Center Party.
There's a reason Zentrum had to change its name and re-form as the CDU under the only major Zentrum figure that opposed the 1929-30 rule by decree 'coup'. The SPD came out of the situation clean.
Similar theme in Professor Sunstein's brief review of an old book by Sebastian Haffner.
https://open.substack.com/pub/casssunstein/p/the-collapse-of-law-under-tyranny
Brief but adequately chilling.
I think of this more as a client than as an armchair strategist. I don't know what Schumer can possibly get with the filibuster card. I doubt Yglesias or any of the activated partisans do, either. That's supposed to be Schumer's job: to get what he can with the cards he's dealt. I suspect it's more than nothing. As a Democratic voter, if he comes back with nothing like last time I'm going to continue writing $0 checks to the DNC, DSCC, etc., write that he should be replaced, etc.
The main problem with the filibuster is that it makes it unclear to the deeply ignorant electorate which party is actually in power and responsible for what. Which in turn makes it more difficult than it already is (considering how willfully ignorant and irresponsible they are) to evaluate and properly reward and punish the parties in the next election.
People are like toddlers when it comes to politics and need every help they can get to vote in a somewhat rational and coherent fashion.
I push elitism hard because it's one of the most ignored truths about the world currently (it's depressing and out of sync with egalitarian myths). Truth is important, both in its own right, and to form a strategy for winning elections.
Trump is the Borg Queen and all members of the Republican Party have been assimilated. Save, of course, Massie. We are still in the first act of this three act drama and our heroes’ peril (that is, *our* peril) is going to get worse before it gets better. Killing the filibuster would be a significant second act plot point.
Tru dat.
To be fair, MTG has been very outspoken on the Epstein issue as well
I've been saying for a while that Ezra Klein really has disappointed me that he hasn't continued his anti-filibuster message. Around 2020-2021, that was a central message of his work, which focused on bolstering democratic processes. It would have been so much stronger of a message if he revisited this recently when Republicans are in power. If he had, he would have shown some ideological consistency. Instead, it comes across as just scheming for partisan advantage. EK's shift to focusing on abundance, AI, and Israel-Palestine is fine, but it's a real lost opportunity to abandon his focus on democratic process when its less politically convenient to do so.
So, I really appreciate MY coming out against the filibuster at a time when there's no partisan advantage for him to advocate for such a position. Highlighting that filibustering is distorting and that these shutdown fights are stupid and structurally set up for failure is the right call.
Ezra was also really into automatic stabilizers in 2020 during the covid recession, but has not talked about them once when inflation picked up.
Another great example. It’s a shame because the idea is a good one.
I'm certain the Democratic base would disagree with that.
With what?
The idea that ending the filibuster was a worthy goal at this point in time.
If they filibuster for a good reason then they should really do it, and do the nonstop talking thing (and preferably talk clearly about why they’re filibustering) instead of the voting no on the cloture resolution.
Why? Isn't the nonstop talking thing just a stunt?
It at least gives them an opportunity to say why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Do they not have several such opportunities? Schumer can get on TV and say: “We’re filibustering because yadda yadda.”
It’s also a limiting factor - they’re only going to do that for a really really good reason, not just on anything and everything.
If we’re talking about rules to prevent the frivolous or insincere use of the filibuster--a problem we don’t seem to have--there are probably better available rules, such as limiting its use by party a certain number of times a session. From a party’s point of view, I don’t see why they should be concerned with unilaterally limiting the filibuster’s overuse than that it be used strategically, which normally doesn’t involve a marathon talking session.