James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun, famously has a temper — hence the nickname. But he has long been regarded as an old-guard, pragmatic, victory-minded Clintonite Democrat. He has occasionally lashed out at the woke excesses of his party’s left flank, usually on the grounds that its extreme stances and rhetoric are electorally unhelpful.
These days, count Carville among the radicals.
As longtime GOP operative Josh Holmes has taken to observing lately, “there’s no such thing as a moderate Democrat.” Carville exemplifies the phenomenon. In a fit of pique last year, the old-school strategist appeared to embrace the radical idea that the next time Democrats control Washington, they should bust the Senate filibuster to add two reliably blue states to the union, and therefore four automatic or likely Democratic Senate seats, as a means of more permanently locking their political opposition out of power. He added that under those circumstances, his party “may” also pack the Supreme Court by adding four seats, erasing the right-leaning majority forged over decades of elections and confirmation battles.
Several months on, it seems he has ditched the “may.”
Carville is now openly advocating naked, banana-republic-style power grabs, ludicrously framed as “saving democracy,” of course. “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on Day 1 they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state,” a spittle-flecked Carville said in a podcast interview last week, highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. He wasn’t through. “They should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust,” he exclaimed, adding an especially chilling tactical admonition: “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
This is the Virginia-Spanberger effect — campaigning as a centrist, and even denying certain intentions, before instantly flipping once in office — on steroids, on a national scale, and in pursuit of permanent objectives. Carville wants Democrats to win elections, even if only narrowly, then move swiftly to consolidate power through a series of rapid-fire, institution-destroying power grabs. And he explicitly wants his fellow partisans to lie to voters about it beforehand. Asking for a mandate for such moves would be too risky. Just do it. “F*** it.”
If Carville is now marching in lockstep with the new radicals on these matters, it is an ominous sign. It raises fair questions about whether genuinely centrist institutionalists still exist within the center-left coalition.
There is a debate on the Right about the Senate filibuster, which at the moment centers on the SAVE America Act. Some people, including President Donald Trump, want Senate Republicans to jettison the long-standing legislative filibuster to push through this legislation along party lines. Others think this is a foolish and shortsighted idea that would inevitably backfire on the party that initiated it, just as nuking the judicial filibuster blew up in Senate Democrats’ faces, painfully and in short order.
I am very much in the latter camp, as are enough Republican senators, leadership included, to render this debate largely academic. The most compelling argument in favor of pulling the trigger is that Democrats are inevitably going to do so anyway, so why not beat them to the punch? There are several rejoinders to that point, and it deserves an answer.
From a purely political vantage point, setting aside any number of other reasons, I have argued that it cannot simply be assumed that a future Democratic majority would have the appetite or the votes to kill the filibuster in order to enable a swift destruction of both the Senate and the Supreme Court. When the stakes were far lower during the Biden era, two Democratic senators stepped up and refused to go along with a multitrillion-dollar spending binge billed as “Build Back Better.” Thanks to former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the U.S. economy escaped an even more damaging inflationary bomb.
See? Cooler heads prevailed, and perhaps they will again, especially if the proposed actions are even more far-reaching than a reckless spending spree. That is the optimistic takeaway.
That said, Manchin and Sinema were both harassed by activists in their own partisan tribe and effectively hounded out of the party. Both opted not to run for reelection after that vote. The same sharp knives are now out for Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), a progressive-turned-relative centrist who overwhelmingly votes with his party but enrages his base with outspoken support for Israel and other nods toward policy pragmatism, all while striking a bipartisan tone. His days as a Democratic senator may be numbered, too.
Extinguishing the filibuster and pledging maximalist “progress” are increasingly becoming purity tests among the voters who dominate and animate left-wing politics. If a moment of truth were to arrive regarding the breathtaking Carville-endorsed scheme, in, say, 2029 or 2033, would there be a Manchin, a Sinema, or a Fetterman left to stand in the gap and prevent what would likely be an irreversibly damaging watershed moment in politics?
One or more such figures might lurk among the Democratic ranks, privately resolved to do the right thing but unwilling to admit it publicly for fear of incurring the wrath of a rabid base that would immediately target them with a submit-or-be-ousted ultimatum. Or maybe not. Maybe a handful of Democrats would wring their hands, then knuckle under and greenlight the path to national unraveling.
I am less confident than ever in the cooler-heads scenario, which is worrisome. I would suggest a cross-party group of senators link arms and commit to maintaining the filibuster, thereby lowering the temperature stoked by voices such as Carville’s and downshifting the apocalyptic rhetoric about Flight 93-level electoral stakes.
But we have seen that movie before, and fairly recently. In 2017, at the outset of Trump’s first term, a group of 61 senators from both parties signed a letter affirming their commitment on this front. Spearheaded by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Chris Coons (D-DE), they declared that they were “steadfastly committed to ensuring that this great American institution continues to serve as the world’s greatest deliberative body” and explicitly opposed “any effort to curtail the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate as we consider legislation before this body in the future,” including the legislative filibuster.
While GOP support for the filibuster remains fairly robust, even while in power, Democratic support has collapsed. Several of the Democratic signatories are no longer serving. Others have since gone on the record reversing their position, citing various excuses and rationalizations. Still others have fallen silent. Could a similar letter draw even a simple majority of senators today? Aside from Fetterman, who would be the lead Democrat? Would Coons, who led this effort not long ago, attach his name to it again?
None of this is to say that I am at all convinced Republicans should “go first” in axing the legislative filibuster, which would do much of Democrats’ still-hypothetical dirty work for them and give them an additional justification for exploiting a filibuster-free environment for deeply harmful ends. But the cooler-heads counterargument is shakier than ever, as evidenced by Carville’s brazenness.
The Senate would be wise to pull back from the brink and decisively reject the Cajun’s latest ragin’ threats. Is that still possible in our political moment?