Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who is challenging Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to be the next Senate majority leader, said Friday he wants to abolish the filibuster and ruled out a potential presidential run in 2028.
Van Hollen, speaking to reporters at the What’s Next conference in Denver, argued that legislation should pass the Senate with simple-majority votes and that the filibuster, which requires senators to muster 60 votes to pass most legislation, is “undemocratic.”
“My personal opinion is that we need democracy in the United States Senate and that means allowing ultimately a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people, so that means 51 votes,” Van Hollen said.
“My personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an antidemocratic — small ‘d’ — provision. It’s not in our Constitution. It was put in there by senators to enhance their power over the power of the people,” he added.
The filibuster is the only thing that kept Republicans from doing even more crazy shit then they already did. The senate is undemocratic in that an outsized minority of voters have an outsized impact on the majority. Every state gets two senators despite WY having half a million people and CA having like 40 million. In the senate they are equal.
The filibuster is how the minority-Republican Senate under Biden was able to block everything the majority-Democratic House passed other than budget reconciliation bills. The filibuster also allows performative bills, that the author doesn’t actually want, to be put in.
Oh I agree to that. My issues is that the senate itself is so arcane that there is a low chance that dems will hold it…:which means removing the filibuster benefits republicans more than democrats. WY gets the same two votes as CA despite huge population differences. I don’t know what the solution is but I have a fear of a republican senate majority that no longer has to worry about the filibuster.
Depends who is holding the leadership. Under McConnel as majority leader we saw them abandon any attempt at a legislative agenda item her than tax reform through reconciliation. Not that Democratic filibusters held them at bay, but McConnell just wasn’t allowing any non-reconcilliation bills.
And, in reality it’s just a rule change that is voted on by a majority. If they have the majority and a determination to pass some dumb shit, they can just get rid of the filibuster right then and there.
The filibuster is the primary reason Republicans have any shot at all at national power.
Republicans thrive on voter apathy. They want voters to believe that both sides are the same, and that the government is incapable of doing anything useful.
What happens again and again is, Democrats will do the impossible. They’ll rally public support and anger and win great power on the promise of improving people’s lives. And then they manage to deliver jack shit because of the filibuster. Then they lose the next election because they never got anything done.
Yes, Republicans will be able to do more damage without the filibuster. But here’s the key - the filibuster didn’t prevent them from doing any of the horrific shit they have in the second Trump term. This is because Republicans don’t actually want to pass much legislation. The things they most want, tax and spending cuts, can be passed with a simple majority. They do everything else with the power of the presidency alone. You can gut a government program with a simple majority vote - just defund it. But establishing a new program requires 60 votes. The filibuster is inherently biased towards Republican policy priorities.
I like the accountability angle. While this is powerful, I’m not so sure about the entire premise of your remaining argument.
Specifically, you note Republicans can easily defund programs, while Democrats need 60 votes to establish them. But eliminating or reducing funding is not always the same as repealing a program.
For example, a future Republican majority might want to:
The filibuster doesn’t just determine which policies can be enacted; it affects how easily every subsequent majority can reverse them.
Bottom line: If Democrats could enact their entire agenda with 51 Senate votes, would they accept Republicans having exactly the same power in two years?
If they remove the filibuster, then we need to uncap the House come 2028 elections. That makes the move not as polarizing since the House becomes much more representative. Additionally, maybe pass measures like Ranked Robin voting at the Federal level so that federal elections use a better version of Ranked Choice voting.
I just can’t picture how to make the senate work when the numbers are so skewed. Don’t have a solution but it’s such a glaring issue.
The Senate remains an issue until we have a constitutional convention - so we need to keep investing and pouring care in to each state in the union hoping we turn hearts.
The Senate should be uncapped as well based on population. The House is more geared towards the country’s short-term interests and the Senate our long-term interests, but it needs to be representative of the population as well.
We are one nation after all!
It is not possible to turn a conservative heart. There is simply no heart there to turn. Conservatives are biologically unable to experience empathy, no matter how much empathy you show them.
I would say it’s more about inspiring hope in the next generations living in conservative states and conservatives areas. Older conservatives might just give up on their elected officials entirely if Democrats do good work, not that they actually believe in Democrats but they see the contrast in their wallet or quality of life.
Making the Senate proportional to the population basically invalidates the reason for its existence when we already have he House of Representatives. I would instead say if we keep the Senate at all, make it so that all legislative bills must originate in the House and the Senate will have 1 month to deliberate before holding a vote to pass it to the President or send it back down to the House, and the House can override with a 2/3 majority. The Senate keeps their role of approving executive and judicial nominees. Maybe transfer federal judicial nomination directly to the judicial branch, though.
I believe the Senate has outgrown its original intended purpose. It served as a balance of power between “territories” that were more independent.
We are more of a nation with a united national identity now than we were at our nation’s founding. We would not have had the union without the current set up because those original territories might not have agreed to unite under a shared flag to oppose British rule, yet alone unite afterwards. I would say even the Civil War is evidence that we were a looser collection of states at the time.
The House of Representatives serve shorter terms, the legislation they pass through may not be geared towards what’s best for the country long term, but what would help them secure reelection in the short term. The Senate having longer terms make sense purely for our long term national outlook. But our current Senate structure fails at fulfilling that goal at a national level, imo. The Senate not being based on population means it does not look out for our long term national interests, but instead the individual Senators long term career prospects in their state. It also gives those states more weight and their lower level population more power relatively.
I think each individual region should be weighted evenly, no state should be winner take all. If you live somewhere with say a population of 100,000. Then you should have a proportional amount of representation to a place with 1,000,000. Forget the borders of the states, I want each block of people in our nation to have proportional representation. No gerrymandering and full proportional representation.
A constitutional convention is not a viable option right now. 250 years ago, you had statesmen who were interested in doing their job representing the people they were beholden to. That is not longer the case. Virtually everyone involved in a modern constitutional convention would be there to line there pockets and billionaires would be lining up to fill those pockets to make sure the new constitution was structured to help them hold onto and increase their wealth.
I think a modern constitutional convention would need good actors to ensure legislation that helps the people to get passed.
I guess it depends on who calls the convention - if it’s the states themselves calling for it then I feel that it could at least be more likely that we implement legislation with more of a local focus. Our current Congress is already heavily aligned with big businesses so getting money out of politics first is a must if we plan to head into a constitutional convention.
💯 The Koch brothers capitalized on the Tea Party movement to fund state legislature and governor races with the express goal of calling a Constitutional Convention to reshape the country with their anarcho-capitalist ideals.
It’s also the Democrats’ excuse for never doing anything. On the net the filibuster like other causes of institutional gridlock is a tool for maintaining the status quo and that helps corporate stooges and fascists. In addition, since it prevents Congress from doing things it essentially forces it to abdicate power to the executive and judicial branches, directly weakening democracy.
Agreed. Its presence actually further enables the Ratchet Effect and reduces individual accountability from voters. Force them to debate and vote on the bill.
In Australia we use proportional representation to elect Senators within each state, and assign each state a number of senators based on their population. The lower house is voted for in seats, like US counties, by preferential voting.
This keeps the Senate as an effective house of review that has a different makeup than the lower house, but does not disenfranchise those in well-populated states.