If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster.
But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today.
You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon.
Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents.
41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).
The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire.
But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
Just like modern reactionary politics isn’t good for people or popular, the biggest fear of slave owners was that free whites would figure out that slaves gutted the value of their labors.
It doesn’t take a “genius” to figure out that having state legislatures select federal legislators is foolish. Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
>>some geniuses
A super majority of both the house and senate with 3/4 of all state legislatures in accordance with the intention of the original founders that people update things as the times change?
That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.
"When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.
The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government.
Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.
1. The much-mythologized founders disagreed on how strong the federal government would be; the first political parties were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (technically the Democratic-Republicans, but carrying on that same ideology).
2. Filibusters are not in the Constitution, weren't possible for decades after it was signed, weren't used for half a century after it was signed, and didn't become the "sixty votes required for anything" tool they are today until 10-15 years ago. The founders had nothing to do with it.
You're incorrect, the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified and have been common since 1917 and common in their current form since 1970 (that's 53 years not 10-15)
Not coincidentally, 10 to 15 years ago is around when people started viewing the "other" party as "evil." You can justify a lot of behavior when you declare yourself full of righteous indignation.
The fact that they founded a nation that has last as long and successfully as the USA is extremely impressive, in the same way Apple is impressive even though Steve Jobs was not a perfect person, except the USA is orders of magnitude more impactful.
Simply on the basis of accomplishments, whether for good or bad, the founders rank amongst the greatest people to ever exist.
Where not otherwise stated, the branches of government are free to decide how to conduct their own internal business. The House and the Senate, for instance, get to decide the rules on how to conduct the votes for legislation, how the bills are even made ready for voting in the first place, etc.
It can really be no other way, short of stuffing all the parliamentary rules like that into the Constitution.
The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
>But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues."
The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.
The size is less a problem than our system stabilizing at two viable parties, both of which would stand to lose a great deal of power if they actually fixed some of the core problems with the Constitution.
It's not that the government is "large". It's that the representatives from different parties are unable to work together to get stuff done. I think it's mostly the way the media cover politics - they can't be seen to be weak.
"The founders" did not create the filibuster. They actively debated whether it should require more than a simple majority to pass legislation, and decided that was a bad idea. They had already designed a system with a ton of friction in it. It didn't need one more hurdle.
The founders added a bunch of checks and balances but not the filibuster.
The fillibuster was more of a gentlemanly agreement until the 1970s and it wasn't until the Obama era that it was regularly used on almost every single vote.
> The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government.
Spot on. Yet we continue to insist on using the system in a way (i.e., overly strong fed gov) that it's not good for. This isn't a Dem or Republican issue. It's history.
And the more taxes Uncle Sam collects, the stronger and more bloated he gets. At some level we need to come to terms with the fact that we're using a screwdriver as a hammer. That doesn't work well. Ever.
The founders also designed a system that a very few people got to vote, and with the assumption it would take days for representatives to hear from their constituents.
Yet nobody seems to be saying the answer is going back to horses and written mail in the name of making our government fit our lives better.
Are they really - or are they pretty obvious to anyone who casually glances at the headline of the policy, but the consequences are a problem after the next election. If you win you can always just blame the other side and if you lose you can blame the other side as well.
Quite the opposite! Scalia had a great speech[0] where he argued that our Constitution is weak compared to other nations of history but had outlived those nations because of its slow nature to act. The point being, it doesn't matter how great your constitution is if your country is dead.
Several features of or accidents-resulting-from the US constitution amount to that. With the added "fun" that they also create a system in which fixing any of them is unlikely, from within the system.
There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
"Weak government made sense when it was small but we made it bigger so we should make it stronger now too" is certainly a take, but not a particularly good one.
The vast majority of things the government touches turn to shit, including things with wide bipartisan support. How does making government able to do more, faster, fix that?
The Founders were of diverse positions and ideas on the topic.
A couple overly simplistic examples:
Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad.
Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed.
“They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth.
It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily.
I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.”
To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.
Yes, but it also means that the minority is less effective when it gains an electoral majority and takes 'hold of the gavel. That makes it harder for them to, say, change things to further entrench minority rule—which is real problem in several state-level governments.
