Ezra Klein on Senate filibuster reform

If you're looking for some good historical data on the filibuster, the fine folks who keep up (the surprisingly useful) Senate.gov site have you covered. They've tracked the number of cloture filings (when the majority begins the process of breaking a filibuster), cloture votes (when they vote to break the filibuster), and clotures (when the majority actually breaks the filibuster) in each Congress since 1919, when the Senate first gave itself the power to break a filibuster. Here's what it all looks like in graph form:

A few things about that graph. First, the rise in filibusters is just shocking. And this doesn't even count all of them. It only counts those filibusters that the majority actually tried to do something about. Plenty more filibusters get threatened, but cloture doesn't get filed because the issue isn't important enough or the votes aren't present.

Second, note how many filibusters get broken. It's not all, but it's a far cry from none (and it's more than you see in this graph, as filibusters that get withdrawn don't end through cloture). Some get broken by overwhelming majorities. But that doesn't mean the filibuster failed. A dedicated filibuster takes about a week to break even if you have the votes. That's a week of wasted time in the Senate. If your preference isn't merely to delay one vote but to threaten the majority with the prospect of getting less done overall, then launching a lot of fruitless filibusters makes perfect sense.

Klein discusses his reasoning for Senate filibuster reform. A productive Congress doesn't weaken the case for filibuster reform:

That the filibuster increases partisanship is one of the most consequential — and poorly understood — manifestations of the law of unintended consequences in the government. In a world without a filibuster, where legislation can pass if the majority wants it to pass, it would be easier for members of the minority to break ranks, as a strategy of relentless obstruction wouldn't work, and their unyielding opposition would no longer decide where legislation lived or died. And in a world where the minority can't quickly return to power by stopping the majority from governing, their constituents and allied interest groups might begin demanding a voice in the legislation that does pass.

Another argument is that the filibuster would make it easier for political majorities to pass legislation the people don't want. That's true, though it would also make it easier for them to pass legislation the people do want. More importantly, though, it would make it easier for the public to connect cause to effect and judge the incumbent party. Right now, to understand why Congress is acting the way it's acting, you need to pay an awful lot of attention to congressional procedure, and most people don't. Removing procedure from the driver's seat of our democracy would make it easier for voters to impose accountability of legislators.

Whether Congress got a lot done over the past two years is not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is whether it would've been better or worse in the absence of the filibuster. And I think the answer, looking backward as well as looking forward, is better. The fact that a company with dysfunctional management processes might beat earnings estimates some years doesn't mean the dysfunctional processes couldn't be fixed. Both the earnings estimates and the performance might have been higher still if the company worked better, and so more was expected of it.

When it comes to Congress, it's not just that more should be expected of it. It's that more will be needed of it. And if the past two years were as good as it gets for legislating, well, that's just not good enough.

Doug Mataconis looks at Klein's graph on the filibuster and comments on his reasoning about partisanship, We don't need to fix partisanship to fix the Senate :

I hear this a lot, but I don't really understand it.

For one thing, there is a good argument that eliminating the filibuster will make party-line voting less effective for the minority, and thus less common. Whether partisanship still lives in the hearts of minority senators doesn't really worry me. Whether they decide to work with the majority on legislation or continually obstruct it in order to keep the country from being effectively governed does. If obstruction ceases to work, it's not clear why they'd continue to pursue it as pretty much their only strategy. No one likes a perpetually feckless minority. (For a longer version of this case, head here.)

But the broader point is that we don't know how to fix partisanship. It's ebbed and flowed at different times in our polity, and manifested in our legislative institutions in different ways. As Gregory Koger emphasizes in his book on the filibuster, it was the House of Representatives, not the Senate, that first suffered from an overuse of filibuster-like practices, and they were eliminated when the body became unmanageable.

The good news is that we don't need to fix partisanship, which is really nothing more than organized disagreement. All we need to do is ensure that our system can function amid it… Rules can be changed to fit political realities, but political realities cannot usually be changed to fit rules.

Ezra Klein also has an interview with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), a leading proponent of Senate filibuster reform. whose own proposal is a modest document that doesn't end the filibuster so much as bring it closer into alignment with what the public already thinks it is. Sen. Jeff Merkley: 'This isn't a question of filibuster or no filibuster'.