The Patriot Post® · Is Ron Johnson Right About the Filibuster?
This story starts in the bedroom. There, as the numbers suggest, Democrats tend to perform poorly.
In recent decades, the Republicans have become the party of smaller government and bigger families. The Democrats? Just the opposite. The party whose voters once produced huge, brawling, boisterous Catholic clans is no more. And neither, increasingly, are their votes. But don’t take my word for it. As Kristin V. Brown lamented last year at The Atlantic:
Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” [UC San Diego economist Gordon] Dahl told me.
Indeed, these days, the loudest voices on the Left tend to be feminist cat women like Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, Sandy Cortez, and Chuck Schumer. And it’s for this reason — this demographic reason — that Democrats are fighting so furiously against ICE and against the lawful deportation of the 10 million or so illegal aliens that Joe Biden invited across our southern border.
It’s also why the Democrats oppose the SAVE America Act despite overwhelming bipartisan support for it across the electorate — because the easier it is to vote, the easier it is to cheat.
Democrats desperately want to make America browner because their cynical and not-so-subtly bigoted beliefs tell them that brown people tend to vote for free stuff and are therefore naturally inclined toward the Democrats’ plantation.
Think about it: The two political issues that are most roiling our country today are tightly related to the Democrats’ demographic death spiral: illegal immigration and voter ID.
On the latter subject, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Thursday, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson advocated for doing away with the filibuster — that century-old rule that allows 41 senators to prevent a final floor vote on a piece of legislation by continuing to debate and thereby refusing to invoke cloture. Johnson starts by acknowledging his body’s complicity in our nation’s current mess:
The U.S. Senate is broken. That U.S. federal government debt is approaching $39 trillion is only the most obvious evidence proving this point. Since I entered Congress in 2011, we should have passed 180 appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year they were funding. We’ve passed only six on time. That’s a 96.7% failure rate.
Owing to that dysfunction, in the past 15 years we’ve had five shutdowns, relied on 57 continuing resolutions to fund government on an interim basis, and increased or suspended the debt ceiling a dozen times, allowing the federal government to incur an additional $24 trillion in debt.
While acknowledging that the filibuster has stopped plenty of bad legislation, Johnson says that today’s version has also made it impossible for Republicans to pass good legislation. The overwhelmingly popular SAVE America Act is perhaps the ultimate expression of this, and he thinks Senate Republicans should beat the Democrats to the punch by doing what the Democrats were barely prevented from doing back in 2022: ending the filibuster.
Never mind that today’s senators no longer do the hard work of a real filibuster, like the kind that former Klansman and longtime Democrat Robert Byrd used to temporarily block the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Instead, whenever a minority of senators wants to block legislation from being voted on, they invoke a lazier, more gentlemanly form of filibuster, what Republican Senator Mike Lee and others derisively call the “zombie filibuster.” In any case, today’s sissy version allows senators to merely threaten a filibuster rather than cinching up their Depends and taking to the lectern like Byrd and his colleagues did for 75 straight hours back in May and June 1964.
“Democrats have already made their intentions clear,” Johnson writes. “Even though 31 of them signed a 2017 letter led by Republican Sen. Susan Collins vowing to maintain the filibuster, only two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, voted not to end it in 2022. Both were purged from the Democratic Party and retired from the Senate.”
We conservatives are right to be uneasy about doing away with one of the Senate’s longstanding traditions, and we’re right to be concerned about the Pandora’s box that such a move will no doubt open up. But in these contentious times, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the filibuster is fatally flawed when one party can so effectively deny the overwhelming bipartisan will of the American people.
Look at it this way: If we can’t secure our elections, and if we can’t deport the millions of illegal aliens in our midst, perhaps we should ponder whether our defense of the filibuster is politically untenable — indeed, politically suicidal.
I think the Democrats have done away with every norm in our political culture. They cheat in elections, they don’t honor the results of elections, and they do everything they can to subvert the administration of a duly elected president of the opposite party.
Remember: Democrats long ago incrementally eliminated the filibuster for judicial appointments. And expecting them to abide by political norms at this point seems just plain idiotic.
Let’s be clear about what the Democrats have already done here: They’ve lured millions of illegals into our country; distributed those illegals across our sanctuary cities and states, and especially the big cities of our election-deciding swing states; used those illegals to artificially pump up the census count in blue cities and states for greater congressional representation; and consistently resisted both commonsense deportation measures and commonsense electoral reform measures in order to mint future Democrats and make it easier for them to vote.
History tells us that the Democrats held power for most of the 20th century, and that they’ll have power again soon. And by doing away with the filibuster, Republicans will have done away with one of the few tools they have in the minority to stop terrible legislation. On the other hand, the filibuster didn’t stop the Democrats from ramming through Sarbanes-Oxley or ObamaCare or Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” bill, so is it really as vaunted as we’re making it out to be?
Perhaps, if Republicans think they’re going to lose the Senate in the midterms, they could wait and dare the Democrats to kill the filibuster. Otherwise, why not move to end it right now and pass the SAVE America Act? In doing so, the Republicans could also note, for posterity’s sake, that only the Democrats’ abject refusal to support a wildly popular piece of legislation convinced the Republicans to do so.
We all want to live in a country where the Democrats and Republicans mostly get along and mostly play by the rules. But the Democrats have long since made it clear that they’re not interested in playing by the rules. Vote for us, they seem to be saying, or we’ll wreck the country.
Let’s do away with the filibuster. Now. For the good of the country.
P.S. One other point worth making here: The SAVE America Act might ultimately be struck down for federal overreach in election law. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? In addition, the SAVE America Act might have zero effect on the midterms because the Democrats will find a court to block it, even if the Supreme Court eventually upholds it. On the other hand, just the idea of a new election reform law will likely deter cheating.