This might be true, if the policies advanced by legislators more-closely reflected what voters want. Instead, we have a bunch of very-popular reforms that never get done for a variety of reasons, but the one-two punch of the two-party system and the Senate filibuster are a big part of why. Though, personally, I'd say our system naturally stabilizing at two parties is the bigger of those two problems—it's the core reason why major legislative bodies in the US can end up maintaining or advancing laws and policy that differ sharply from what a large majority of voters want, session after session. Unfortunately, fixing that would require a bunch of legislators or a bunch of states to vote against their own interests. So, probably not gonna happen, ever.
As a non U.S citizen, sounds like a state with a million residents is represented as much as a state with 10 million residents. Not sure that's fair, be it I get you don't want to be underrepresented based on where you live either.
> minority rule, in the Senate
If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster.
But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today.
You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon.
Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents.
41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).
The senate was never meant to represent people. It was meant to represent the interested of the states as sovereign entities. The house was supposed to be the populist dumpster fire.
But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
>But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
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Lol. That was done to placate the slave owners.
Just like modern reactionary politics isn’t good for people or popular, the biggest fear of slave owners was that free whites would figure out that slaves gutted the value of their labors.
It doesn’t take a “genius” to figure out that having state legislatures select federal legislators is foolish. Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
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>>some geniuses A super majority of both the house and senate with 3/4 of all state legislatures in accordance with the intention of the original founders that people update things as the times change?
That's an interesting take, to call democracy a dumpster fire. Some people I suppose would have rather kept their parties with tea.
The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.
That's not the kind anyone means anymore, at least when it comes up in relation to the US Senate. They generally don't actually filibuster, they place a procedural hold that requires 60 members to agree to override it.
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No, fillibusters are a matter of procedure now. Nobody's standing up there talking to perform a fillibuster anymore.
From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod...
"When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
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Not since 1972. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/filibuster-joe-biden...
You don't deserve to be downvoted for just not knowing that this isn't how the filibuster works anymore. All the well known pop culture treatments of it - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The West Wing, etc. - show this form of it.
Yes but you have that be the person in the safest seat.
The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government.
Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.
1. The much-mythologized founders disagreed on how strong the federal government would be; the first political parties were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (technically the Democratic-Republicans, but carrying on that same ideology).
2. Filibusters are not in the Constitution, weren't possible for decades after it was signed, weren't used for half a century after it was signed, and didn't become the "sixty votes required for anything" tool they are today until 10-15 years ago. The founders had nothing to do with it.
You're incorrect, the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified and have been common since 1917 and common in their current form since 1970 (that's 53 years not 10-15)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
8 replies →
Not coincidentally, 10 to 15 years ago is around when people started viewing the "other" party as "evil." You can justify a lot of behavior when you declare yourself full of righteous indignation.
18 replies →
The fact that they founded a nation that has last as long and successfully as the USA is extremely impressive, in the same way Apple is impressive even though Steve Jobs was not a perfect person, except the USA is orders of magnitude more impactful.
Simply on the basis of accomplishments, whether for good or bad, the founders rank amongst the greatest people to ever exist.
Where not otherwise stated, the branches of government are free to decide how to conduct their own internal business. The House and the Senate, for instance, get to decide the rules on how to conduct the votes for legislation, how the bills are even made ready for voting in the first place, etc.
It can really be no other way, short of stuffing all the parliamentary rules like that into the Constitution.
The filibuster began its current form almost immediately after the Constitution was amended to require the election of Senators.
Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government.
But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
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>But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues."
The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.
The problem now is that the government is large and it is nearly impossible to shed the cruft that has accumulated.
The size is less a problem than our system stabilizing at two viable parties, both of which would stand to lose a great deal of power if they actually fixed some of the core problems with the Constitution.
It's not that the government is "large". It's that the representatives from different parties are unable to work together to get stuff done. I think it's mostly the way the media cover politics - they can't be seen to be weak.
Nothing ever gets shed or revised. The stale regulatory agencies are captured, corrupted, and stale/weak.
OSHA has no teeth (they are just a nuisance to the scofflaws)
FTC is underpowered
EPA needs shut down
FDA is on record for enabling very harmful medical devices
I remember something about Boeing colluding with regulators to put people in harms way.
