19 ms·

To the extent that the filibuster's beneficial, I'd say it's only so because of our bad electoral system that stabilizes at only two viable parties, and sometim

To the extent that the filibuster's beneficial, I'd say it's only so because of our bad electoral system that stabilizes at only two viable parties, and sometimes results in minority rule.

ChrisLTD 4y ago
The filibuster guarantees minority rule, in the Senate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    This sounds like a positive because it makes sure the support backing actually enacted policies is not balanced on a knife edge.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      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.
- filibustedbyD 4y ago
  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
- fwungy 4y ago
  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.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    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.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Or perhaps the predictable outcome?
  - carom 4y ago
    The problem now is that the government is large and it is nearly impossible to shed the cruft that has accumulated.
    - datavirtue 4y ago
      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.
      - rnk 4y ago
        We'd be so much better if there were no environmental rules, wouldn't we? Medical regulation, who needs it?
- gopalv 4y ago
  > 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).
  - overboard2 4y ago
    The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      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.
      - lumost 4y ago
        This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books. Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So it sounds like it's an even smaller minority rule now?
- abirch 4y ago
  The Senate enables minority rule due to state size as well. Unfortunately we're hostages of the past
  - pc86 4y ago
    The Senate doesn't represent people, it represents States. The Representation is exactly equal, as intended: 1 State == 2 Senators.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      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.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Right, there are two failure modes in the US governmental system, basically: 1) Things the founders got wrong on purpose. We've fixed a bunch of these, by e.g. broadening the franchise and ending chattel slavery with that whole Civil War thing. The way our Senate is composed is arguably an un-fixed one of these—it's that way on purpose, but it's, you know, bad. 2) Things they got wrong by accident. These are usually cases where politicking, application of game theory, and bad actors in general conspire to make things work differently than they were intended. This is stuff like the system stabilizing at two viable political parties, and the way the electoral college has worked in-practice almost from day one (but not the way the electoral college favors low-population states, because that part was on purpose, so would go under point 1 if we're regarding it as an error)
        pc86 4y ago
        You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it. There's nothing inherently bad about the upper chamber of a bicameral legislature being explicitly not designed to represent individual people in a perfectly proportional manner. As originally designed, the US is not a nation with a strong central federal government that happens to be made up up 50 weak states and a handful of territories and districts. It's 50 strong states who happen to be united under one central but relatively weak federal government. In that context, having States represented equally, without regard to their populations, makes complete and total sense. Completely by chance, that happens to indirectly overrepresent people you disagree with. That's unfortunate (depending on your ideology), but it certainly doesn't make the entire system broken or bad.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pyuser583 4y ago
  It guarantees the federal government had a strong bias towards inaction.
- prepend 4y ago
  The filibuster decreases the rate of change.
roywiggins 4y ago
I dunno, it still might be pretty tricky to put together 60 votes for cloture in a 3 or 4 party system. It might even be harder! Fractious multi-party coalitions in parliamentary systems commonly fail to scrape together bare majorities- they're not exactly known for making it easy to produce supermajorities either.
- vertis 4y ago
  Various European democracies seem to have done fine, even if it is at times the coalitions become unstable. Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    It's the case in Canada right now too.
    - tlavoie 4y ago
      I sure would have liked to see the Liberal party follow through on their promise to engage in electoral reform though. It seemed to have completely slipped their minds once they found a majority. Perhaps related, but I find minority governments to be the most aligned to how I think things should work. It's not that they can't get anything done, but rather they have to actually engage with the other parties to find common ground. Crazy idea, I know...
      - tempestn 4y ago
        Agreed on both counts, with the added note though that minority government only works in multi-party systems. US-style split government is far less functional. My understanding of what happened with the electoral reform promise is that the Liberals wanted a specific form of electoral reform: ranked choice. Unsurprising, because as the centrist party, they would stand to benefit most from that system. Which isn't to say I necessarily disagree with it; personally I think a system that encourages moderation is probably a good thing. Anyway, when the committee they put together to study the issue didn't come back with that option, they just shelved the whole thing.
phpisthebest 4y ago
The filibuster rule is from a time when the Senate was selected by the States, not the people. It was designed as an effective State Veto. It works for that purpose and in that context and IMO is good. We should return the Senate to be the States representatives in congress, and the House is the People. Instead of having both the Senate and the House be popularly elected. Return to more republican (i.e Republic not the party) style of governance, and less democratic, but I know that is heresy today where democracy is the new religion and people fail to learn the lesson of Athens
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  "Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy. The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman. Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent. Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time. You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection. Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office. [0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you. [1] They're not.

To the extent that the filibuster's beneficial, I'd say it's only so because of our bad electoral system that stabilizes at only two viable parties, and sometimes results in minority rule.

