Love, like, or hate him, Senator Joe Manchin is right about one thing: If Republicans are going to filibuster, they should have to really filibuster.
For context, as things stand now in Washington, Democrats handily control the House of Representatives, but just barely control the Senate, which has 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote. (Technically, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat but “caucuses with Democrats” so that counts. Ditto Maine’s Angus King.)
Trouble is, since 1917, supermajorities—originally two-thirds, lowered to three-fifths in 1975— have been required in the Senate to end debate on most subjects. (Before that, thanks, I kid you not, to a change made by Aaron Burr, it was impossible to close off debate at all.) That means that, functionally, Republicans can now stop the Senate from doing all sorts of things if just 10 of them refuse to go along with it. They can just keep talking and talking and talking; they can “filibuster.”
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Over the years, filibustering has led to some memorable episodes of verbal diarrhea.
In 2013, for example, Rand Paul talked for nearly 13 hours, in order to delay a vote on President Obama’s pick for CIA director and score some PR points along the way. On the other side of the aisle, Sanders spoke for eight and a half hours in 2010 to protest a tax bill. Ted Cruz famously read Green Eggs and Ham as part of a 21-hour filibuster in 2013 to oppose the Affordable Care Act. (Too bad he didn’t read If I Ran the Zoo.)
Some of the history is downright odious. Senator Strom Thurmond holds the record for the longest filibuster in history—over 24 straight hours of talking—which he did in opposition to the 1957 Civil Rights Act. And Senator Robert Byrd filibustered for 14 hours to try to stop the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Only, for decades, the Paul, Sanders, and Cruz speeches aside, the filibuster hasn’t usually worked this way.
Most of the time, instead of actually filibustering a bill, the minority party in the Senate just threatens to do it, and so the majority doesn’t bring the bill to the floor for a vote. That way, the Senate can still go about doing other things, instead of being ground to a halt by marathon bloviation.
While that does enable the Senate to go about its business, it also makes the filibuster invisible and painless—which it should not be. For a minority to stop a bill that a democratically elected majority wants (even within the radically anti-democratic nature of the Senate itself) is serious business. It should be a spectacle. It should be headline news. And it should hurt.
Or in Manchin’s words, from a Sunday interview on Meet the Press:
“And now if you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk? I'm willing to look at any way we can. But I'm not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.”
This wouldn’t be a mere endurance contest. With the COVID relief package now passed—thanks to some last-minute horse-trading with Manchin, who can pride himself on having reduced the aid available to Americans devastated by the pandemic—the next major item on the Senate’s agenda is a voting rights bill known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, or H.R. 1, which would establish national standards for voting by mail, nonpartisan redistricting commissions, and new disclosure rules for SuperPACs.
H.R. 1 would be the most important civil rights law in the last 30 years. It is also an absolutely essential protection for our democracy, which is currently being attacked by Republicans around the country no less than it was attacked on Jan. 6. In the last three months, Republicans have introduced over 250 voter suppression laws in 43 states, desperately trying to turn back the tide of the 2020 election.
Just like the terrorist insurrection on Jan. 6, these efforts are propelled by lies and conspiracy theories that fraud affected the results of the election. But unlike Jan. 6, they will have real-world policy impacts: rolling back early voting, making it harder to vote by mail, even prohibiting volunteers from passing out water or blankets to voters waiting in line. (Surprise, surprise: the overwhelming majority of areas where voting places have been closed and lines were longer than ever have high Black or brown populations.)
Having covered voting rights for nearly a decade now, I would say that these efforts, and their motivations, are obvious. In 2019, a dead Republican’s strategy memo became public in connection with the Trump administration’s plan to rig the census to “advantage non-Hispanic whites.” You can just look at the gerrymandered districts, rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court (Chief Justice Roberts dismissed challenges to them as being based on “sociological gobbledygook”), and map them on top of racist redlining maps from decades ago. Honestly, it makes me want to scream.
But I’m not normal. Most people have no idea that voter suppression is a thing, which is why Republicans can be so brazen about doing it. They don’t know that Voter ID laws have a racially disproportionate impact and that they don’t prevent fraud because there’s no fraud to prevent. And they definitely don’t know what H.R. 1 is because they are leading their lives, trying to make it through the pandemic, and not paying attention.
Which is where the filibuster comes in.
If Senate Republicans—who, despite their 50-50 tie in the Senate, actually represent 41 million fewer people than Senate Democrats—want to filibuster the most important civil rights law in decades, make them freaking do it. Make them stand there, for hours on end, defending Trump’s conspiracy theories that there is widespread voter fraud in the country and that making it harder to vote is necessary to fight it. Confront them with the obvious, indisputable, right-in-your-face racial disparities in ballot access, and force them to explain why voting by mail is a bad idea. Make them own it.
A real filibuster would turn this debate into a spectacle, which is exactly what we need, because democracy dies in darkness and spectacles are bright, shiny things that can capture a news cycle and grab some attention for, again, the most important civil rights law in decades.
In fact, while it would be far better to get the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate on a straight majority vote, an absurd, protracted filibuster would yield so much 2022 campaign footage that it’s almost as good. Because while Republican senators wear suits instead of shaman costumes, most are pushing the same fact-free conspiracy theory trash as the insurrectionists, hoping that no one is paying attention.
It’s time to call their bluff.
