Hey, hey, ho, ho! The filibuster has got to go!
I cannot blame House Republicans for their “Big, Beautiful Bill” being over 1,000 pages long. Legislators from both parties have completely abandoned the process of addressing specific societal problems with narrow, targeted legislation; instead opting for omnibus-styled conglomerations of policy aims bundled into budget bills.
The only consensus lawmakers seem to possess is that achieving consensus is futile. But consensus is easier to obtain than we think—especially if we return to small, targeted legislative procedures.
The filibuster limits this capacity in many harmful, undemocratic ways.
In a democracy, majorities are meant to enact their ideas while maintaining mechanisms to correct inevitable policy errors—through elections and judicial review. When the minority dictates the legislative capacity of the majority, bills are either forced into excessive compromise or dead on arrival (compromises are often a reason for its swift death).
With the filibuster intact, the only—or at least most utilized—solution is for the majority to pack unrelated policy items into a budget to qualify under special procedural rules. That, or they don’t pass anything. Allowing the majority to test its ideas, and work with moderates in the minority on legislation for the public to evaluate, is the solution to this procedural error. And that requires removing the filibuster.
Compromise is overrated
When a majority implements its policy preferences in an attempt to solve problems for which the public voted them in, we can more clearly attribute those attempts at solutions to the ruling party.
This is good. It’s much harder to evaluate the impact of a bill when majorities are forced to water down their ideas to secure supermajority support.
Compromise means everyone loses. With the filibuster in place, compromise is inevitable. Democracy fundamentally depends on voters learning from mistakes. Learning requires knowing what problem we tried to solve, what solution was attempted, and how it went wrong. But no one ever wants to accept a failed compromised position as their own—because it’s not theirs!
The filibuster removes opportunities to learn from clear outcomes. When a compromised policy fails, those who forced compromise and those in the majority can both dodge blame by pointing to the parts of the bill they didn’t support. In either case, accountability is blurred.
If most legislation needed only a simple majority, more ideas would be tested. And democracy depends on the public correcting errors, especially in judging the tester.
The filibuster induces extremism
Ending the filibuster means more testing of moderate policies—not radical ones.
The filibuster’s proponents often argue the filibuster is there to avoid extreme swings in policy and force consensus on legislation; it does the opposite. Reaching 60 votes often requires stitching together support across ideological extremes inside party coalitions, which leads to legislation bloated with progressive or populist provisions. These additions make support from moderate minority members nearly impossible.
Without the filibuster, coalitions of moderate Democrats and Republicans can more easily pass popular, incremental legislation.
Cross-party backing was responsible for much of the Biden Admin’s major policy achievements. Most notably, it became a requirement for moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin, who, as Matthew Yglesias put it, wanted “moderate Republicans to come to the table with ideas that he likes better than what progressive Dems are pushing for.” And because the filibuster was acting as Manchin’s ideological crutch, many progressive Democrats ended up feeling shorthanded with what bills ended up passing.
Testing bad ideas is good
The filibuster protects bad ideas from ever being tested by preventing legislation from reaching a vote in the first place. Rather than inducing debate, it stifles criticism by enabling obstruction—an obstruction that also impedes corrections. In a world without the filibuster, small, testable reforms could help resolve deadlocks within a majority because consensus varies on specific issues and moderate factions of opposing sides can find common ground on many of them!
Some voters—though I hear it less often now—still carry the belief that their lives won’t change much no matter which party is in charge. Whether Democrats or Republicans win, their problems remain the same, and little gets done.
While I strongly disagree with that view, their sense of stagnation is understandable. Part of why we should want the winning party to test its ideas is because of this sentiment: the public should be able to see if the winning ideas offer noticeable improvements—or the lack thereof. If people aren’t satisfied, their democratic duty is to vote the ruling party out. If moderate coalitions can get together to work on popular policy mandates, then the public is already consenting to try these new solutions.
The filibuster leads to chaotic governance
One of the most common defenses of the filibuster is that it contributes to government stability by preventing dramatic policy swings whenever control of Congress shifts. But that’s already untrue. Policy swings today are quite volatile, largely because recent presidents have relied more heavily on executive orders—again, a byproduct of the filibuster making legislative action so difficult.
I think major swings can be productive when a new majority is in place, especially because we have mechanisms for correcting errors. We should want a wide range of creative, controversial ideas being tested because even if they fail we can learn from them. And as I’ve explained, moderate and popular policies are incentivized without the filibuster.
Tyranny of the minority
Abolishing the filibuster isn’t just about letting the majority rule—it’s about letting ideas be tested, responsibility be assigned, and voters be informed through visible, directly explainable consequences. Without that, we aren’t learning; we’re repeatedly blaming the system for its lack of tangible outcomes—constantly asking why ostensibly popular ideas aren’t being implemented.
