In the past couple of years, calls to eliminate the Senate filibuster have steadily grown louder. The argument is fairly simple: Current Senate rules allow a minority party to block most legislation, and the Republican Party spent the first half of Barack Obama’s first term obstructing Obama’s agenda despite not having control of the House or the Senate. There’s widespread fear that history could repeat itself in the Biden era, as well as frustration that even when Democrats win elections they can’t enact their stated agenda. The filibuster, writes campaign group Fix Our Senate, “has been weaponized and abused by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to empower a partisan minority of the Senate representing an extreme minority of the American people to block overwhelmingly popular legislation supported by a majority of elected senators.”
A lot of pundits have written about this topic, often arguing, as Matt Yglesias did recently, that requiring a 60-vote threshold for most legislation is a bad idea regardless of your ideology—in practice, it paralyzes the Senate and makes it less responsive to the will of the voters.
But for all the discussion at the elite level about the filibuster, reforming or eliminating it remains out of reach for now. Moderate Democrats in the Senate, most prominently West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have publicly said they won’t vote to change the Senate rules; defenders of the filibuster say that it encourages bipartisanship and compromise. (Progressives suspect that the status quo is good for centrist senators hoping to dodge tough votes.)
Foes of the filibuster still have hope that Manchin and Sinema change their minds, however. Recent history shows that though the Senate is resistant to change, the majority party sometimes changes the rules when it really wants to. In 2013, Democrats eliminated the 60-vote requirement for non–Supreme Court judicial nominees because they were fed up with GOP obstructionism; four years later Republicans got rid of the requirement for the Supreme Court in order to elevate Neil Gorsuch. The question is, what is something that will motivate institutionalists to change the institution? Here are some possibilities.
A $15 minimum wage
Raising the minimum wage is perhaps more popular than the Democratic Party itself—a $15 minimum wage ballot measure passed in Florida in November even as Democrats suffered a series of defeats—so there has been hope from progressives that the party would find a way to push a long-sought federal minimum wage increase through even with just 50 seats. Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, hopes to pass a $15 minimum wage through reconciliation, a process by which bills that are mostly budgetary can pass with a narrow majority.
But there are obstacles to raising the minimum wage that illustrate the tricky politics of a closely divided Senate. Sinema doesn’t think a minimum wage increase should be included in legislation primarily intended to address economic fallout from COVID. Manchin recently told representatives of the Poor People’s Campaign that he worries about the impact a $15 wage would have on businesses and would rather see an increase to $11 or $12. Neither senator seems likely to agree to eliminate the filibuster to increase the minimum wage, but it also may be true that there aren’t even 50 Democratic votes to bump up the wage.
DC statehood
One organization that has tied its policy demands to the elimination of the filibuster directly is 51 for 51, a group that has asked senators to not just support statehood for Washington, DC, (a cause both Joe Biden and Kamala have endorsed) but agree to make DC a state with a simple majority vote in the Senate.
The rationale is simple: DC residents don’t have representation in Congress and therefore don’t have the same political rights as other U.S. citizens, a historic wrong that is compounded by the fact that the district is a majority-minority city. It would also increase the Democratic Party’s power in the Senate; presumably, the state of DC would send two Democrats to the Senate.
These arguments may be persuasive to a majority of Democrats (39 Democratic senators are co-sponsors of the most recent statehood bill), but Manchin is one of the senators who remains skeptical, meaning there are still major hurdles in the way.
New voting rights legislation
The first bill introduced in both the House and Senate this Congress, a symbolic measure of the issue’s importance, was the same voting-rights package that Republicans blocked in the last Congress. The For the People act aims to make it easier to vote by requiring states to allow online voter registration and implement automatic voter registration for federal elections; it would also mandate states set up early voting and vote by mail for federal elections while protecting voters from poorly designed voter roll “purges” that often deregister people by mistake.
As with DC statehood, these are all policies popular among Democrats which would both make the electoral system more small-d democratic and also (it’s often assumed) help Democratic politicians, who supposedly do better in high-turnout contests. (The past cycle is an example of that truism not always being true.) Again, is it an issue that would personally move Manchin and Sinema? That’s unclear, but if Democrats miss what is probably a narrow window for action on voting rights because of the filibuster, it’s going to make many progressives and activists extremely angry.
Infrastructure
The above topics are high priorities for many progressives and probably most Democrats, but not Manchin in particular. So what might appeal personally to the West Virginian senator? Here’s what he told a local outlet last month:
"The most important thing? Do infrastructure. Spend $2, $3, $4 trillion over a 10-year period on infrastructure."
There are a lot of different ways to “do infrastructure,” of course. When the Trump administration appeared halfway interested in the issues, congressional Republicans favored public-private partnerships, which many Democrats are skeptical of, saying that they can lead to lawsuits and cost overruns that the government is on the hook for. An infrastructure package could be a great way to mitigate damage from climate change and reduce emissions from transportation and buildings, but the GOP might balk at anything that smells too much like the Green New Deal.
So while it might be possible to pass a truly bipartisan infrastructure bill, Republicans might retreat into their obstructionist shells either in order to deny Biden a signature legislative win or because they won’t want to add to the deficit. In those circumstances, would Manchin accept that the “most important thing” Congress could address can’t be addressed because of objections from Republicans? Or would he accept either the full elimination of the filibuster or some kind of reconciliation-centric compromise that allows legislation to advance with 50 votes? Maybe he’ll be happy to take an L in the name of Senate tradition. But progressives looking to reform the Senate will have to find an issue he values more than his beloved filibuster.
