An antiquated rule keeps standing in the way of Joe Biden’s agenda.
© Erin Schaff / The New York Times / Redux F rom multiple directions, the crisis over the filibuster is peaking for Democrats. In just the past week, the casualty count of Democratic priorities doomed by the filibuster has mounted; both police and immigration reform now appear to be blocked in the Senate, and legislation codifying abortion rights faces equally dim prospects. Simultaneously, the party has tied itself in knots attempting to squeeze its economic agenda into a single, sprawling “reconciliation” bill, because that process offers the only protection against a GOP filibuster. Meanwhile, legislation establishing a new federal floor for voting rights, the party’s top priority after the reconciliation bill, remains stalled in the Senate under threat of another GOP filibuster. And then, this week, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell raised the temperature even higher by leading a Republican filibuster that has blocked Democratic efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. “On voting rights, budget and reconciliation, potential economic calamity [over the debt ceiling]—this is a very clarifying few weeks,” says Eli Zupnick, a spokesperson for Fix Our Senate, a liberal group advocating for ending the filibuster. “Our hope is this will culminate in Democrats finally realizing they cannot keep preserving this weapon that McConnell can use to derail their agenda and hurt President Biden’s ability to govern.” [ Read: The end of the filibuster—no, really] Reform advocates don’t expect Democrats to resolve the latest standoff by exempting the debt ceiling from the filibuster—most bet that the party will eventually turn to the special budget-reconciliation process to pass the increase. But they do hope the Republican willingness to court default and financial chaos by filibustering the debt-ceiling increase will pressure Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to reconsider their blanket defense of the rule. “The debt ceiling is an exacerbating dynamic putting salt in the wound in a way that might expedite filibuster reform on other fronts, like voting rights,” says Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group. Like other filibuster opponents, he says the stalemate over the debt ceiling should send yet “one more signal to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that these [Republicans] are not rational or good-faith actors.” McConnell’s latest maneuver on the debt ceiling may have inadvertently made the strongest case yet for changing the filibuster. As he’s done before on Supreme Court confirmations, McConnell recently conjured a self-serving new “rule.” The Senate Republican leader declared that the majority party alone should bear the burden of passing the politically fraught debt-ceiling legislation. As he explained it to Punchbowl News, “The country must never default. The debt ceiling will need to be raised. But who does that depends on who the American people elect.” By itself, that was not a remarkable assertion. Senate Democrats also provided almost no votes to raise the debt ceiling while Republicans controlled the White House and both legislative chambers during the middle years of George W. Bush’s presidency. The catch is that while McConnell contended that the majority party alone must raise the debt ceiling as its “ sole responsibility,” he also insisted that the minority party should maintain a veto on whether it does so through the Senate filibuster. On Monday, he was as good as his word, leading a GOP filibuster of the Democratic legislation to increase the ceiling and to provide the funding to keep the federal government open past this week. That represented a new escalation of the partisan wars: Although Senate Democrats generally didn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling under Bush, they didn’t filibuster to block the GOP majority from doing so. McConnell’s “Heads I win, tails you lose” formulation on the debt-ceiling issue captures the structural change in Congress’s operation that has rendered the filibuster even more pernicious and illogical than it was in earlier generations. His assertion that the majority party alone should raise the debt ceiling actually demonstrates how Capitol Hill works in the modern era: Congress now functions essentially as a quasi-parliamentary institution, and it has an enormous level of party-line voting and very little cooperation across partisan lines. But McConnell’s contention that the minority party should retain a veto through the 60-vote threshold underscores how the filibuster has created a parliamentary system without majority rule. That’s a contradiction in terms. The point of a parliamentary system is that the majority rules. It assumes that legislators from the parties not in power will oppose the governing party’s program but allows the ruling party to advance its agenda anyway through a simple majority vote.
