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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), perhaps fearing a future with his minority party, published an editorial in the New York Times Thursday that offers his best defense of the buccaneer – the process that allows a minority of senators to veto a bill unless the bill is supported by a qualified majority of 60 votes.
The filibuster's defense by McConnell is understandable. Countries that have fewer veto points, that is, opponents of the law have fewer opportunities to block it, tend to have larger and more robust welfare states. Keeping the filibuster will help preserve Republican politics even when the GOP loses the election.
Similarly, the domination of the Supreme Court by the Republican Party allows it to orient its policy in areas ranging from right to vote at Health care the workplace, without really having to legislate. If Congress could legislate, it could overturn many Supreme Court decisions and transfer the power of Republican judges to the American people.
The essence of McConnell's argument is that even though the filibuster is not mentioned in the Constitution, it is actually an essential part of our constitutional system:
[T]The cherished tradition of the Senate is not efficiency, but deliberation. One of the main objectives of this body is to ensure that new laws get more support than is required for a simple majority in the House. Legislative obstruction does not appear in the text of the Constitution, but it is at the center of the constitutional order. This echoes James Madison's explanation in Federalist 62, that the Senate is designed not to endorse House bills, but to act as an "additional hurdle" and "complicated control" of "Inappropriate legislative acts". He embodies the principle of "great innovations should not be forced on thin majorities. "
The legislative flibust is directly downstream of our founding tradition. If this tradition thwarts the whims of the far-left members, it is their half-cooked proposals and not secular wisdom that must be reorganized.
McConnell's idea that the buccaneer is rooted in a great tradition is simply wrong. The buccaneer is not part of a major constitutional project imposed by two of McConnell's favorite deceased slave owners. It is a historical accident, provoked by one of the most famous figures of the first republic. And it's an accident that went largely unnoticed for decades after its inception.
Shortly after the indictment of Vice President Aaron Burr for the murder of Alexander Hamilton, he returned to the Senate as president. As a lame duck, he led a process meant to eliminate duplicate procedures from Senate rules. Burr convinced the senators to eliminate a process called the "previous question motion".
Burr, however, was wrong about this motion. The previous question motion was not a matter of parliamentary irrelevance, it was the process that allowed senators to interrupt the debate on a topic when a minority wanted to continue it. Without this, a minority could forever postpone a vote by forcing the Senate to continue to "debate" a topic until the majority leaves the party.
Although the Senate made this change in 1806, no one was aware of it until 1837, when, as Matt Yglesias explained in The Atlantic, "a minority group of Whig Senators prolonged the debate to prevent allies of Andrew Jackson to impose a censorship resolution him. "
Since then, the Senate has reformed the systematic obstruction repeatedly to prevent a minority from blocking progress. In 1917, the Senate authorized a two-thirds supermajority to break a filibuster. This threshold was finally lowered to 60, then to 51 for confirmation votes.
But the filibuster is by no means part of the great American constitutional plan. This is the vestige of an error committed by a lame murderer.
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