Joe Biden wants to go down in history as a transformative president. He began his time in office by passing a popular economic stimulus and Covid-19 relief bill. The Biden White House basked in comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt’s country-changing presidency. With Democrats in control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the sky seemed the limit. However, in recent months Mr. Biden’s agenda — most notably on climate change — has been buried in a legislative graveyard.
This is in part because the U.S. Senate is a rare law-making body: it needs a super-majority for ordinary business. Its rules require 60 senators to give the green light for a bill to go to the floor for passage with a straightforward vote. This is the hurdle required to beat a filibuster, where debate is extended so that no vote on a bill can take place. Frustrated and hamstrung, President Biden has cooled on such mechanisms. He’s right to think about ending this maneuver which is used to block legislation a majority wishes to pass. The 41 Republican senators needed to defeat “cloture” motions — those required to end a debate — could represent less than a quarter of the U.S. population.
As EJ Dionne pointed out in the Washington Post last October, the filibuster “is now a barrier to normal governing … From 1917 through 1970 (53 years), there were only 58 cloture motions. From 1971 to 2006 (35 years) there were 928. From 2007 to now (14 years) there have been 1,419.” As the use of the filibuster has become more frequent, so have the threats for “the nuclear option” to change the rules and impose simple majority votes. When Barack Obama was in the White House, Democrats eliminated the filibuster on presidential nominations other than those for the supreme court. In 2017, with Donald Trump as president, Republicans got rid of those too.
Today, Mr. Biden will give a major speech on voting rights in Georgia. The Republican party at a state level has been promoting suppression and gerrymandering legislation that targets minority voters and, in some cases, permits the takeover of the election administration to override an official count. The Democrats are pushing two bills to secure American democracy. This is a battle that Mr. Biden cannot afford to lose. However he will struggle because of the filibuster. This could be abolished by a simple majority vote but, absurdly, two senators on the right of the party — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — won’t back him. The best Mr. Biden can do with his one-vote Senate majority is negotiate a filibuster carve-out for voting rights.
What the past year has taught Mr. Biden is that advances for economic and political rights will be dead on arrival in the Senate unless he can rewrite its procedural rule book. He must do so, and convince holdout Democrats that unless they back the party agenda, they risk dooming every legislative expedition. Electing Mr. Biden and Democratic majorities in Congress were meant to deliver the party’s agenda, not let it be obstructed by its opponents.