I could hop on a search engine and dig up a tome-worth of completely unacceptable shit from the last 40 yrs in this regard.
8 replies →
"The founders" did not create the filibuster. They actively debated whether it should require more than a simple majority to pass legislation, and decided that was a bad idea. They had already designed a system with a ton of friction in it. It didn't need one more hurdle.
The founders added a bunch of checks and balances but not the filibuster. The fillibuster was more of a gentlemanly agreement until the 1970s and it wasn't until the Obama era that it was regularly used on almost every single vote.
But now we have a strong federal government that can't agree enough to keep up with the needs of it's citizens. The worst possible outcome, IMO.
Or perhaps the predictable outcome?
The founders didn’t create the filibuster because they already created a fuck load of checks on the majority. Making even more is senseless.
> The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government.
Spot on. Yet we continue to insist on using the system in a way (i.e., overly strong fed gov) that it's not good for. This isn't a Dem or Republican issue. It's history.
And the more taxes Uncle Sam collects, the stronger and more bloated he gets. At some level we need to come to terms with the fact that we're using a screwdriver as a hammer. That doesn't work well. Ever.
The founders also designed a system that a very few people got to vote, and with the assumption it would take days for representatives to hear from their constituents.
Yet nobody seems to be saying the answer is going back to horses and written mail in the name of making our government fit our lives better.
2 replies →
> difficult it is to predict policy outcomes
Are they really - or are they pretty obvious to anyone who casually glances at the headline of the policy, but the consequences are a problem after the next election. If you win you can always just blame the other side and if you lose you can blame the other side as well.
That might had make sense 200 years ago when Fed government was small. Nowadays it is a slow death sentence to the country.
Quite the opposite! Scalia had a great speech[0] where he argued that our Constitution is weak compared to other nations of history but had outlived those nations because of its slow nature to act. The point being, it doesn't matter how great your constitution is if your country is dead.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0
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Several features of or accidents-resulting-from the US constitution amount to that. With the added "fun" that they also create a system in which fixing any of them is unlikely, from within the system.
There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
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"Weak government made sense when it was small but we made it bigger so we should make it stronger now too" is certainly a take, but not a particularly good one.
The vast majority of things the government touches turn to shit, including things with wide bipartisan support. How does making government able to do more, faster, fix that?
8 replies →
The Founders were of diverse positions and ideas on the topic.
A couple overly simplistic examples:
Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad.
Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed.
“They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth.
It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily.
I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.”
To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.
The system the founders designed didn't even have an income tax. We should go back to that.
Yes, but it also means that the minority is less effective when it gains an electoral majority and takes 'hold of the gavel. That makes it harder for them to, say, change things to further entrench minority rule—which is real problem in several state-level governments.
This sounds like a positive because it makes sure the support backing actually enacted policies is not balanced on a knife edge.
This might be true, if the policies advanced by legislators more-closely reflected what voters want. Instead, we have a bunch of very-popular reforms that never get done for a variety of reasons, but the one-two punch of the two-party system and the Senate filibuster are a big part of why. Though, personally, I'd say our system naturally stabilizing at two parties is the bigger of those two problems—it's the core reason why major legislative bodies in the US can end up maintaining or advancing laws and policy that differ sharply from what a large majority of voters want, session after session. Unfortunately, fixing that would require a bunch of legislators or a bunch of states to vote against their own interests. So, probably not gonna happen, ever.
A supermajority threshold requirement is not minority rule. It's supermajority rule.
Minority rule would be if 40% of the Senate could pass laws at will.
The Senate enables minority rule due to state size as well. Unfortunately we're hostages of the past
The Senate doesn't represent people, it represents States. The Representation is exactly equal, as intended: 1 State == 2 Senators.
No one is questioning that it is working as designed.
That something is working as designed is not an endorsement if the design is bad.
9 replies →
As a non U.S citizen, sounds like a state with a million residents is represented as much as a state with 10 million residents. Not sure that's fair, be it I get you don't want to be underrepresented based on where you live either.
8 replies →
It guarantees the federal government had a strong bias towards inaction.
The filibuster decreases the rate of change.
This is why the civil rights act was never passed, and schools in the US are still segregated to this day, because Sen Byrd (D) filibustered