ChrisLTD 4y ago

The filibuster guarantees minority rule, in the Senate.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  This sounds like a positive because it makes sure the support backing actually enacted policies is not balanced on a knife edge.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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.
filibustedbyD 4y ago
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
fwungy 4y ago
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.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Or perhaps the predictable outcome?
- carom 4y ago
  The problem now is that the government is large and it is nearly impossible to shed the cruft that has accumulated.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    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.
    - rnk 4y ago
      We'd be so much better if there were no environmental rules, wouldn't we? Medical regulation, who needs it?
gopalv 4y ago
> 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).
- overboard2 4y ago
  The one person performing a filibuster is presumably doing so very much on record, complete with soundbites.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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.
    - lumost 4y ago
      This is where the insanity really started. It used to require 8-20 senators to physically filibuster to actually kill a bill. On a major bill, the small number of senators also risked reputational harm from the sound bites of them reading their phone books. Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So it sounds like it's an even smaller minority rule now?
abirch 4y ago
The Senate enables minority rule due to state size as well. Unfortunately we're hostages of the past
- pc86 4y ago
  The Senate doesn't represent people, it represents States. The Representation is exactly equal, as intended: 1 State == 2 Senators.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    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.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Right, there are two failure modes in the US governmental system, basically: 1) Things the founders got wrong on purpose. We've fixed a bunch of these, by e.g. broadening the franchise and ending chattel slavery with that whole Civil War thing. The way our Senate is composed is arguably an un-fixed one of these—it's that way on purpose, but it's, you know, bad. 2) Things they got wrong by accident. These are usually cases where politicking, application of game theory, and bad actors in general conspire to make things work differently than they were intended. This is stuff like the system stabilizing at two viable political parties, and the way the electoral college has worked in-practice almost from day one (but not the way the electoral college favors low-population states, because that part was on purpose, so would go under point 1 if we're regarding it as an error)
      - pc86 4y ago
        You're conflating something being bad by definition, in an inexcusable fashion, with simply not liking it. There's nothing inherently bad about the upper chamber of a bicameral legislature being explicitly not designed to represent individual people in a perfectly proportional manner. As originally designed, the US is not a nation with a strong central federal government that happens to be made up up 50 weak states and a handful of territories and districts. It's 50 strong states who happen to be united under one central but relatively weak federal government. In that context, having States represented equally, without regard to their populations, makes complete and total sense. Completely by chance, that happens to indirectly overrepresent people you disagree with. That's unfortunate (depending on your ideology), but it certainly doesn't make the entire system broken or bad.
adamsb6 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pyuser583 4y ago
It guarantees the federal government had a strong bias towards inaction.
prepend 4y ago
The filibuster decreases the rate of change.

roywiggins 4y ago

I dunno, it still might be pretty tricky to put together 60 votes for cloture in a 3 or 4 party system. It might even be harder! Fractious multi-party coalitions in parliamentary systems commonly fail to scrape together bare majorities- they're not exactly known for making it easy to produce supermajorities either.

vertis 4y ago
Various European democracies seem to have done fine, even if it is at times the coalitions become unstable. Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.
- tempestn 4y ago
  It's the case in Canada right now too.
  - tlavoie 4y ago
    I sure would have liked to see the Liberal party follow through on their promise to engage in electoral reform though. It seemed to have completely slipped their minds once they found a majority. Perhaps related, but I find minority governments to be the most aligned to how I think things should work. It's not that they can't get anything done, but rather they have to actually engage with the other parties to find common ground. Crazy idea, I know...
    - tempestn 4y ago
      Agreed on both counts, with the added note though that minority government only works in multi-party systems. US-style split government is far less functional. My understanding of what happened with the electoral reform promise is that the Liberals wanted a specific form of electoral reform: ranked choice. Unsurprising, because as the centrist party, they would stand to benefit most from that system. Which isn't to say I necessarily disagree with it; personally I think a system that encourages moderation is probably a good thing. Anyway, when the committee they put together to study the issue didn't come back with that option, they just shelved the whole thing.

phpisthebest 4y ago

The filibuster rule is from a time when the Senate was selected by the States, not the people. It was designed as an effective State Veto. It works for that purpose and in that context and IMO is good. We should return the Senate to be the States representatives in congress, and the House is the People. Instead of having both the Senate and the House be popularly elected. Return to more republican (i.e Republic not the party) style of governance, and less democratic, but I know that is heresy today where democracy is the new religion and people fail to learn the lesson of Athens

kmeisthax 4y ago
"Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy. The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman. Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent. Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time. You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection. Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office. [0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you. [1] They're not.