A Case for Getting Rid of the Filibuster

Elections and Politics Policy Brief # 26 | By: Ryan Campbell | August 20, 2021

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Policy Summary

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After recent Supreme Court rulings against the Voting Rights Act, many want to pass new voter rights laws, however, the path is blocked by the filibuster.

The filibuster is a political procedure in the US Senate (as well as other governmental bodies) where a Senator or Senators may speak for as long as they want on any topic that they choose (i.e. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) once filibustered by reading from Green Eggs and Ham).  This will allow the party (or individual) to essentially run out the clock and deny the party moving in favor of the legislation an opportunity to ever have said legislation voted on.  This can only be broken if 60 senators vote for “cloture,” or a motion to bring debate to an end.

A cloture motion can only be used for budgetary matters, and so does not apply to every bill.  Should this threshold not be met and cloture not be available, any Senator objecting to the legislation could bring the business of the Senate to a halt by invoking the filibuster, never allowing a vote on the legislation to happen.

This occurs in an age when laws can be increasingly tailored to look nondiscriminatory on the surface, but in reality be sophisticated attempts to undermine voting in indirect ways.  This can be most clearly seen in the issue of the “poll tax.”

Considering how a vote on voter rights legislation would not be eligible for cloture and would be all but impossible to get around a filibuster in these divided times, the only realistic way of preventing continued voter discouragement is by doing away with the filibuster.

Policy Analysis

Currently, the hottest topic in legislation is essentially building on the Voting Rights Act, a law which has been drastically weakened recently by the Supreme Court.  This law was previously used to prevent discrimination, and after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act by removing “pre-clearance,” the US saw a wave of laws passed that would have previously have gone through a rigorous Justice Department test.

This weakening happened in two recent cases where Arizona law banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver and threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct.  The question of enforcing the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court, and the Court held that states with a  history of discrimination no longer had to get advanced clearance from the Justice Department for changes in how their elections are run.

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The filibuster has a long history of being the result of a race to the bottom of those who are the last holdouts against civil rights: it lets one Senator take the heat, often on an issue wouldn’t affect them, and the rest of the Senators in their party to not deal with the issue.  Although the filibuster is, as lawyers would call, “facially neutral” (that is, not intended to benefit or hinder a group within the language of the law) the way in which it has been used has been incredibly slanted against civil rights.

The filibuster has a long history of being the result of a race to the bottom of those who are the last holdouts against civil rights: it lets one Senator take the heat, often on an issue wouldn’t affect them, and the rest of the Senators in their party to not deal with the issue.  Although the filibuster is, as lawyers would call, “facially neutral” (that is, not intended to benefit or hinder a group within the language of the law) the way in which it has been used has been incredibly slanted against civil rights.

A particularly relevant example of a facially neutral law would be the “poll tax.”  A poll tax, which began in the 1890’s, was a way to use the law to keep Black voters from voting essentially as a voting fee.  There would often be carve outs to allow poor southerners (and these laws were typically in the part of the South that would later be covered by the Voting Rights Act) to still vote.  This would include clauses that grandfathered in anyone who had voted before the Civil War, which, while again facially neutral, heavily discriminates against Blacks who were enslaved and not registered to vote prior to the Civil War.

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As an example of how a facially neutral procedure is used to cover facially neutral laws, the record holder for longest filibuster, made at a time when you had to be on your feet speaking the entire time, was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.  He was filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a law that has become a cornerstone of American civil rights legislation.

States are still continuing to pass restrictive voting laws, and there seems to be no change in the stances in the Senate to allow for updated voter rights legislation to be passed.  With mounting political pressure to act and the near certainty of a filibuster in the senate, the question now is whether voter rights legislation will be the pressure needed to attempt to change or do away with the filibuster.

A particularly relevant example of a facially neutral law would be the “poll tax.”  A poll tax, which began in the 1890’s, was a way to use the law to keep Black voters from voting essentially as a voting fee.  There would often be carve outs to allow poor southerners (and these laws were typically in the part of the South that would later be covered by the Voting Rights Act) to still vote.  This would include clauses that grandfathered in anyone who had voted before the Civil War, which, while again facially neutral, heavily discriminates against Blacks who were enslaved and not registered to vote prior to the Civil War.

Engagement Resources​

Click or tap on image to visit resource website.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voice/keeping-vote/state-rules-federal-rules/poll-taxes

https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-is-the-senate-filibuster-and-what-would-it-take-to-eliminate-it/

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/07/173736882/how-did-strom-thurmond-last-through-his-24-hour-filibuster

Prospects for the Biden Agenda, Part 2

Elections and Politics Policy Brief # 25 | By: William Bourque | August 19, 2021

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In this series U.S. RESIST NEWS Reporter William Bourque examines the feasibility of implementing  the different components of President Biden’s ambitious policy agenda. In Part 2 of the  series we examine prospects for passage of Biden proposals in the areas of infrastructure and immigration.

