Ruth Marcus, Deputy editorial page director at the Washington Post wrote an editorial today titled: “Kill the Filibuster—and reap what you sow.”
Well, as a farmer I took the title to mean something entirely different from what she argued. For example, how would YOU react if you sowed corn seeds and collards came up instead? Or if you planted sunflowers and ended up with a crop of pansies? Your farm would be in chaos. You’d have the wrong equipment for harvesting, and you’d have a crop useless for the purpose you planted it. A commercial grower doing this only a couple of seasons would be out of business. No seed supplier would be able to stay in business either with such a disastrous mixup.
Yet, that’s actually what the filibuster ends up doing. It confused voters about what they are voting for.
For example, you elect a Democrat, expecting them to deliver more affordable, more available healthcare for all, safe, affordable childcare, scientific-led government regulation, action on climate change, protections for voting rights and human rights that ensured everyone could live lives equally free from threats, harms and violence just because you’re different in some way from the majority.
Or, you elect a Republican, expecting them to deliver bans on abortion, tax cuts, de-regulation and damn the consequences, action to protect existing industries like coal, oil, ICE cars and trucks, cartel-like power suppliers a la Texas, restrictions on voting by “unqualified voters” (wink, wink), border protection with walls and guns and goons and whatever and a whole lot of gawd talk and bible quoting out of context.
How would you react if your Republican representative voted for Medicare for All, statehood for D.C., raising taxes, increasing regulation, subsidizing renewable energy and electric vehicles, and equality for all? Why, you’d be outraged enough to primary the bastard come the next election and make sure a proper Trump supporting libtard baiter and not a RINO represented you. Actually, just vote once against Trump and you get primaried. Ask any of those very few Republicans who did vote for his impeachment and conviction.
So when Democrats elect a Democrat and instead get someone who votes to “protect” coal and gas or high, exploitative pharmacy prices, and who opposes statehood for D.C. and “personally” opposes abortion so goes along with the Hyde amendment and various other restrictions. Well, are you sure you’re going to go all out as a Democrat to help him get re-elected just because “nobody else could win that seat” in that district? What do you think the corn-sowers are going to do when they wake up to find collards coming up instead?
The filibuster allows politicians and parties to confuse voters as to what their policies actually are. “We had to compromise (promise X) in order to get enough votes to overcome a filibuster by the other party in the Senate. Don’t blame us that it doesn’t quite do everything we (insert party label) wanted.”
Hey, it’s the perfect cover to slip in various favors to whichever industry group contributes the most or that a deep pockets donor wants, or opposes for that matter. And thus business in the Senate was ever done, and the way some want it to continue to be done.
This is what Ruth Marcus wrote:
Still, the question remains: Do the benefits of doing away with the filibuster, immediate and obvious as they are, outweigh the risks of what a different majority would do down the road? That should be a sobering concern for anyone pressing for its abolition, because a return to complete GOP control is a matter of only a few seats, and the damage that Republicans could do would be immense.
“First, do no harm” should be a guiding legislative principle as well as a medical one. My point here is not to defend the filibuster but to press for taking seriously the consequences of abandoning it. Perhaps the patient, democracy itself, is in such dire straits that the foreseeable risks are worth the short-term rewards. But I’m not there.
One common response to my concerns is that Republicans, given the opportunity, will move to majority rule anyway; why not seize the moment to achieve Democratic priorities? Yet when Republicans had this opportunity they didn’t take it, despite being bludgeoned to do so by Trump.
What does more harm than confusing people as to what they voted for? When people vote for one thing and don’t get it, or get something entirely different from what they thought would result, they tend to either write off politics and voting as pointless, or start looking for someone else to vote for, or just switch parties to vote against whoever happens to be in at whatever moment they look for help and can’t find it being given by whoever’s in office at the time. The wild swings from voting for Obama to voting for Trump make sense when you realize a lot, a huge number, of low information voters have no clear idea what either party actually wants to do, or actually did do. Republicans have the clearest relationship to a set of policies, and guess what? Their voters are the most determined to show up anytime there’s a vote to be taken, and to vote for the person with an R behind their name.
The filibuster confuses things. Time to clarify who stands where. Which side are you on? What does that D stand for, anyway?
And why didn’t Republicans take the opportunity to end the filibuster when they had it? They are smart enough to realize most of their policies would result in disaster (gutting government regulation has crashed the economy or invited avoidable disaster time and again, for example). McConnell and the smart Republicans wanted to hide behind the courts to do their dirty work, and hence they gleefully ended the filibuster as it applied to all court appointments.
If they had nothing to hide behind, people might realize they actually want some pretty destructive things done. Even George W. Bush finally realized what Republican policy led to when the Capitol was attacked by Republican Trumpists. And he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Thousands of Republicans have changed party registration after finally realizing what today’s Republicans are actually sowing: chaos, hatred, white nationalism, violent overthrow of our democratic order. Even religious belief has dropped sharply since christianists nailed their cross to the Republican Party, and especially so since they equated belief in Trump to belief in God.
When I vote for corn, I want corn coming up, even if I like collards. Give me what I vote for, tell me what you are going to do for me, tell me while you are doing it, tell me you did it, then remind me what you did for me (and what the other guy wants to do that will hurt me) when it comes time for me to vote. Make it clear what you stand for and do what you promise. Don’t confuse things. I want corn. Where’s the damn corn? Who is promising me corn? Don’t tell me collards is all you could get after “having” to compromise to avoid a filibuster which never appears in the Constitution anyway. That’s what happened to the promise of freedom for the slaves: compromised away by the filibuster rule, put in place to allow Jim Crow to replace the freedom promised in the amended Constitution. And now threatening to be done again with the same rule.
Time to end the filibuster. Take the vote. Enact the policy and don’t waffle. And make very clear who voted for what when the next election comes up. The Suffragettes did that, a century ago, and won because of that clarity, not despite it. Women vote and today, a woman is a heart beat away from the presidency itself.
Have some courage about your convictions and clarity about your policies, and reap what you sow. I’m confident Democrats will come out on top once it is very, very clear to even the lowest information voter who supports what.
Anyway, if we don’t protect the right to vote, NOW, all the camouflage and confusion offered by the filibuster will amount to nothing. If Trumpists will attack the Capitol, consort with Russians, lie endlessly, pack the courts and line their pockets with dark donations, do you really, really think they will let the tradition of a filibuster by the minority stand in their way to permanent power when push comes to shove?
They have already shown it won’t. Even George W. Bush figured that one out.