Progressives, most Democrats, and many Independents agree — the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule is anti-democratic and should be reformed. Congress can’t accomplish anything when it is paralyzed by Mitch McConnell’s iron grip on his caucus.
However, the concept of reform implies there are a spectrum of outcomes and some form of compromise will need to be reached to resolve the underlying problem. Thanks to Senators Mansion and Sinema, nuking the filibuster likely won’t get 50 Democratic votes, and that means Vice President Harris won’t even get a chance to cast a tie-breaker.
So why not retain the filibuster, but just make it easier to overcome?
Attracting 10 Republicans to cross-over and vote with 50 Democrats won’t happen in today’s polarized climate, right? Maybe not. But didn’t we just see 7 GOP Senators cross-over and vote to remove Trump from office?
The more we can adapt our political system to reward Senators for voting their conscience (and penalize them for blind party loyalty), the better the legislative outcomes will be.
A recent WaPo article illustrated an important reason why Republican senators have such a hard time doing the right thing — it involves cooperating with “wrong” people. In game theory, this is a form of the classic Stag Hunt dilemma. To quote (slight paraphrase) from the article:
...Hunters face a choice between (a) collaborating to bring down game that can only be bagged by a group acting in concert or (b) breaking away from the hunting party to go after a smaller prize one hunter can get by themselves, even though doing so will mean that the hunting party can’t get the big game.
The outcome of the classic Stag Hunt model depends on trust. If everyone trusts that everyone else will work together, the group can feast — but if anyone suspects that someone else will break away, they’ll be better off breaking away, too.
Unlike the Stag Hunt, the Senate can actually accomplish business as long as “a few” GOP Senators can trust each other enough to gang together and defy the right wing of their party. Explaining an affirmative vote to their constituents isn’t difficult when 65 percent of voters agree (e.g., a $15 minimum wage). It’s the part about “trusting your GOP colleagues to do the right thing” that they are afraid of doing all alone.
So if the filibuster rule was modified to 53% or 55% (down from the current 60%), you might attract a handful of folks like Romney, Murkowski, Collins, Sasse, and Cassidy (which would get you to 55%)— and perhaps also Toomey and Burr. Hopefully, Sinema and Mansion also would feel they had enough “cover” because the outcome was decidedly “bipartisan”. Trimming away the excess portion of the filibuster would also would give the middle of both parties more power than they currently have.
With a 53 (or 55) vote cloture threshold, GOP centrists will feel (at least somewhat more) empowered make principled decisions — especially if they occasionally get support from the centrists on the left side of the aisle. All the centrists can feel like they are part of the solution, and not feel forced into becoming part of the problem.
Unfortunately, game theory can’t explain the foolish loyalty to Trump by the hard right extremists of his party who are still trying to win elections based on Trump’s losing message. However, it’s obvious that the current reality of the filibuster is “nothing always obstructs everything”.
With a centrist reform, a new filibuster threshold might garner enough trust among moderates of both parties to permit good faith negotiations across the aisle, and permit a few more “somethings” to rise above partisanship and help the American people.
And if my hypothesis proves to be false (i.e., McConnel keeps enough of his party in line so cloture still is never reached in a 50/50 Senate), then left-leaning Democrats would have an even better argument that the GOP is 100% hopelessly opposed to helping Americans. At that point, such a message might be enough to get Sinema and Mansion to tell their constituents, “Hey, we tried. The GOP just doesn’t give a damn about you.”
At that point, 50 Senators could eliminate the filibuster in late 2021 or early 2022, and still have time to pass a bunch of bills before the election.