Infrastructure

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For President Biden’s Administration, infrastructure has been a top priority, as clearly shown by the release of the “American Jobs Plan” which is one of the Presidents’ cornerstone policies.  The plan aims to increase American jobs while repairing infrastructure which was thrown to the wayside because of President Trump’s “wall”.  Biden plans to modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main-streets, while also repairing 10,000 of the most out of date bridges in America.  Additionally, a large portion of repair will be done to “the 10 most economically significant bridges in the country in need of reconstruction.”  Evidently, this is a problem that needs to be dealt with and Biden has made it clear that it is at the very top of the to-do list.  In fact, the American Jobs Plan is one of the main priorities of the new $3.5 trillion budget the Senate laid out recently.  Luckily, infrastructure is one of the more bipartisan issues that we currently face, so Biden shouldn’t have too much trouble pushing the more pressing infrastructure issues through.  Look for much of this work to begin next year, once the delta variant of the coronavirus is more controlled.

Immigration

The Biden Administration has faced some of its harshest critics in recent months because of the practices in use at the United States’ southern border.  During the Trump presidency, it was evident that refugees fleeing persecution weren’t being treated as humans.  It seems as though the Biden administration hasn’t perfected their approach to the border yet, but it is a work in progress.  The Administration outlined their plans in a press release on July 27th, saying “We will always be a nation of borders, and we will enforce our immigration laws in a way that is fair and just. We will continue to work to fortify an orderly immigration system.”

One of Biden’s main goals with the border is to redirect funds that were being used towards Trump’s wall to more useful projects, such as funding the border patrol officers on the front lines.  Also, the Administration has stated that they intend to slow the expedited removal process of those arriving at the border.  Essentially, this mean that folks who arrive at the border will have a chance to have their circumstances heard before a decision is made on their immigration status.

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This allows families to reunite and those fleeing persecution to have a stable, safe place to stay while their case is heard.  Biden is also putting some of the border wall funds towards improving the United States human trafficking investigation operations.  This is something that the Trump administration had neglected because of the obsession over the wall, and is certainly long overdue.  Finally, the communications team at the White House will be put to work on immigration, releasing messages that encourage and “promote safe, legal, and orderly migration.”  The Biden administration certainly has a lot of its plate, but they will be eager to maintain their campaign promises.

Republicanism is Dead: How Today’s Global Challenges Invalidate Current Republican Politics

Elections and Politics Policy Brief # 24 | By: Adrian Cole | August 16, 2021

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Many people on the Left have for decades considered Republican politics anathema. But as the twenty-first century advances into ever-more perilous territory, Republicans are clinging to political and ideological stances which simply defy common sense, logic, reality and efficacy. Bearing in mind the existential nature of the problems facing the country and the world, it is clear that the foundational pillars of today’s Republican party are all premised on untenable positions, false assumptions, bad science and ill-faith, and will, if pursued, lead us all into further crisis.

They are already largely responsible for wasting several decades in the struggle to control our climate; climate obfuscation is almost a religion among today’s Republicans, such has been their determination to deny reality and obstruct positive change in terms of fossil fuel emissions.

Recently, probably in response to a summer unlike any other in human history, a few Republican lawmakers have begun to deviate from the party line on climate change. The penny, as my mother would have put it, referring to my teenage brain, is beginning to drop. As ten-thousand-year floods inundated subways in Henan Province, rivers in Germany washed away villages, and a heat dome hovered over the perennially temperate Pacific Northwest, a few lawmakers who had hitherto insisted that any discernable change in weather was attributable to natural cycles, began to sing a different song.

Senator Rick Scott, former governor of Florida, known for his inaction on climate change in a state which has spent more than 100 billion dollars  on climate-related disasters (according to the federal government) now appears to recognize the reality of climate change, but—because of his tenacious adherence to Republican positions—is unable to propose any solutions. Said solutions, according to the global scientific community, begin with de-cabonization. But to Scott, de-carbonization rhymes with economic instability (even if it doesn’t).  As the recent IPCC report makes crystal clear, the planet needs to effect radical change, now. But for Scott: “I’m not doing anything to raise the cost of living for American families.”

Several assumptions—and deeply held Republican positions—are at play here. The first assumption is that Republicans like Scott care about American families (and not the large corporations that extract fossil fuels). That’s a low blow, I know, but one strongly suspects that any reluctance to impinge on the dominance of the fossil fuel industry is about just that, not American families. Another assumption is that American families won’t be affected by climate change. Strangely enough though, they already are being affected by climate change, and disproportionately amongst the poor. Talk to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Another assumption—and this is perhaps the big one—is that investing in our planet’s future will actually hurt American families, presumably by taxing them more to pay for a “Green Revolution,” or whatever solutions are proposed by the “socialist” democrats.  The notion of rising taxes—and by extension expanding government—is a key Republican hot-button, which, as Scott demonstrates, is responded to by knee-jerk, flat-out rejection.

