U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker was correct Wednesday when, according to a press release from his office, the Mississippi Republican spoke against Democratic efforts to eliminate the filibuster.
The filibuster is a unique Senate mechanism that gives the minority party some leverage. It requires 60 senators to approve ending debate on a bill and bringing it to a vote. Since one party rarely has 60 of the Senate’s 100 members, the filibuster in theory requires the majority party to seek compromise to get its legislation passed.
In Wicker’s remarks on the Senate floor, he described the filibuster as “the consensus building 60-vote rule.” He added that “it has enabled us to craft some of the most long-lasting and widely accepted legislation in the history of this republic.”
That is commentary you would expect from a member of the Senate’s current minority party, since Vice President Kamala Harris can break a 50-50 tie in favor of Democrats.
The majority party, both today and in the past, naturally sees the filibuster as an impediment to passing whatever legislation it wishes. There’s little doubt that the brakes applied by this Senate rule have kept both parties from passing reckless legislation.
Democrats are nuts to try to kill the filibuster, no matter what noble cause they want to put into the law. Sooner or later, they should remember, they’ll be a minority — and it will then be the majority Republicans’ turn to have their way.
Some criticism of the filibuster is legitimate. It doesn’t exactly make the tactic look noble, for example, when one of its most famous deployments was an effort to delay civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.
And Wicker can speak grandly of building consensus, but let’s get real: How much consensus, or a willingness to work together to craft long-lasting legislation, do you actually see in Congress today between Democrats and Republicans?
The answer is none, or pretty close to it. Just like the voters who elected today’s lawmakers, the senators themselves don’t trust the members of the other party. Few if any are willing to work with each other on anything but the most incidental of issues.
Even so, the alternative to the filibuster is unappealing: one party, if lucky enough to hold the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, shoving through its priorities by a simple majority vote, with the minority party unable to participate.
If that’s something you think the federal government needs, then try considering the idea when the party you favor is out of power.
When the voters made their choices in 2020, Democrats made a clean sweep of the executive and legislative branches. But they won Congress by extremely narrow numbers — nothing that signaled a strong mandate for aggressive, one-party change.
The filibuster, if it remains in place, would prevent Democrats from errors they will regret in future elections. And it will provide Republicans such as Wicker a good test, when they are in the majority, to see if they mean what they say.
