The Senate filibuster rule is undermining democracy

President Joe Biden pledged bipartisanship. But there seems to be no reciprocity. Democrats will have to work around Republicans. A big help would be ending the Senate filibuster.

The Constitution apportions the House of Representatives by population, while in the Senate all states are represented equally. This was so big states couldn't dominate small ones. Unforeseen was how that would play out in a 50-state union with many small states. And importantly, big states are big because they have big cities; small states don’t, tending to be more rural. And whiter.

Now small states are way overrepresented, with two senators each. That’s problem enough if the Senate worked by majority vote. But the filibuster rule means it normally takes 60 out of 100 votes to pass a bill. That magnifies small states’ clout even more; 41 senators representing as little as 23 percent of the population can stymie the majority. And rather than promoting compromise, in so polarized a political ecosystem it produces legislative paralysis.

It wasn’t always like this. The filibuster rule is not in the Constitution. Debate has always been limited in the House of Representatives. The smaller Senate saw itself as a more collegial, deliberative body, with unlimited debate. Not until the 1850s did anyone ex

ploit this to prevent a bill’s passage by keeping debate going — “filibustering.” But that was rare. Only in 1917 was it deemed necessary to institute a way to end debate — called “cloture,” it was considered an extraordinary measure and hence required a two-thirds vote.

In the 1950s, Southerners filibustered to block civil rights legislation; it was hard to get 67 Senate votes for anything. So finally, in 1975, they reduced the requirement to 60 votes, thinking to make cloture, and bringing bills to a vote, easier. But the result, perversely, was the opposite, partly because now a filibustered bill would not halt all other Senate business.

Furthermore, a filibuster originally meant you actually had to keep debating. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-N.C., set the record in 1957, talking for 24 straight hours. Now, however, it became a given that all significant legislation would require cloture with 60 votes; the actual speechifying was dispensed with, thus giving a minority an effortless automatic veto over everything.

Changing this was called the “nuclear option,” as if politically it was an act of war. But when Republicans were using the filibuster rule to block President Barack Obama's judicial nominations, former Demcratic Majority Leader Harry

Reid, D-nev., went for a limited nuclear option, scrapping the 60-vote rule just for such nominations. Then, when Republicans regained control of the Senate, they extended this to Supreme Court nominations.

All this shows that the 60-vote rule is by no means sacrosanct. No other country has the equivalent. Its resultant minority veto is a major factor undermining the health of our body politic, and democracy itself. And there's actually an easy fix: The Senate can change the rule by a simple majority vote. For that, 60 votes are not needed.

That would enable tackling many other problems effectively. A big one is immigration reform. Another is election reform: We must set national standards, to allay concerns about fairness and fraud, but particularly to outlaw Republican vote suppression measures. We should also make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states, likely adding four Democratic senators and reducing the perverse Republican small-state advantage.

Yes, they will howl, alleging a power grab. That will dominate talking heads and internet blowhards for, oh, maybe two or three days. Then it will be forgotten as we move on to something else. After all, being able to pass a bill by majority vote shouldn’t seem very radical. We’ll quickly get used to it, and if we think of it at all, will wonder why the previous bizarre rule wasn’t junked long before.