Republicans are more afraid of tax increases than they are of the prospect of an uninhabitable earth. The Republican religion of business uber alles is what has gotten us into this pretty pass. Adherence to neoliberal, laissez faire economics has, and will continue to, present obstacles to the business of slowing the warming of the climate.

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Laissez faire economics and the cult of business are cozy bedmates with Republicans’ other obsession: small government. Seeing government, as Reagan put it, as “the problem” is very unhelpful these days; the problems we face as a global community cannot be resolved with an anti-government ideology.

The two recent Republican administrations, that of King Donald, and his vastly preferable predecessor, G.W., both worked assiduously to reduce the size of government based, not on a scientific approach to government and economics, but a slavish adherence to an ideology originating in a quasi-scientific dogma birthed by Milton Friedman, and harking back to his predecessor Friedrich Hayek. G.W. only failed to reduce government to a skeleton crew because he chose to go to war, twice, and needed all the resources available to humanity to do so. To riff on Reagan’s epithet, however, one could say that Laissez faire economics is not the solution to our problems, it is the cause of our problems.  We have, for decades now, let be, to revert to English for a second. And, as they say in Spain, aqui estamos.

Laissez faire economics and small government are hand-in-glove conspirators in the ending of the world as we know it. The more you let go, the less government you need. Justice is then meted out by militias. Or vigilantes. Corporations regulate themselves, financially, environmentally, which is great, because for business and industry to rule, in a free market, nothing must get in their way, not even clean air, water and soil. In the real world, however,  Government, with all its bureaucratic meddlesomeness and inefficiency, is necessary in order to guarantee a semblance of equality and to protect the vast majority of the population from the acquisitive, rapacious minority.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill on Democracy, government is the worst system of social organization that we have. Except for all the other systems of social organization.

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The Other way in which Rick Scott’s rhetoric about “American families,” represents key, unhelpful, Republican pillars is the “American” bit. As we found with Trump and his America First priorities, modern Republicanism like other nationalisms around the world these days, cannot get to grips with global problems because they don’t really recognize the global community and cannot see past their own borders. Such borders are of course largely invented, because nations are fictions.  “Nationalism,” said the preeminent historian of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, “is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”

Having said that, there is nothing per-se wrong with nationalism. Nations developed for a reason. Historian Yuval Hariri writes about how ancient tribes along the Nile Valley could not cope, individually, with the river’s annual flooding. But together as a much larger entity—a nation—they could effect change for everyone. But the problem starts, says Hariri, “when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism. Instead of believing that my nation is unique…I might begin feeling that my nation is supreme…” Hariri is referring to the difference between patriotism and nationalism, the former often defined as love of country, the latter as hate of other people’s.

But in terms of effective governance, nationalism might have been just that in the pre-war period. After 1945, in the new era of nuclear weapons, there were reasons to look for a more overarching authority to control the world’s propensity for self-destruction. For the first time in history there were global problems which required global solutions. Now, with ecological collapse and climate change, that is more true than ever. There are notable differences, however, between the nuclear crisis and the environmental crisis, as far as nationalist politics are concerned. Nuclear weapons are an immediate and imminent threat that cannot be ignored. Climate (perhaps until very recently) has been more abstract, allowing some politicians to ignore the threat, or even deny the existence of it.

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“It isn’t a coincidence,” writes Hariri, “that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right…Since there is no national answer to global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe that the problem does not exist.”

The recent softening of some Republican positions on climate tend to recognize climate change, and even humanity’s role, but fall short of doing anything meaningful about it. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, (“We cannot live without fossil fuels or chemicals. Period. End of Story,”) helped craft the recent 1 trillion-dollar infrastructure bill which included billions to protect coastal states from sea level rise.

He will not, however, support policies to curb the amount of oil drilled off the Louisiana coast, the burning of which contributes to ice caps melting and rising sea levels. Other Republican senators, like Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, promote mitigation policies, such as cleaning up the gases produced by burning fossil fuels, instead of limiting the burning of such fuels themselves. All of this is to protect the fossil fuel industry, which pushes the same line: we’ve got this; we’re going to use science to mitigate the problem.

In summation, then, this little handful of core beliefs, to which Republicans cling like a group of seals on a rapidly-melting chunk of ice, laissez faire economics, small government and nationalism, have been extraordinarily destructive. Such ideologies cannot provide a way out of humanity’s current predicament.

If we are to limit warming to well below 2 degrees, and still have a habitable planet, there will have to be governmental action and public spending on a huge scale and it will have to be carried out by a community of nations who act cooperatively for the same goal, all the while listening to scientists. Republicans, however, if they cannot think themselves out of the box of their own narrow economic status quo, will take us all down with them.