Minority Faction

The debate over the filibuster continues to rage, with Matt Yglesias wanting to get rid of it and the Decembrist coming to its defense. I tend to be a bit of an institutionalist, so I'm in favor of retaining the filibuster. But I think that Matt's argument is worthy of a response.

Yglesias argues that liberals should support the elimination of the filibuster because of what he describes as its inherently conservative character. The filibuster is a tool for frustration of majority will, and is therefore an instrument for blocking change. Since liberals like change and are generally majoritarian in outlook, they should want to get rid of the practice. You would expect conservatives would like the filibuster, but they're too shortsighted to realize that it ultimately benefits them.

I have two objections to Matt's position, one simple and the other a little complicated.

The simple objection first: Matt confuses change with left. We can also change to the right.

Matt's mistake is that he confuses left/right and conservative/liberal, thereby ignoring the existence of the another dichotomy, radical/reactionary. Liberals are indeed in favor of (gradual) change while conservatives are against it. But there also exists radicals, who want to push in an egalitarian direction without respect to institutional restraints, and reactionaries who want to turn back the clock. Today's political dispute is not between liberals and conservatives (I wish it were). It is a fight between liberals and conservatives on the one hand and reactionaries on the other. The first two have combined to preserve the long-established reforms of the 20th century. The reactionaries have never accepted the New Deal settlement and are trying to overturn it. Since the reactionaries have the political initiative, it is the liberals who are against change.

Political change can therefore come from either the left or the right. Whoever is in favor of restraint usually ends up being whoever is at a political advantage. At the moment, that is the left, hence our love of the filibuster. In 1993-93 we hated it and the right loved it, and now the shoe is on the other foot. But there is no principled reason who liberals should want to get rid of the filibuster. Anti-majoritarian institutions are sometimes a good thing. Hence our defense of the independent judiciary.

Okay, now from one long-winded response to another. The complicated objection to Matt's position is that, at the moment, the filibuster is serving the interests of the political majority against an empowered minority.

Yeah, yeah I know it sounds impossible, but there it is. Let me explain. First, you need to accept that the majority of the country does not really favor the agenda of the Republican reactionary right. There's plenty of polling evidence to this effect. The next thing you need to remember is that Senate is gerrymandered in favor of small states, which gives a bonus to agrarian interests. Now when the rural vote swung between the two parties, this did not present a problem. But now the Republicans have a lock on the countryside and therefore have a real advantage in controlling the Senate.

Evidence? As others have pointed out, the Democrats actually received more aggregate votes for Senate candidates than the Republicans did in the last election, so we have a situation in which a political minority actually controls the chamber. So the Democratic (majority) uses the filibuster to prevent the passages of reactionary laws directed against them. Weird, ain't it?

But wait a minute, you say, what about the House? It's not mal-apportioned like the Senate! Shouldn't it be a good enough check on these shenanigans?

Well...no. The House is gerrymandered in favor of rural interests too. It was for years until the Baker v. Carr decision in 1962, but since the racial re-districting of the 1990's, minorities (who tend be urban-dwelling Democrats ) are packed in a few supermajority seats. So we have a pro-rural gerrymander in the House just like we did before 1962, but unlike then it is now also an anti-Democratic gerrymander (since the rural vote is now strongly Republican).

On top of this, the internal organization of the House makes it easy for the rural-based minority to win working control of the House. The senior leadership of the House has total control of the legislative process. And since that leadership is either of or beholden to the reactionaries, they have been able to force through legislation using the "majority of the majority" doctrine so baldly enunciated by Dennis Hastert. So while the ideological majority of the House is somewhere in the middle, the extreme right is able to run roughshod over their moderates and pass any laws they like. In the House, like the Senate, the minority has control of the chamber.

So there is no check on our impassioned reactionaries in the House, and the Senate is gerrymandered in their favor by the Constitution, so we have a situation in which the only protection that the ideological majority of the country has is the filibuster.

So go ahead and dump the filibuster. But you'd better re-write the Constitution, the rules of the House, and eliminate gerrymandering while you're at it. Let me know how that goes, will you?