Elections are supposed to have consequences, but often they don’t. People vote for change and get more the same, the rich getting richer and the rest getting left behind. This makes people lose faith in democracy, as if their votes don’t matter. And when they lose faith in democracy, that lays the ground for fascism. So, will this election have consequences? Even with a blue tsunami, Democrats won’t be able to pass much meaningful legislation because we have so many institutions where the minority rules, like in the U.S. Senate where the filibuster means you need 60 votes to get anything done.
That’s not the way the Founders planned it. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned against any proceedings that required a supermajority, which he said would “substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.” So the filibuster wasn’t written into the Constitution and it wasn’t originally written into the rules of the Senate, where if someone was talking too long, the majority could simply call the question and vote. But that changed in 1805 when Aaron Burr (who shot Alexander Hamilton dead in a duel) also shot down his idea and allowed speeches in the Senate to go on forever. The filibuster was born and came to be used increasingly by the slaveholding South, which had half the states and half the population of the North, but even with a minority could block abolition or any kind of popular reform. It continued to be used that way into modern times, when Strom Thurmond of South Carolina speechified on the floor of the Senate for 24 hours and 18 minutes to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Now we have an opportunity. Democrats need to deliver bold change to end the war, make the minimum wage a living wage, rein in corruption, put term limits on the Supreme Court, guarantee that every American who needs one can see a doctor and get dark money out of politics. Even if that legislation is vetoed by Trump, it needs to arrive on the President’s desk to show voters what a progressive agenda looks like. But Democrats won’t be able to pass many initiatives at all without compromising and bending to the Republican minority—unless they end the filibuster.
So what’s the plan? If you live in a blue state like New Mexico, you need to call your senators this week, Lujan and Heinrich, and tell them to end the filibuster so that Congress can deliver on its mandate. Surprisingly, Senate rules allow a simple majority to do so. Our incoming majority—El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan, Talarico, Adam Hamilton, Annie Andrews, Troy Jackson—did not flip the Senate by running on a platform to maintain the status quo. They tapped into a groundswell of public sentiment demanding real, substantive change for the American people.
But what about that filibuster? Doesn’t it protect Dems when liberals are in the minority? Now it's true that the Founders distrusted direct democracy to some extent. They didn't want the many trampling on the rights of the few. That’s why the Senate gives the half million people living in Wyoming the same representation as the forty million in California. It’s why we have the damn electoral college. It’s in the Constitution. But the filibuster is not there, it’s contrary to the ideals of men like Hamilton, and I don’t know anyone in this age of tech billionaires who thinks our country is suffering from too much democracy. So let’s have a little more majority rule in the U.S. Senate. The people have spoken. Let the politicians listen.
