Mitch McConnell wants Chuck Schumer’s commitment to preserve the filibuster before he will permit the Senate to reorganize with the new Democratic majority.
“Republicans very much appreciate the consistency and the rock-solid fidelity to the norms and rules that make the Senate a moderating force in policymaking,” said Scott Jennings, a former McConnell aide. “The legislative filibuster is the last rule driving bipartisanship in Washington.”
Jennings, a savvy political-operative-turned-commentator, who knows McConnell well, also knows well that the Minority Leader hasn’t the least interest in driving bipartisanship. (Never mind the ridiculous appeal to “the rock-solid fidelity to the norms and rules that make the Senate a moderating force in policymaking,” which have hardly been of interest to McConnell or the GOP.) During the Obama presidency, a key to McConnell’s scorched-earth obstructionism was snuffing out every vestige of bipartisanship:
“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
McConnell is driven to win, to beat his opponents at all costs, not to overcome differences or find common ground, as shown after Obama’s election in 2008: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term presidentOpens in a new window.”
We have every reason to believe that McConnell is equally driven to ensure that a Democratic White House will not survive past the 2024 election. Democrats recall with anger McConnell’s history: both his prodigious use of the filibuster as Minority Leader, and later (as Majority Leader) his willingness to change Senate rules when it advantaged Republicans. Doyle McManus observes: "That history is what McConnell wants to repeat in the Biden era: politics as guerrilla warfare, battling the majority to an impasse."
For more than half a century, the filibuster served primarily to preserve Jim Crow. We can credit Mitch McConnell, after his elevation to Minority Leader in 2006, with employing the tool for unprecedented obstruction across the board. As Norman Ornstein noted:
In 2007, with a new Democratic majority in Congress for the final two years of the Bush presidency, it was Republican filibusters that stymied Democrats trying to send legislation to Bush that he would be forced to veto. And with Barack Obama’s presidency, Republican filibusters or threats of filibuster escalated in ways the Senate had never seen before. The rule had not changed, but the norms were blown up. Filibusters were used not simply to block legislation or occasional nominations, but routinely, even on matters and nominations that were entirely uncontroversial and ultimately passed unanimously or near-unanimously. The idea of a filibuster as the expression of a minority that felt so intensely that it would pull out all the stops to try to block something pushed by the majority went by the boards. This was a pure tactic of obstruction, trying to use up as much of the Senate’s most precious commodity—time—as possible to screw up the majority’s agenda.
The filibuster served, in 2007, to protect George W. Bush from vetoing popular bills pushed by the Democrats. In the future, it might serve to protect vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the Senate, such as Joe Manchin, from taking unpopular votes. So, it would be politically handy from time to time (for one party or the other, depending on the circumstances) to have this tool at their disposal. Eliminate it, and they’ve lost that tool.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know how things will play out. But the stakes are so high now for the new president and the tenuous Democratic majorities in both chambers, that they can’t let McConnell stand in the way of Biden’s agenda — and that most likely means a change in the rules.
Short of eliminating the filibuster altogether, Democrats might, for instance, limit the scope of the filibuster, or stretch the use of the Byrd Rule. But the filibuster appears highly vulnerable and, in my view, isn’t likely to survive unscathed in the near term.
(Barring something out of the blue, that is, such as a Democratic senator switching parties. After the events of the past year, who knows what else might appear out of the blue?)