In rare fleeting moments of childlike naivety, I sometimes wonder how these people live with themselves.
And by people, I mean Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose 25-hour rambling speech on the Senate floor this week was the longest in the history of the institution, beating the record of segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours.
Democrats spent this week celebrating Booker’s historic “filibuster,” typically an antimajoritarian tool that helps preserve the Senate’s deliberative nature. Pollster Frank Luntz predicted that the Booker marathon speech “may have changed the course of political history.” I’m skeptical. One imagines very few voters in the United States could tell you what was said or why.
In one sense, the reaction to Booker’s speech speaks to the feckless and leaderless nature of the present-day Democratic Party, which is desperately trying to find someone, anyone, to spark a revival. In recent years, Democrats have had a habit of turning to middling talents with a knack for self-promotion. Who knows? Maybe that’s how politics has always been.
Notwithstanding the contention of Democrats, Booker’s speech was not technically a “filibuster,” as he didn’t delay, block, stop, or slow down any nomination, bill, or resolution. Still, let’s concede that his speech was in the spirit of the thing.
For years, the Democrats argued the 60-vote threshold to cut off debate is an antiquated racist tool that facilitates “minority rule” — by which they mean constitutional “federalism.” Modern Democrats see the filibuster as they see everything: in consequentialist terms. They defend governing norms when out of power and destroy them when it’s expedient to their cause. Which is why they have no credibility in defending our institutions.
In 2021, Democrats spent their time trying to eliminate the filibuster so they could ram through party-line generational reforms that would nationalize election insecurity and remake the economy. The arguments to do so were weak.
Ezra Klein, whose antagonism toward the filibuster unsurprisingly ebbs and flows with the fortunes of his party, urged Democrats to kill it because “Republicans will when they’re back in power — and they won’t hesitate.” This is what they call “projection.” Virtually every major left-wing pundit made a similar case.
While I can’t tell you what the future holds, the Republicans who run Washington right now haven’t been clamoring to destroy the filibuster. Republicans also enjoyed complete control for two years in 2016-17, and not once did Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) threaten to overturn the legislative filibuster, even though it stood in the way of numerous GOP policy goals.
Indeed, the opposite happened. In 2017, President Donald Trump pressured the then-Senate majority leader to end the filibuster, telling him they “look like fools and are wasting time.” McConnell didn’t give in.
Let’s remember that the only reason the Senate has a simple-majority threshold for judicial nominees is that former Majority Leader Harry Reid, who once argued that getting rid of the filibuster would “destroy the very checks and balances our Founding Fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government,” decided to use the “nuclear option.” How quaint it is that we thought destroying a norm was a big deal back then. McConnell warned Reid, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the post-Roe v. Wade era.
We do know, however, that Democrats will destroy the filibuster the first chance they get. We know this because they spent four years trying to do it. If anyone has a good practical argument to accede to the inevitable and end the Senate’s filibuster, it’s the GOP.
When two Democrats-turned-independents, former Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, refused to scrap the filibuster, they were harangued, sometimes followed into bathrooms, and driven from Congress. Former President Joe Biden, allegedly a lifelong Senate traditionalist, attacked them, as did virtually every pundit now bragging about Booker’s performance.
Booker himself continually advocated the destruction of the filibuster. Kill it for the “sake of our vulnerable populations,” he said. Kill it “for the sake of America doing big things again,” he said. Well, guess what, I’m sure Trump wants to do “big things” as well.
Former President Barack Obama cynically used the funeral of John Lewis in 2020 to tell America that the filibuster, first used in 1837, was a “Jim Crow relic.” Obama had no problem wielding this bigoted parliamentary procedure on numerous occasions during his short stint as a senator, arguing that eliminating that authoritarian effort allows the majority to “make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet.”
But I agree with then-Sen. Obama: Eliminating filibusters exhibited an “ends justify the means” mentality. Once the minority was excluded from decisions, “the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.”
When Trump first won the presidency, 30 Democratic senators signed a letter calling the filibuster an imperative tool in maintaining the “deliberative” composure of the legislature. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), a signee, argued in 2018 that abolishing the filibuster “would be the end of the Senate” — which sounds bad.
When Biden won the White House, Durbin dramatically changed his outlook, arguing that “the filibuster has a death grip on American democracy.” This week, the second most powerful Democrat in the Senate was celebrating Booker’s fake filibuster as a historic moment, thanking him for “fighting for Americans.”
Democrats have already used the filibuster for real this year. They filibustered Trump’s nominees 314 times during his first term. To put that in perspective, every other president in history had faced a combined 244 of those roll-call votes over a filibuster before that time. And, of course, parties often don’t even bother bringing bills forward when they know they will be shot down in the Senate. And that’s good. We don’t need slim, fleeting partisan majorities lording over the country and instituting wide-ranging, generational policies.
CORY BOOKER HANDS WEARY DEMOCRATS A LIFELINE WITH MARATHON TRUMP PROTEST
Democrats now have zero credibility in celebrating a filibuster. Of course, hypocrisy is nothing new in Washington. But our politics have become so putrefied that Democrats don’t even feel the need to defend their crass, opportunistic flip-flopping. Once upon a time, the threat of mutually assured political destruction induced partisans to uphold checks on power. Today, it’s about expansion of power and little else. It is truly dangerous because our institutions are always in need of defending.
The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution, yet in many ways, it’s the last remaining tool upholding some semblance of constitutional order. Which is why Democrats hate it. Except when they don’t.