One concern many have with abolishing the filibuster is that it could allow unconstitutional or harmful laws to be passed more easily, especially those against the minority. However, abolishing the filibuster doesn’t entail illegal oppression. Legislation would still be scrutinized within the majority before passage, but also afterward through the courts, executive enforcement, and the public.
This process depends on other branches doing their jobs. With the current Admin, we’ve seen what happens when enforcement fails or when legal battles emerge around laws targeting the very institutions meant to enforce them. I think that’s a real threat.
But the threat does not justify denying the ruling party the opportunity to pass laws within legal and constitutional bounds. It just means we need to improve the laws and enforcement mechanisms. In fact, abolishing the filibuster would likely make passing illegal provisions harder, since bills could be more limited in scope and easier for the public and press to scrutinize.
Arguments about protecting minority rights through Senate procedures are misleading, given the Senate already advantages the minority and minority members still exist within its ranks. The filibuster only adds another layer of undemocratic obstruction to the capacity of legislators to do their jobs effectively.
Trial and elimination
To my knowledge, the main reason neither party wants to give up the filibuster is to prevent the opposing side from enacting its legislative agenda. This argument is fundamentally undemocratic. The core purpose of democracy is to remove bad ideas and leaders through peaceful means—not impeding them from enacting their policy goals. That’s the job of elections.
It may seem counterintuitive, but nearly all improved ideas begin as controversial—they rarely start with consensus. That means the ideas we’ll one day take for granted are currently waiting in the shadows, needing only a bold leader to bring them forward without being dauntied into silence or excessive compromise. If the filibuster remains in place, those better ideas may never be tested—or their delay will contribute to greater harm.
We’ve grown afraid of trying new things. Kennedy was right to say the only thing to fear is fear itself because fear is the only thing—other than the laws of physics—stopping us from doing anything we want! In my view, there is nothing more frightening than being stuck with a problem we already have a solution for—one that could be implemented by those who won the latest elections.
Abolishing the filibuster would give us a better opportunity to improve more quickly. What more could you possibly want from a democratic system?
You kind of allude to this, I would say it's a synthesis of the section on extremism and bad ideas. Namely, because not much gets done, it incentivizes extremists to come up with unfalsifiable theories (dare I say mythologies). So, regardless of what one may think about the squad, I don't think the squad happens if moderate dem policy goes through when they have a simple majority. Same with freedom caucus types who want to abolish government departments. It allows these folks to run on these items, do nothing of substance about them, festering myths about what's wrong about parties and government.
I'm actually less inclined to think people would repeal moderate-coded extremism (median republican policy), but I think we need to indulge radicals from time to time, just to create norms within parties to disavow the nonsense. IMO that's the big difference between the US system and parliamentary ones. We let our politicians say and encourage the dumbest shit and there's no punishment as party insiders usually don't have to take them seriously.
I really like the principle that it's good to try bad ideas. I agree with you that sometimes we just need to try things to see if they work. However, I disagree with the majority of your argument here. The filibuster has been around a very long time, but it was only recently that it prevented bipartisan compromises. Back when representatives could safely cross party lines, getting to 60 votes wasn't such a big deal. It's a big deal today because each party (but especially Republicans) use a combination of establishment coercion and media shaming to keep their moderates from crossing party lines. There are 34 Freedom Caucus members in the House, while there are 215 Democrats. You seriously think it's easier to get 98% of those right-wing Republicans than 15% of all Democrats? It's only in the last few decades that the filibuster became a serious issue precisely because it shouldn't be hard to get people from the other party to buy in if everyone is sincerely trying to find solutions. If they aren't being sincere, then I don't see why letting them pass more party-line bills like this one would be beneficial.
In a broader sense, I think that legislation that has a serious impact on society SHOULD require a high level of buy-in from representatives of the public. If only 51% of the country agrees with a certain course of action, why would we let them implement any significant changes? Considering how often control of Congress has shifted in the last 10 years, I don't think we can say there are a large number of things that "the people" agree on about how our nation should be run. In such a situation, letting things keep running on autopilot is the best solution until a larger consensus emerges. Politics should be the slow boring of hard boards, not moving fast and breaking things.
It is certainly a problem that we can't get Congress to do their most basic job without gimmicks, but I'm not yet convinced that the answer is to make it easier for them to pass party-line bills. It's hard to know if this is a temporary state of affairs that will recede after Trump is gone, or if our modern distributed media combined with popular vote control of primaries and gerrymandering creates and enforces this to be the new normal. If it's the latter, perhaps we do need to simply make it easier to pass bills, but I still think the better solution (if possible) would be to fix whatever stops us from achieving the bipartisan consensus we were able to achieve for over a hundred years since the end of the Civil War.