Lindsey Graham’s threat to flee Washington is part of troubling trend

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Senator Lindsey Graham (RS.C.) has a brilliant idea to stop the Democrats’ $ 3.5 trillion infrastructure package. He will simply copy what the Democrats in Texas did and leave town so the Senate cannot have a quorum to pass the bill.

“You must have a quorum to pass a bill in the Senate,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “I would leave before I let this happen.”

Graham was probably just cute, and his plan would be hard to pull off anyway: it only takes 51 members of the Senate to reach a quorum, so Graham would need all of his fellow Republicans to join him in order to be successful. But his comments are also a sign of how many GOPs – which so often present themselves as the party “more constitutional than you” – have escaped the vision of the founders.

In Federalist 58, James Madison cautioned against letting members of Congress use the manipulation of quorum requirements to block legislation. “In all cases where justice or the general good might demand the adoption of new laws or the pursuit of active measures, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,” he wrote. “It would no longer be the majority that would govern: power would be transferred to the minority. It looks like Madison, at least, would think badly if Graham got what he wanted by stopping the Senate from doing business.

This brings us back to the Democrats of Texas, who fled their state to prevent the GOP-controlled legislature from passing new electoral restrictions. Wouldn’t Madison despise them too? The easy answer – too easy, really – is that Madison wrote about the federal government, not state governments, so who cares? But the reality is that in the name of defending democracy, Democrats in Texas are using anti-majority and anti-democratic tactics to achieve their political goals. This should be at least a little disconcerting to progressives who have spent the last few months advocating for an end to anti-majority and anti-democratic filibustering in the US Senate. Coherence is a difficult thing in politics, for Republicans and Democrats alike, when the possibility of power is at hand.

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